Concerned Emporia State alumni and community members have become increasingly vocal as they still try to cope with the dismissal of 33 faculty members and the discontinuance of multiple academic programs as the university announces program redesigns. 

“I was heartbroken over what was happening to my alma mater,” said Blanca Herrada, 2014 ESU graduate of painting, recounting her reaction to the changes at the university. 

On Sept. 14, the Kansas Board of Regents (KBOR) passed a new framework that led to the layoffs of 33 faculty members the next day and the suspension of several university programs soon after. 

Gwen Larson, director of media relations at ESU, didn’t respond to the email requesting for administration comment. 

Two weeks after the framework was passed, the university uploaded a post to Facebook announcing a “reinvestment” into the Department of Art. The listed investments included “Gallery + Outreach Director, Staff.” Roberta Eichenberg, the current galleries director for the university was one of the 33 dismissed. 

The Bulletin previously released an article about Eichenberg and her dismissal. 

“I think it’s just a cover,” Herrada said in an interview with The Bulletin. “I don’t believe that those actions are genuine. There’s no reason that they needed to fire her (Eichenberg) when she was a year away from completing her tenure (career before retirement) at Emporia State. It just doesn’t make sense.”

The university’s Facebook post sparked disappointment and outrage. Reactions were overwhelmingly negative, with more than 164 comments expressing anger and concern toward the university and the changes being made. 

“I’ve never been more disappointed in my college,” said Caitlin Jo Hendrix on Facebook. “I’m genuinely considering changing my license plate from the ESU alum one to the regular Kansas one. You don’t deserve our money after pulling this crap.”

Since the announcement of the reinvestment into the art program on Facebook, the university has sent emails to campus about similar redesigns to the music department and the Computer Science program. Neither of those announcements have been posted on the university’s social media pages. 

Melanie Ralston’s parents met at ESU while they were in speech and theater and she herself graduated from ESU with a BSE in speech, theater and English in 1983. She recently retired from teaching English and theater for 38 years at Topeka West High.

Ralston said hearing about the cuts to university programs and the changes being made was like a “gut punch.”

“We’re good English teachers, because we had good English professors,” Ralston said.  “We were good speech (and)  theater teachers because we had good professors and at the high school level for secondary ed, you need those content specific faculty members if you want to produce a good product out of your university, and they’ve just totally annihilated that opportunity.”

Herrada said while her experience at ESU was “wonderful,” hearing about all the recent changes “feels terrible because this isn’t the school that I graduated from and that I have such fond memories of,” she said.

Many alumni of ESU seem to feel the same way about what is happening to the university they used to call home, they say in interviews and social media comments. Herrada, like many others, describes the feeling as heartbreak.

“It’s really heartbreaking,” Herrada said, “That my former professors, that I still very much care about and still to this day, support me and will send me notes being like, ‘we’re so proud of you. We love what you’ve been doing. Like, this is amazing.’ I just, it makes me so sad and angry that they are having to deal with this.”

The university sent out the email announcing the redesign of the computer science department Oct. 6 and has not released any other announcements regarding the future of other programs since.