March 29, 2010. Chronicle of Higher Ed focuses on FSU to highlight power of administrators and trustees to vote entire disciplines–and the faculty in them –out of existence.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education
March 28, 2010
Disappearing Disciplines: Degree Programs Fight for Their Lives
Mark Wallheiser for The Chronicle

[GRAPHIC]
Flip Froelich (third from left), a tenured professor of oceanography at Florida State U., stands with other faculty members whose jobs will end this year because of budget cuts. “It’s just immoral,” he said of the university’s decision to hire tenure-track faculty members and lay them off six months later.

By David Glenn and Peter Schmidt
Would you like to major in anthropology at Florida State University? Sorry: The department stopped accepting new students last year. What about economics at the University of Louisiana at Monroe? That major is also going out of business. Computational physics at Oregon State? Circling the drain.

Critics sometimes grumble that American universities’ curricula constantly metastasize and never shrink. But that hasn’t been true in this recession. Dozens of majors and doctoral programs have been suspended or terminated since last year, and many more have been under the shadow of the guillotine. Several state systems, including those in Pennsylvania and South Dakota, are conducting wholesale reviews of smaller degree programs, aiming to weed out the allegedly weak ones.

Download pdf of article from UFF-FSU website by clicking here.