Free Republic

Christina Westman dreamed of working with Parkinson’s disease and stroke patients as a music therapist when she started studying at St. Cloud State University. But her schooling was upended in May when administrators at the Minnesota college announced a plan to eliminate its music department as it slashes 42 degree programs and 50 minors. It’s part of a wave of program cuts in recent months, as U.S. colleges large and small try to make ends meet. Among their budget challenges: Federal COVID relief money is now gone, operational costs are rising and fewer high school graduates are going straight to...

DICKINSON, N.D. - While the leadership and the rest of the campus at Dickinson State University is waiting for a resolution on the school’s accreditation status, a campus nearly 1,500 miles away sits mostly empty after going through a similar process. Formerly a vibrant campus with about 2,000 students and largely the centerpiece of Beckley, a city of about 17,000 in southern West Virginia, Mountain State University closed its doors for good in January after being stripped of its accreditation by the Higher Learning Commission, a wing of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools that oversees institutions in...

Dickinson State University got caught issuing hundreds of phony degrees to foreign students, something for which nobody outside of former President Richard McCallum has been held accountable. McCallum, who I guess we’re supposed to believe pulled of this fraud by himself, was merely fired. Horwarth’s article quoted a newspaper editor in West Virginia who covered the HLC’s decision to remove accreditation from Mountain State University. “If I’m Dickinson State, I would be nervous,” he told Horwarth. That article prompted angry denunciations from DSU officials and North Dakota University System Chancellor Larry Skogen who called the idea of lost accreditation “impossible.”...