Ohio Wesleyan University has announced it will eliminate 18 majors and consolidate several other departments, a move expected to save nearly $4 million.
The cutsfollow a year of "rigorous" review of the university's academic program, OWU president Rock Jones said in an email to students last week. The university expects to eliminate just one currently filled faculty position as part of the changes, though a number of faculty are also participating in an early retirement program, said OWU spokesman Cole Hatcher.
"Our goal has been to ensure that we are providing students a vibrant education enriched by the breadth of the liberal arts and the depth of focused expertise in key programs and majors that our students and the world need most," Jones wrote.
The elimination of the 18 majors takes a significant bite out of the academic offerings at the liberal arts university, which currently includes nearly 100 majors. But Jones said OWU will continue to offer more majors than most other schools its size.The university has a totalenrollment of less than 1,500.
Effective Dec. 19, the university will no longer accept new students to these majors that are to be phased out andeliminated: comparative literature, computational neuroscience, dance, earth science education, earth sciences, geology, German, health promotion, journalism, Middle Eastern studies, planetary science, pre-optometry, pre-public administration, pre-theology, religion, urban studies, and certain chemistry and biochemistry majors that were certified by the American Chemical Society.
Jones assured "every student who has declared a major in one of these affected areas" before then will have access to courses and resources needed to complete their major.
Ohio Wesleyan also announced it will consolidate the following:
• Black World Studies and Women's and Gender Studies to develop a new Department of Critical Identity Studies.
•Some Geography and botany-microbiology faculty to form a new Department of Environment & Sustainability.
• Remaining botany-microbiology faculty and the Department of Zoology into a new Department of Biological Sciences.
• Music and Theatre & Dance departments to create a new Department of Performing Arts.
• Classics and Modern Foreign Language into a new Department of World Languages.
• Philosophy and Religion to form a new Department of Philosophy and Religion.
First-year student Lan Do is majoring in zoology,which isn't affected, but she also hoped to study Japanese during her time at OWU.
With the consolidations resulting in a new Department of World Languages, Do now isn'tsure what courses will be offered.
"That is a bummer," she said. "... I really want to study Japanese, like probably for the rest of my college career, so that kind of puts a dent in that (plan)," she said.
The academic changes follow sweeping cuts at the liberal arts university earlier this year.
In May, to avoid a major deficit, the school previouslyannounced cuts totaling $10 million, including theelimination of 44 non-teaching staff members andreducedretirement contributions, among other major changes.
More:Ohio Wesleyan announces $10 million in cuts
OWUalready was forecasting a $7.5 million deficit for the 2020-2021 school year and wasreviewing ways to cut costs even before the COVID-19pandemic.Construction debt accounted for some of that deficit, but the university also faced “a shrinking population of prospective students, increasing competition, and families less able to afford the rising cost of higher education,” Jones said at the time.
Jonesbelieves OWU is far ahead of other institutions just beginning to reexamine their structure and operations in the midst of the pandemic, he wrote last week.
"Through the administrative and academic actions OWU has taken during the past six months, Ohio Wesleyan has become a more focused, more efficient university," he said.
Students, faculty and alumni from the soon-to-be-eliminated journalism major said they were disappointed bythe university's decision, but say they saw it coming.
"The journalism program has been notsupported by various faculty and administrators for some time," said Paul Kostyu, who was chair of the journalism department until May 2019. He continued to teach during the fall 2019 semester before ultimately retiring.
"It comes as no shock to me that this is the direction they intended to go," he said.
Caitlin Jefferson,currently a junior journalism major at OWU, said she'll be able to take the classes she needs to graduate with her major. Butshe expects they will be communications courses, not specifically journalism classes within its own major.
"There were a lot of factors deciding whether Iwanted to come to this school, but I definitely planned to pursue a journalism major," she said. "Getting halfway through college and finding out it's no longer going to be available here is a little disappointing, for sure.”
Some former journalism faculty and alumni are worried about the future of The Transcript, the online-only student newspaper which bills itself as the oldest independent college student newspaper in the country.
Noah Manskar, a 2015 OWU journalism graduate and former editor of The Transcript who now works at the New York Post, called the elimination of the major "really disappointingbecause OWU has a really long history of producing successful talented journalists."
He said journalism alumni are working to set up a call with university leadership about the future of the student newspaper, and he's encouraged the school wants to engage its former students.
jsmola@dispatch.com
@jennsmola
