UO weighing cuts to graduate programs in humanities, education

The University of Oregon is considering phasing out graduate programs in several humanities departments and the College of Education as part of budget cuts, faculty say.

UO is weighing the elimination of some or all of the master’s and doctoral programs offered in History, Romance Languages, Folklore, Comparative Literature, Classics, and German and Scandinavian, said Jeff Schroeder, co-chair of the politics committee of United Academics, the UO faculty union.

Maithreyi Gopalan, an associate professor of education studies, said two graduate programs —  the Quantitative Research Methods in Education doctoral program and the Education Policy and Leadership master’s program — are also being considered for cuts in the College of Education.

If the proposals move forward, students who entered the affected programs this fall would be the last admitted, faculty members said. Current students would be allowed to complete their degrees, they said, though some graduate student employees have already lost their positions this fall.

The university has not yet finalized its plans to address its $65 million budget deficit. The first proposals for budget reductions will emerge at the UO Senate meeting Oct. 28, with final decisions expected in mid-December. But in recent weeks, rumors of possible program eliminations and academic mergers have begun to circulate. No final decisions have been made.

Maram Epstein, a professor of Chinese literature and the vice president of United Academics, said cutting such graduate programs would “impoverish the liberal arts” at UO and do a “disservice” to the state.

She spelled out some of the potential consequences: increased workloads for faculty, less classroom support for undergraduates, and fewer researchers and high school and community college educators teaching in Oregon.

“We are meant to be the flagship, centered around a liberal arts education,” Epstein said in an interview. “I don’t know who else in the state is supposed to fill that vacuum.”

Ryan Jones, the head of the Department of History, said UO offers the only doctorate in history in the state. The program has existed since 1899, just 23 years after the university’s founding in 1876. If it were to be cut, Oregon would join the four states — Alaska, Wyoming, South Dakota and Vermont — in which no university offers a history PhD, he said.

“We’d stand out as really an outlier as one of the weaker research universities in the country without programs like this,” Jones said. “It’s a huge loss. We wouldn’t have the capacity in the same way. We would be one of the very few states which is not able to train historians at this level,” he added.

Jones said eliminating the history programs would reduce the number of graduate employees available to grade assignments and lead discussion sections. The cuts would also limit faculty members’ opportunities to supervise graduate research, he said.

“There’s no question that it will degrade the undergraduate experience,” Jones said. “Undergraduates’ first point of contact is often graduate students. In fact, they’re essential at a big university like this.”

Gordon Sayre, the director of the Folklore and Public Culture program, said the program has trained hundreds of master’s students who went on to become professors, work in folklore and cultural fields internationally, and manage folk festivals.

“Oregon has one of the few remaining folklore graduate degree programs in North America, and it is a great loss to give this up now,” Sayre wrote in an email to Lookout Eugene-Springfield. 

Epstein said the six College of Arts and Sciences graduate program eliminations would make up about half of what the college is expected to cut from its budget as part of UO’s overall $65 million reduction. She said Dean Chris Poulsen shared the numbers in a meeting with department heads last week.

“Everything at this point is up in the air, and I get the sense that at some of these meetings, administrators are saying things targeted to specific audiences to calm them down, or maybe testing out to see how things will play and see what kind of feedback they’re getting,” she said. 

The potential cuts extend beyond the humanities. In the College of Education, faculty say two graduate programs — the research methods doctoral program and the policy and leader master’s program — also are under consideration for elimination. 

Gopalan said the cuts would reduce the university’s capacity to provide expertise when Oregon faces educational challenges, and weaken relationships with policymakers and schools. 

She said faculty have already proposed several cost-saving changes to college leadership, including admitting doctoral students every other year instead of annually, combining courses across programs and changing faculty teaching and advising schedules.

“I’m quite deeply distressed at the possibility of these two programs getting eliminated because it feels like a very short-sighted move from the college and the university, given that these have placed some of the best policymakers, researchers across the country, and we’re continuing to build these programs,” Gopalan said. 

She said faculty had been previously told that the university was considering eliminating two tenure lines in the College of Education — reviving concerns about threats to tenure that surfaced during last year’s budget reductions, which ultimately did not include layoffs to those positions.

But Gopalan said UO appeared to reverse course, the dean writing in a Wednesday, Oct. 15, email that “none of the scenarios currently under consideration for the [college] involve layoffs of tenure-track faculty.” 

Schroeder confirmed that the faculty union doesn’t have “reliable information” about potential plans for any faculty layoffs at this time. 

A UO spokesperson did not respond to Lookout’s request for comment before publication.