By threatening the suspension of 26 academic programs, interim Provost Mark Lapping was trying to “light a campfire.”
Fires, indeed, have been lit.
Computer science came up with an inch-high stack of documentation supporting their program. Physics and chemistry students all but rioted. Lapping received earfuls of comments from faculty and students, notes or petition-like documents written by more than one person, and, he says “the occasional diatribe.”
“At the end of the day, when someone’s ox is being gored, people fight,” he said.
Two months after putting the programs – including women’s studies, the B.S. in economics, and LAC’s arts and humanities – on ‘probation,’ all but one program has submitted a plan for how they’ll address the issues that put them on ‘the list.’
These issues include low enrollment – only 62 students graduated last year from all of the programs, combined – and trouble “working and playing well with others,” said Lapping, citing “internal troubles” in the midst of which students found themselves caught. He did not name specific programs with this problem.
The Russian program is the only one which has not yet submitted a plan, says Lapping, but he’s extended their deadline because the department consists of only one faculty member.
Most of the plans, Lapping said, trying hard not to roll his eyes, were prefaced by statements saying, “if we get eliminated, life on earth would never be the same.”
These programs are being evaluated under the cloud of the current budget crisis, which, combined with near-weekly news of more cuts, has a lot of university employees feeling vulnerable.
At last Friday’s Student Senate meeting, Lapping emphasized something he says he’s been trying to make clear since day one.
“No full-time faculty will lose their job,” he said. “We need faculty.”
“There’s a myth that faculty will be reduced or asked to teach more – it’s a scare tactic,” said Lapping. “It’s not happening.”
While student senators asked him questions that emphasized their frustrations with some of the administration’s decisions around the less-protected part-time faculty in recent “budget cuts,” their real concerns focused more around the transparency of cuts and program evaluations to students.
Students, several senators said, have been left entirely in the dark, and are being given little voice in the decisions that affect their everyday life at this university.
“We know the faculty better than anyone,” said senator Jen Cote, yet aside from various surveys and intangible feedback, students have no influence over what happens in the hiring or cutting of faculty or programs.
In the hallway outside the meeting, senator – and physics major – Sri Dhyana spoke with Lapping about the myriad ideas she has for how to invigorate her threatened physics program, including ways to reach out to the other sciences and increase involvement in the new student-run physics club.
She was partially involved in the plan created by the physics program, which she says got people involved who had never said anything before.
Eric Favreau, a sophomore senator and geoscience major, said that although students were not involved in creating the plan to revive his department, faculty took time during classes to tell students about their action plan.
“Geoscience found out that they actually make money for the university,” he says, “we’re the largest geoscience program in New England.”
Favreaus beef with all the proposed cuts and program evaluations is that he sees little happening to administrative offices.
That programs are seeing the first cuts – or the most publicized ones – he thinks is a mistake.
“There are so many duplicate administrative offices, ones that have the same goals and do similar things,” he says. “Offices have no relation to students. Faculty (and programs) do.”
And even worse, he says, is that even the offices that have a lot to offer students do very little advertising, and are known to a minority of students. “Even financial aid and scholarships – nothing is advertised.”