‘In a panic’: USM faculty vote no-confidence in program review

Faculty at the University of Southern Mississippi are pushing back on an administrative plan to cut low-enrolled programs. 

Earlier this month, the faculty senate voted no-confidence in the program review process that President Joe Paul announced earlier this school year as part of his administration’s efforts to afford future faculty pay raises. 

The vote came after the administration shared a list of dozens of programs that could be cut or consolidated, such as bachelor degrees in criminal justice and philosophy, graduate programs in public relations, mathematics and computational science, and multiple music and theater programs.

The process for reviewing this list of programs was determined by the provost, Lance Nail, and will be based on a data-based analysis that looks at enrollment and program revenue. Nail’s office will meet with the deans and school directors to determine the future of these programs, and will make a recommendation on whether a program should stay with a corrective action plan, be consolidated or be cut. 

That’s a problem for faculty, who say that any matters affecting teaching and learning at the research institution in Hattiesburg should be conducted by the people who know it best — the faculty, not the administration. 

“As I explained to our administration this month and in prior meetings, other faculty and I probably have very strong opinions about who should be coaching football at USM,” Josh Bernstein, the faculty senate president, said during the Oct. 4 meeting. “We also have thoughts on recruitment and enrollment or how to oversee the finances of the university or what kind of lasagna should be served at the fresh, but it is not our job to be the primary advisers on those things.” 

Bernstein went on to call a program review process that did not have faculty input imprudent, dangerous and “a disservice to students.” The English professor added that the faculty senate had requested more involvement in the process over the course of at least five meetings with the administration but now, morale was tanking.  

“Bluntly, I said faculty were in a panic,” Bernstein said. 

In response to the no-confidence vote, the university’s administration said that faculty’s involvement in the process could not come at the exclusion of the administration and that it listened to and acted on the senate’s concerns.

“Faculty in affected degree plans will have, and in many cases already have had, direct
involvement in discussions about the future of their degree plans,” the administration’s response states.

The president, Joe Paul, previously told faculty his goal is to help the tuition-dependent university afford future raises and remain solvent as it works to reverse years of declining enrollment. 

Meanwhile, the third-largest university in Mississippi is also dealing with inflation, escalating property insurance, aging facilities and increased competition for a declining pool of high school graduates going to college. 

Layoffs are a possibility, according to documents the administration recently shared with faculty about the program review process.  

“While layoffs are a possible outcome of this process, the committees, councils and administration will remain mindful of the impacts of these decisions on faculty and staff,” a white-pager stated. University policies will be followed if layoffs become necessary.”

Before the vote was taken, Nail attended the faculty senate meeting with Doug Masterson, the senior associate provost for institutional success. Masterson took questions about a report he had recently shared that determined which programs were on the administration’s “red light list.” 

The data analysis showed how more than 35 programs were or were not financially contributing to the university, among other data points. Not all programs were in the red but some, like a doctoral degree in computational science, cost the university $1,070 per credit hour. 

“Those numbers are tied to people, and those people are graduates,” Masterson said. “It’s not just a number. It’s a number with a person and an interest in a program.” 

Some unquantifiable factors the administration will look at include how the degree serves USM’s mission or engages with the community. 

“Philosophy has been a program that has continuously not met our enrollment requirements,” Nail said. “That’s been put on stipulation on a rolling basis because it has been deemed critical to the university’s mission.”

One aspect of the process faculty took issue with is that USM’s requirements for program enrollment is higher than IHL’s. The review looks at cumulative graduates over a three-year period, but USM’s baseline is twice what IHL requires. 

Nail noted that some of the university’s programs were already in the process of creating plans to boost enrollment and graduation numbers because they had been flagged by IHL due to the recent drop in student population.

“The rapid decline in enrollment is triggering a lot more of these reviews than we’ve ever had before,” Nail said. “When your enrollment is down 12-13% over three years, all of a sudden that starts to flow through and the graduation numbers decline.” 

USM has directed faculty who will be required to revise their degree plans to evaluate the market demand for their program based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics or other sources of potential job growth in Mississippi. 

“The degree plan should prepare students for their future careers, graduate school or professional programs, and to adapt to changes in the job marketplace,” Masterson’s report states. 

The fate of the least-enrolled programs will be determined by the end of the semester, according to the white-paper. The process will repeat in the spring for programs that meet IHL’s minimum standards, but not USM’s.

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