To the Editor:

Recently, the UW Regents have expressed their support for UWSP’s administrators and rewarded them with raises even though they have not solved the university’s dire financial and enrollment problems, but have made them worse.

We urge community members who take pride in UWSP to support the hundreds of faculty, staff, and students who have urged the regents to give the university the leadership it deserves.

The administration blames decreased state funding and a downturn in the number of college-age students for its problems.  While these factors play a role, they cannot explain why enrollment has fallen more than other UW campuses, why  retention rates are near the bottom in the system, why enrollment fell significantly following the implementation of the Provost’s general education reform,  why enrollments and the deficit were not shored up by spending the add-on tuition increase on a crew of advisers and administrators, or why the creation of a new non-academic college and dean position have not fixed the financial problems.

Now the administration recommends a curriculum solution to the financial problem. The Point Forward document says nothing about the budget.  Instead, it targets programs that are among the least expensive for closure.  Cutting cost is only part of the problem.  The bigger part is how to attract and retain students.  Program discontinuations will result in fewer offerings to attract students. The leaders say they plan to develop new professional preparation programs, but they offer no budget analysis.  Even if the deficit were closed through program discontinuations, funding new programs will be much more difficult with the lost revenue from the eliminated programs.

The administration is misguided by the notion that liberal arts programs don’t lead to employment.  In fact, liberal arts graduates attain higher lifetime salaries, are more likely to have occupations related to their fields, and enroll in graduate and professional programs more often than graduates from technical fields.  History is the most common major among Fortune 500 executives.  In The Fuzzy and the Techie: Why the Liberal Arts Will Rule the Digital World, the business leader Scott Hartley states that the Liberal Arts are more important than ever because they foster intellectual agility, creativity, and curiosity.

It is obvious that UWSP leaders don’t know how to solve the budget problem.  Easing graduation requirements, creating an honors program (which failed twice before at UWSP), launching an expensive (and subsequently abandoned) first-year seminar, and securing add-on tuition to create new administrative positions, have all failed to set the university on a sustainable path.

Now they are planning to eliminate the College of Letters and Science and proposing curricular changes that destroy the decades-old mission of the institution, resulting in humiliating national public attention, a demoralized faculty and staff, and lost student confidence.   Attempting to save the university by destroying it will not work.  This course of action is not the hallmark of leadership that will sustain UWSP into the future.  Please urge the regents to give us leadership that will not continue in this misguided direction.

Alphabetized List Those signing on:

Richard Barker, E. Sherwood Bishop, Bob Bowen, Jutta Brendel, Jim Canfield, Barbara Dixon, Robert Enright, Hamid Hekmat, Ronald Hensler, Neil Lewis, Ed Miller, Marcia Parker, Justus Paul, Richard Ruppel, Gail Skelton, Padmanabhan Sudevan, Michael Williams, Robert Wolensky, David Wrone