Campus Responds to Curriculum Restructuring Proposal

The chancellor’s office released a proposal on Monday, March 5, detailing Academic Affair’s vision for combatting the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point’s current budget deficit. In the week since the proposal was released to campus, conversations and debate have proliferated around the topic.

Under the proposal, 13 academic programs are slated to be “eliminated.” The 13 programs are American studies, art, English, French, geography, geoscience, German, history, music literature, philosophy, political science, sociology and Spanish.

Two programs are to be expanded: chemical engineering and computer information systems. Six programs are to be elevated to majors: conservation law enforcement, finance, fire science, graphic design, management and marketing. Eight new programs are to be instated: environmental engineering, ecosystem design and remediation, captive wildlife, aquaculture/aquaponics, geographic information science, master of business administration, master of natural resources and doctor of physical therapy.

Twelve of the 13 proposed eliminations are housed in the College of Letters and Science.

Eric Yonke, interim dean for the College of Letters and Science, said, “What I want to make sure people understand is that we are going to have humanities majors… They’re not all going to look how they looked in the past, but we’re definitely going to do that.”

Yonke views the proposal as an important step of beginning the process by putting the provost’s direction down on paper.

“I thought it was really important to put things in writing and figure out when we’ll go through the formalized process but give people time to respond, and that’s what we’re in right now,” Yonke said.

Yonke hopes to initiate conversations for students to recommend productive combinations of humanities and social sciences programs. The current platform for these programs are no longer supported by the university’s budget, and reorganization is the reality for the institution’s future. He recommends students meeting with others within their majors to discuss why they were attracted to campus and how their combination of studies have readied them for their desired careers.

“It is about reorganizing. It is about combining. It’s about building on a budgetary structure that we can really rely on,” Yonke said, citing a goal of stabilizing the college’s budget in order to “stop having to keep looking over our shoulder,” waiting for the next cut.

Dave Arnold, professor of English, said that the faculty was “notified that these things were under discussion and my impression was that students were as well, although every student I’ve talked to has said that they were completely flabbergasted by it.”

Arnold believes that the proposal not only affects the future of the program but students in the spring 2018 semester. Despite the administration’s statement that students will be given the opportunity to finish their degrees, students are disconcerted by the uncertainty cast on the future of their programs.

“The English major most definitely pays for itself,” Arnold said.  “Humanities majors are cheap to offer. The majors that they’re talking about offering… are expensive to deploy… and trendy.”

While Arnold is all for exploring new possibilities at the university, he feels the liberal arts are assets the university needs.

“Career-specific university degree paths are a traditional recipe for failure… The four-year college degrees aimed at one specific job, it seems like you have one arrow in your quiver and maybe you’re aim is good, but what if somebody takes the target away or the target moves?”

Arnold said, “The administration’s rhetoric is that in today’s ever-changing job market, you need these skills for today’s jobs, but the reality is that tomorrow, they’re going to be skills for yesterday’s jobs. The liberal arts are always skills for all jobs.”

Arnold stated that enrollment decline has been part of the university’s discourse since he came to UWSP in 2000. With the foreknowledge of this decline, Arnold believes a possible approach to addressing the budget deficit is to spread the cuts out.

“We’re here to educate citizens and to help people navigate difficult times like this,” Arnold said, vying for “balanced, measured reductions across the board.”

Two professors in the CNR declined to interview on how the proposed changes would affect their programs, saying that “it is really up-in-the-air right now” and they were “not sure how the changes will affect the program.”

While academic programs are facing a shockwave of information, and even those that may benefit from the proposed changes are still reeling from the news and its implications, the Student Government Association is also trying its best to keep up in the wake of the proposal.

Brailey Kerber is a junior elementary education major and SGA College of Professional Studies Caucus Chair.

“SGA found out with everyone else,” Kerber said. “As a whole, I think we reacted really quickly and were like, ‘This is really frustrating. We are angry’ … Then we had to stop being angry and start acting and start trying to get meetings with people and start gathering information.”

However, Kerber feels that SGA doesn’t know any more than the rest of the student body but hopes to find out more soon and communicate their findings to the students. The top thing SGA is looking for is data.

Some of the questions on SGA’s minds are: “How are these proposed cuts and the proposed additions of programs going to balance out? Why select these programs? What information told them that these are the ones they should be targeting? Do they expect to see enrollment increase? Do they expect retention to be okay?” according to Kerber.

Since she joined SGA in October, Kerber feels that the necessitated response to the proposal is the biggest thing she’s worked on with SGA.

“This feels like it’s going to be very chaotic for a long time. And that’s good. We should be pushing back. We should be collecting data and asking questions and making sure we’re representing our students well. But this feels like it’s going to be a lot bigger fight than at least anything that I’ve experienced before,” Kerber said.

SGA hopes to help in producing a counter proposal but is still in the “information collection stage” that must be navigated before moving forward.

