Facing economic reality. The disaterous neglect of the University of Wyoming's budget.

 Big news at the University of Wyoming:

UW Proposes Transformation in Light of Budget Reductions, Changing Needs

So the university is going to eliminate some programs, but create some others.  More specifically:

Reconfiguration -- Reorganize UW’s academic colleges to create larger, more stable departments with common disciplinary interests while reducing redundancies.

Specifically, the plan calls for changing the College of Engineering and Applied Science to the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences. Currently in the College of Arts and Sciences, these departments -- Chemistry, Geology and Geophysics, Mathematics and Statistics, and Physics and Astronomy -- would move to the newly named College of Engineering and Physical Sciences and become part of new academic units there. 

Meanwhile, the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources would become the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Moving to that college from the College of Arts and Sciences would be the departments of Botany, and Zoology and Physiology, as well as the Life Sciences Program.

The College of Arts and Sciences would become the College of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts -- bringing UW in line with the way many universities organize those disciplines. 

“These reorganizations would expand and enhance two very important colleges central to our land-grant mission, focused on agriculture and engineering, better positioning the university to advance the Tier-1 Engineering and Science initiatives, and making its research programs more competitive in the federal science and technology ecosystem. They would provide additional critical mass, create new synergies and bring new opportunities for faculty members and students in all of the academic units housed in these colleges,” Seidel says. “At the same time, we would still have a very robust college focused on the arts, humanities and social sciences, which also are part of the land-grant charge -- and are at the core of a strong university education.”  

The school is also eliminating some degree programs, including the Bachelors degrees in Spanish, French and German, as well as secondary education.  The advanced degrees in Sociology, philosophy, political science, international studies, architectural engineering entomology, family & consumer sciences and statistics will all go as well. So will the MBA programs in finance and energy.  Four departments are slated for the ax, but their programs will be folded into other departments.

This is a disaster.

I don't have an opinion on the department consolidation.  Offhand, that makes some sense to me.  But a four-year university without a Spanish, French or German language bachelors degree is rocketing towards second rate.  The same is true about a university lacking advanced degrees in all the topics slated for elimination, except for perhaps "family & consumer sciences", which is something I don't know anything about, so I don't have an opinion.

In other words, this is really bad.

This is an off shoot of the ongoing reliance on the extractive industries for financing in Wyoming. The school doesn't have the money it needs, so its making cuts.  And that should tell us right now that we need to make major adjustments to the funding of the state.

That probably means taxing something that we're not taxing now.  But the choices for the alternatives are grim. We can let the university slide into a minor four-year school which most serious Wyomingites will avoid attending, or we can acknowledge that we're in a new economic era and adjust to it.

I suspect we'll do the former.

Something has really happened in the mindset of the state over the past forty years.  I'm old enough to remember prior booms and busts, but in prior years it seemed we always were aware that they'd occur, and underlying it all was the realization that the industries served the state, but didn't define it. The industries have never said that they did.  Somehow, however, during this last boom there came to be a fundamental shift in thinking. We went from "this is temporary, what are we going to do?" to sort of believing that it wasn't temporary.  We've refused to acknowledge long term trend that are now not only going away, they're getting advanced.  Some have insisted that we sue other states to try to bring the "good old days" back.  

Times change, we know.  Fundamentally, our existential selves, if grounded in reality, do not have to change with them.  But ignoring clear changes is a recipe for disaster.  And now we're inflicting a disaster on the university, which in turn will be visited upon our children.