Posted on 08/12/2023 6:19:32 PM PDT by CFW
West Virginia University leaders have recommended discontinuing 32 of its majors at its Morgantown campus as the school is feverishly working to make up for a multi-million budget shortfall.
The preliminary recommendations, released Friday afternoon, said 12 of those programs are undergraduate majors and 20 are graduate-level majors. Other programs were told to reduce their faculty size — 169 faculty jobs are on the line for cuts.
Programs marked for discontinuation included: master’s and doctorate in Mathematics; master’s and doctorate in Higher Education Administration; master’s of Public Administration; master’s of fine arts in Creative Writing; and a bachelor’s in Recreation, Parks and Tourism Resources.
The Department of World Languages, Literatures and Linguistics, which includes Spanish, Russian and Chinese studies, was marked to be completely dissolved.
“My colleagues and I are still in shock; it’s inconceivable that our state flagship, R1, land-grant university, the place where we’ve all built our homes, careers and lives is completely eliminating the teaching of languages,” said Lisa Di Bartolomeo, a teaching professor of Russian Studies.
(Excerpt) Read more at westvirginiawatch.com ...
math is , lik, HARD dude!
I expect few mellennial/gen-z are up for that sort of rigor.
Reparations studies are more like it nd et them invited to the cool kids parties.
I just don’t see how any university could survive without degree programs in collaborative piano and jazz pedagogy.
“...It’s a shame to see Mathematics cut...”
I agree but I suspect it is is they have a large department and few students.
Covid was used to postpone reality. It's time to start paying the piper now.
Any math with i is imaginary.
The rest is real...
If I wanted to study higher mathematics, WVU wouldn’t be at the top of my list. Maybe MIT, Stanford, Chicago, CMU might be places to start looking.
Good to see colleges and universities dying regardless.
Nonsense….my grandchildren are in those generations and all did quite well in college .
Why would you think otherwise ?
……
Its also fundamentally wrong to get rid of languages. Thats a real loss.
It may be, as you say, that there are few takers for math and languages, but thats a bad sign on its own.
Worked in Morgantown years ago. Back then there were not 1, but 2 companies who’s entire business was to sell and deliver you a couch to burn after a wvu football win
Duolingo works quite well for some people. My French is way better for it. But for a dedicated student real language courses are much better.
I’m using it for Polish.
China is not cutting its mathematics programs.
Today, a cashier could not count the 5 $20 bills I presented him. He had a high school “education”.
China wins. We self-destructed.
Why are they removing Math graduate degree?
Shucks i can’t get a doctorate in Bikini Inspection.
For decades West Virgina benefited from Senator Robert Byrd’s ability to bring federal pork spending home to prop up the state’s government and economy. His replacement, Joe Manchin must not be pulling as many federal dollars to prop up the state university system.
If its business school is any good the University could employ the students and faculty in a practical hands on case study of how to evaluate and downsize a boated, inefficient organization. For example the university should look at its administrative overhead growth over the past 30-40 years. Likely it has grown two to three times the rate of student enrollment. It should be possible to quickly eliminate this excess non-teaching headcount with zero impact, and possibly an actual increase in the productivity of those remaining.
They should also look at utilization of space in buildings, particularly after the headcount reductions. Identify every classroom, meeting room and office utilization by hour. Adjust class and meeting schedules to fully load space in the most efficient buildings and then close and tear down or sell the surplus buildings. Schedule classes into the evenings, and on weekends to maximize use of buildings. Also look at selling or leasing dormitories to private contractors to exit the administrative and maintenance cost burden of renting living space to students.
Increase the teaching workload of the faculty. Universities are notorious for loading low paid adjunct faculty and grad students with heavy teaching loads while tenured professors teach 1-3 classes per semester. Require every faculty member to teach at least 4 courses per semester. Four courses per semester would mean the professor would be in the classroom only 12 hours of a 40 hour workweek. Still plenty of time remaining for research, writing , and consulting activities tenured professors prefer to teaching. Increasing the average teaching workload by 33%, from three to four classes per week, should allow a corresponding reduction in faculty headcount which would be a huge payroll savings as well as freeing up office space.
Online instruction can also dramatically reduce building space requirements and allow more students to be taught with fewer professors.
Like the federal bureaucracy, universities have become bloated and inefficient at delivering on their primary mission. Radical downsizing and focus on essentials will make them better at delivering education value for students and taxpayers.
The math programs being cut are “master’s and doctorate in Mathematics”, not undergrad math.
There are lots of good jobs for math PhD’s — hedge funds have a lot. But those places will grab their people from Stanford or MIT, not WVU.
Somewhat unrelated topic, but then why is it so hard to find quality trades people who actually do good work?
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