Boards make final decisions on program cuts

The votes are in for Academic Program Prioritization, and with them comes the end of seven majors, four minors and the entirety of four academic programs at CSB+SJU.

After nearly two years of reports, recommendations and deliberations, the CSB and SJU Common Boards of Trustees made final decisions on the program closure stage of APP on Feb. 26 after reviewing resolutions from the APP Final Report, Provost Richard Ice, CSB+SJU President Brian Bruess and the Joint Faculty Assembly. This vote comes as a result of years of declining enrollment at both institutions and is intended to allow for a reallocation of resources to closer align with student enrollment in programs with high student demand.

“It’s healthy for an institution to do this work,” Bruess said. “It was done in really fantastic fashion. [It was] hard because it impacts people we know—it impacts the community—but the process itself, from a big-picture, national landscape, [was] very well-done and done from a position of strength to the great benefit of our students.”

The Boards voted to eliminate the ancient Mediterranean studies, gender studies and theater majors but retain their minors. French studies, German studies, Latin and Japanese lose both their major and minor but keep their three-course language tracks. The Asian studies, Chinese, Greek and peace studies programs will be entirely closed. Additionally, the Boards voted to eliminate the dietetics concentration in the nutrition major and the composition, performance and liturgical music concentrations within the music major. These changes will take effect for incoming students in fall 2024. Students currently enrolled in affected programs will be able to complete their studies within that program.

“Many of the things that you’re seeing in these recommendations that are now decisions are replicated over and over and over in other liberal arts colleges across the country,” said Bruess, who started as CSB+SJU president in July 2022. “I’ve watched this community since I’ve arrived do a beautiful job of making sure this work is evidence-based, that it’s not swung one way or another with an emotional appeal.”

Both the philosophy major and secondary education minors, which Ice recommended be closed, made it through the vote comparatively unscathed. In his recommendation to the Boards, Bruess sided with the Joint Faculty Assembly’s resolution to further evaluate secondary education minors and to retain a revised philosophy major and minor. Bruess’s email to faculty about the vote said that the education department and an external consultant plan to complete a review of the secondary education minors by January 2024 and to implement the results of that review in fall 2024.

According to gender studies chair and philosophy professor Jean Keller, the philosophy department will lose one full-time faculty member as part of these changes. She said around 25 other faculty will have to leave CSB+SJU as part of this process. Keller herself did not know if she would still have a job until Monday.

“A lot of us are just grieving,” Keller said. “We’re so sad. We are losing one position in philosophy instead of three. It’s relief for philosophy and that’s great, but I don’t want to lose those 25 colleagues.”

The administration released an incentivized retirement plan to faculty in mid-January, which was covered in further detail in a Feb. 2 article of The Record. The plan is intended to encourage professors to consider retiring sooner in order to alleviate the need to cut younger faculty. Professors have until April 1 to decide whether or not to take the offer. After that deadline, administrators plan to work with departments to determine which faculty will be let go.

“No one really likes to do this kind of process and make these kinds of decisions, because I know that they affect people’s lives,” Ice said. “This has been difficult for everybody, but I believe that everybody also knows that we had to act, and we needed to make some difficult decisions. Even in the faculty report to the president, they made it clear that they knew action needed to be taken.”

Faculty and students have noted that the impact of these changes may extend beyond just on-campus academics. Keller and language and cultures department chair Ana Conboy both expressed concern about the loss of many of the language and culture programs in terms of their impact on study abroad.

“The study abroad model we have at CSB and SJU is one of the things that sets us apart,” Conboy said via email. “Depending on the specific study abroad program, it is plausible that there will be repercussions for study abroad programs after the APP final decisions. Languages facilitate different perspectives on the world, which allow for openness, cultural humility and intercultural agility.”

CSB junior and German major Sara Hoppe, who studied abroad in Austria in the fall, said students with previous German experience seemed better prepared.

“I think [for] the people who had a background in German from St. Ben’s and St. John’s it was a little bit easier,” Hoppe said. “It wasn’t just being thrown in. I think it was really helpful for everybody who was in the German section prior to going.”

With many of the affected programs falling under the umbrella of humanities, students, faculty and alumni and alumnae have questioned how these changes might affect the schools’ liberal arts identity.

“I think [the schools] lose the true value of a liberal arts education,” said Logan Biren, SJU junior and ancient Mediterranean studies and classics major. “I think that they not only have made it harder, but almost near-impossible, to help every student get a liberal arts education to the degree that they are supposed to get.”

While much of the focus on the APP process has surrounded program cuts, there are other aspects of this, as well. In his email to students on Friday, Bruess said that the process allows CSB+SJU to “allocate more resources into our academic programs with high demand and introduce new, more innovative ones.” Bruess highlighted seven new programs added in recent years, including graduate nursing, an exercise and health science major and minor and minors in climate studies, data analytics, global health, narrative practice and neuroscience. He also said that the changes will allow the schools to hire more faculty in high demand programs.

“One of the parts I think that got lost in this is what we’re trying to add,” Ice said. “I know that a lot of students are in high-demand programs, and they can’t get in classes because they’re full or they don’t offer enough. We need to pay attention to that and put resources into those areas.”

Additionally, the schools are surveying students and faculty about the current class schedule to evaluate a potential replacement. Administrators were not immovable in their views throughout the process, either, with one example including, according to Keller, Ice’s deviation from the APP Final Report to retain the gender studies minor instead of eliminating the entire program. The entire process began in August 2021, when Ice started exploration of the APP process. Data and steering committees provided the APP Final Report in June 2022. In August 2022, Ice invoked section 2.14 of the faculty handbook to officially initiate the APP process, and he announced his recommendations for program closures in September. Over the next several months up until the vote in February, the Joint Faculty Assembly discussed and voted on resolutions that either agreed or disagreed with Ice’s recommendations. The Boards considered the APP Final Report, Ice’s recommendations and the faculty resolutions last week, along with Bruess’s private recommendations that he presented on Thursday and Friday. Bruess did not release his recommendations to anyone other than the Boards of Trustees. Current students were not consulted in any part of this process outside of class enrollment data.

“It just did not seem like there was enough opportunity for student input,” Biren said. “Granted, these changes don’t affect current students, but if there’s anyone who’s going to think about the value of their education here, I think current students would have the best idea.”

For faculty, this process has been two years of deliberation, discussions and questions about job security. Now, after two years, the decisions have been made, and the academic future of the institutions has gained some clarity. It is yet to be seen what impact it will have.

“It’s really painful,” Keller said. “It’s really hard to say goodbye to programs like the languages, and 25 faculty are going to basically, hopefully some of them take early retirement, but a lot of them are going to be leaving unwillingly, and that’s really demoralizing and painful and hard.”