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As I reflect on my first semester as dean of the College of Liberal Arts (CLA) at Washington State University, my thoughts continually return to a statement that I made several times in response to questions about my primary reasons for accepting the position. The high quality of the faculty and staff and their commitment to the college and the University were consistently in my "top three" reasons. Not surprisingly, I have since learned that our students and alumni are equally talented and dedicated. People truly do make the college what it is and, as I mentioned to the provost earlier this year, you can successfully negotiate difficult times with good people, and it is challenging to survive even good times without them.
This has truly been a semester in which the college has needed and benefited from good people! As everyone knows all too well, we are in the worst global economic downturn of the last 70 years. The negative effects of this recession are widespread and have resulted in staggering cuts to higher education nationwide. The state of Washington was hit particularly hard with a projected $9.3 billion shortfall for the next two fiscal years. The state budget for the next biennium decreased state appropriations to higher education by approximately $503 million. Washington State University's portion of that reduction was $112.3 million, which is a decrease of 21.5% in state support relative to the prior biennium. This reduction was partially offset by $15.8 million in temporary economic stimulus funds and $42.4 million in projected revenue from a 14% annual tuition increase. Fully counting these temporary and projected offsets, the reduction to the University is still $54.1 million, or 10.4%.
The budget reduction for the College of Liberal Arts was $1.6 million, which is 8% of our base budget. To demonstrate the magnitude of the reduction, this amount is equivalent to the budgets of two or three entire academic departments or about 35 faculty and staff positions. Our ability to respond to this budget crisis was highly constrained by a multiyear trend of increased enrollments in CLA courses during a period of flat or declining state dollars as a proportion of the total WSU budget. This, combined with a horizontal approach to past budget reductions in the college, resulted in nearly 99% of our budget being in personnel. As a consequence, academic programs are currently pushed to the very limit of their capacity to provide a quality educational experience due to diminished faculty, staff, and operating resources.
Analyses by the Dean's Office, the CLA Leadership Team, and a representative CLA Budget Advisory Committee concluded that it was impossible to absorb cuts of this magnitude horizontally and maintain excellence in our work. The clear majority view was that we could no longer continue to do everything we currently do in the same ways we have done them in the past given the context of continually shrinking resources because that path leads to overall mediocrity in the college, or worse. As a consequence, a set of guiding principles was developed and endorsed in each of these groups by a strong majority.
Guided by these principles, our budget reduction plan protected people and programs to the extent possible by reducing administrative overhead and increasing efficiencies through creative reorganizations and restructuring without sacrificing quality. Many innovative ideas for restructuring and reorganizing were discussed, and those included in the plan are summarized below:
In addition to saving money, each of these reorganizations has the potential to increase creative synergies and improve the consistency and quality of programs and scholarship. Collectively, the reorganizations resulted in $854,000 in permanent budget savings. To achieve that level of savings through personnel cuts, we would have had to eliminate 18.5 positions. In contrast, the consolidations and reorganizations noted above will eliminate only 3.5 staff lines, 2 tenure-track faculty lines, and 1.8 non-tenure-track faculty lines. The majority of these lines are already vacant, so the human cost of these changes is further minimized.
The savings through these reorganizations were substantial, but they left us $746,000 short of our budget reduction target. Thus, the magnitude of the budget crisis required that some lower-demand programs be phased out, with the associated loss of faculty and staff positions. It is important to note that a decision to eliminate a program was not a reflection of the quality or dedication of the faculty or students, nor was it a reflection of the program or the discipline lacking intrinsic value in any absolute sense. Rather, it is a reflection of the enormity of the budget crisis and the lower demand for these programs relative to other programs in the college. In addition, several of these programs were already so under-resourced that even a modest reduction would have made their continued operation unfeasible. The departments and programs identified to be phased out were:
The phase-out of each program will be orderly and conducted in a manner that ensures that students currently certified in the major have a reasonable opportunity to graduate. As a general rule, courses required for graduation will be offered with decreasing frequency over a two-year period. Leadership and professional studies has already begun the phase-out process, and the college will work with the relevant department chairs and faculty leaders to quickly establish reasonable phase-out plans for the majors in German and theatre. These phase-outs will result in the elimination of 11.4 positions and an annual savings of $746,000, which brings the college to its $1.6 million budget reduction target.
It must be emphasized that the college retains a strong commitment to instruction and scholarship in the arts and in foreign languages and cultures. The loss of the Department of Theatre and Dance is regrettable, but our School of Music and Department of Fine Arts are highly regarded nationally and internationally, and we are committed to sustaining their excellence. Our Department of Foreign Languages and Cultures will continue to offer majors in French, Spanish, and Chinese, and minors in French, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, and possibly German.
Faced with the largest cuts to higher education during our lifetimes, the University and the College of Liberal Arts have had to make extraordinary and difficult decisions about what to scale back, reorganize, or phase out in order to sustain areas of scholarly and instructional excellence, support high-demand disciplines, preserve the high-quality educational experience that we provide for students, and optimally position ourselves for future opportunities. Through this plan, the college will continue to provide an exceptional liberal arts education for WSU students; offer a range of excellent degree programs across the arts, humanities, and social sciences; enhance our research profile; and capitalize on exciting interdisciplinary opportunities in the future. The college will continue its tradition of excellence in all that we do.
In difficult economic times like these, it is important that the college remain cognizant of its many accomplishments and focused on its mission, which is to be a center of excellence in engaged learning, generation of knowledge, creation of artistic expressions, and professional service to the state, nation, and world. It was my privilege to moderate the college awards ceremony and the Outstanding Senior reception, and I was also able to attend a number of department awards ceremonies. The people recognized at those events exemplify excellence and remind us of the plethora of major achievements in the college. This issue of the Chronicle lists all of the CLA award recipients and highlights many of these people and their successes. I am confident that you will be as proud as I am of the college after reading these stories.
Sincerely,
Douglas L. Epperson
The Chronicle, College of Liberal Arts, Washington State University