To begin the process, SGA hosted a public forum at the Student Government Senate meeting on Thursday, March 8, to hear from the students and the public on the proposal. The meeting was moved from the Legacy Room of the Dreyfus University Center to the Alumni Room to accommodate for the large turnout.

In addition to its regular proceedings, the Senate meeting included an “administrative update” in which SGA representatives posed student questions to Chancellor Bernie Patterson and Provost Greg Summers.

Following, there was a public forum that allowed attendees to speak for three minutes each. Students and alumni took the podium to present to SGA rallying cries like “Vote for steam, not just STEM,” concerns like “We are no longer becoming One Point but One Science Point” and questions like “Who’s going to be held accountable if this system fails?”

While the meeting was called to order at 6:15 p.m., the administrative update was cut off at 8:15 p.m. and the public forum ran past 10 p.m.

Summers said it meant a lot to him to be able to hear the student voices represented at the Senate meeting.

“These cuts that we’re having to make are extremely personal,” Summers said. “They’re personal to me. They’re personal to the faculty and staff whose programs are affected. And they’re personal to the students who enroll in these programs.”

Because the changes that are being proposed are so close to home, everyone affiliated with the university is struggling to move forward under the gravity of the situation.

“The thing that struck me the most listening to these students is that… I agree with almost every single comment that was made. And that’s what makes this almost impossible to go through,” Summers said.

Ruby Ann Malek, freshman undecided natural resources major, attended the SGA Senate meeting on Thursday.

“It was really interesting,” Malek said. “I appreciated that we had a really great turnout.”

As one of the students who spoke in the open forum, Malek felt it was important to be able to address SGA and the administrators directly.

“I feel that students and administrators tend to be looking at the proposal from a different point,” Malek said. “The administrators were repeating a lot of points.”

While students appreciated the opportunity to have their voices heard at SGA, they are campaigning in other ways to tell their stories. Many are taking to social media.

One such movement has been a Facebook page called Humanitarians of UWSP. In the vein of Brandon Stanton’s project, Humans of New York, the page aims “to show the level of support that exists for maintaining and strengthening humanities degrees at UWSP in the midst of the budget crisis.”

Hannah Wiedmeyer, junior communications major, tweeted author Jodi Picoult on March 9 using the hashtags #WeArePointEnglish and #WeArePointHumanities and describing the university’s proposal “to cut the English Major as well as some of the other Humanities.”

Picoult responded by tweeting, “Majoring in English means learning to think critically, and books open up the world to readers. Cutting the humanities? BIG MISTAKE.”

#WeArePointEnglish has been used 90 times on Twitter and #WeArePointHumanities has been used 70 times.

The presence of voices stretches beyond students, faculty, staff and administrators. Alumni still hold stakes in the university’s story.

Samantha Stein graduated in 2017 with a degree in biology. She also earned a minor in biomedical writing through the English department.

Stein related that she felt “monumentally disappointed” when she heard of the proposal.

“The shift away from the humanities and from the opening of one’s mind to other cultures, languages, the arts, political science and so much more is one that universities will not return from, and we are giving up what a college education is all about if we do this,” Stein said.

Although Stein majored in biology, the English program played a major role in her decision to attend UWSP, citing that her combination of science and English is the “only reason” she has her current job, including her achievement of publishing an academic paper this month.

“This campus is a family,” Stein said. “Each program is important, and if we need to make difficult decisions to make it through hard times, we should be doing it together, embracing one another and suffering together.”

Students and others invested in the university are not shying away from using their voices.

Yonke said, “We need to move beyond the initial shock… and start moving into… creative ideas of how to move this conversation forward.”

Arnold said, “The big thing I want everyone to know is that this is not a done deal.”

The proposal is still in discussion stages. Before any changes are made to the university’s programs, the proposal must undergo review, “first by the Consultative Committee, then by the chancellor, and ultimately by the UW System Board of Regents,” according to the proposal.

Stein said, “I want faculty and students to know that alumni are still here and are still part of this fight.”

Kerber also related similar sentiment.

Kerber said, “I’ve been telling people, talk to SGA. If students have questions, if they have a story to share, if they have comments or concerns, talk to us.”

A list of SGA representatives and their emails are posted on SGA’s Facebook page. While SGA members might not have all the answers, they are hoping to also gather questions to guide them in their search for information to better serve the student body.

Kerber said, “We want there to be transparency between administration and us. Get involved. If you feel strongly, you should speak.”

Arnold said, “There is still time to make noise… There’s still time to talk to people and to write emails to Bernie Patterson, Greg Summers, Eric Yonke and tell them that you don’t think that’s the institution you signed onto, that’s not the legacy you want to look back on… It’s not over.”

Kathryn Wisniewski
Co-Editor-in-Chief
kwisn877@uwsp.edu