photo by: Screenshot/KU Health System

University of Kansas Chancellor Douglas Girod speaks during a KU Health System webcast Tuesday, May 26, 2020.

A process underway to eliminate approximately 40 degrees or programs at KU won’t result in the reduction of any faculty members, Chancellor Douglas Girod told the Journal-World this week.

But Girod also said the University of Kansas community should expect more degree and program scrutiny in the future as the university contemplates how large it should be.

“To be honest, I’ve said this from the day that I’ve started, which is in this economy of decreasing state funding, challenges on the tutition side, enrollment to be challenged, we are going to have to get a little smaller and a little bit leaner,” Girod said in a brief interview with the Journal-World.

Girod, though, said the current degree review process wouldn’t result in the downsizing of faculty.

“We are not changing the number of faculty,” Girod said. “What we are trying to do is get better, more efficient about what we deliver, and help faculty focus their efforts where they can be maximized both for them and for us and our students.”

As the Journal-World reported this week, KU Provost Barbara Bichelmeyer is recommending 40 to 42 degrees and programs be discontinued at KU. Some of the recommendations have drawn opposition from KU’s University Senate. The Senate agreed that 28 degrees and programs should be discontinued because they were inactive or had very low activity levels. But the Senate did not support the discontinuance of the other 14 programs.

Bichelmeyer has continued to recommend that 12 of those 14 programs be discontinued, and she hasn’t yet made a decision on the other two programs.

The programs and degrees on the chopping block include several in the arts and humanities. Bichelmeyer’s recommendations include eliminating the Bachelor of Arts degree in humanities, the minor in humanities, the minor in peace and conflict studies and the graduate certificate program in peace and conflict studies.

She also is considering, but has not yet decided on, eliminating KU’s bachelor’s and master’s degrees in visual art education, which is the program that traditionally trains high school art educators.

The provost’s recommendations require approval from Girod, at which point the discontinuations become final. Girod did not provide any new details about the status of Bichelmeyer’s recommendations and did not say anything to indicate that he disagrees with the provost’s recommendations.

Rather, he said figuring out how to change degree programs would be important because maintaining programs that “chronically have had very, very few students in them is not a very efficient way to run a business,” Girod said. “And, yet, a lot of what happened in those degrees is important. How do you take the best of what was there and deploy it in a new way that we can involve more students?”

Girod also said he did not have an estimate for how much money discontinuing the degrees may save KU. Faculty members had raised that question and had not received a savings estimate. Girod said it was possible discontinuing the degrees and programs wouldn’t save much money at all.

“I would say it is not driven by cost,” Girod said. “It is driven by efficiency.”

Girod said KU may benefit financially from the decisions by taking the time that professors were spending teaching the low-enrollment classes and having those professors teach new classes that are in higher demand from students.

“Historically in higher ed, not KU alone, we have presented what we thought people wanted and not always asked them what they wanted,” Girod said. “They actually tend to talk with their feet. It would be great to continue everything, but in our resource-constrained environment, we don’t have the luxury to do that.”

While KU is not reducing faculty with this current degree-discontinuation process, Girod did not promise that would always be the case. He said he expected the process of reviewing degrees to be rather continuous in the future.

“We know our faculty numbers have dropped slowly, but we have done it through retirements and other things and just being careful who we replace,” Girod said. “But we are going to have to do more of it going forward.”

In fact, faculty numbers on the Lawrence campus and the Edwards campus in Johnson County have fallen ever since at least 2014, according to annual fall semester data compiled by the university. But the rate of decline has varied significantly over the years. KU faculty members — which don’t include graduate teaching assistants and several types of staff positions — totaled 1,251 in the fall 2021 semester. That’s down from 1,547 in the fall 2014 semester. The 2021 numbers were down 2.7% from 2020 figures. KU’s biggest year for faculty reductions was in 2017 when numbers were reduced nearly 7%. The smallest year for reductions recently was in 2015, when totals declined by less than 1%.

Faculty and staff leaders at the university have said they understand KU’s financial challenges, but also want to ensure that university leaders value the opinions from the academic community about the importance of teaching certain subjects.

KU Faculty Senate President Rémy Lequesne told the Journal-World earlier this week that the most recent set of degree-discontinuation recommendations had created concerns on that front.

“Of course we need to be efficient, and at the end of the day you have to pay your bills,” Lequesne told the Journal-World. “The faculty understands that, but there are reasons to teach certain topics that go beyond economics. There are reasons to teach art and music and other things that may not make dollars-and-cents sense, but they enrich us and are worth investing in.”

Some members of the Kansas Board of Regents raised those same concerns at a meeting this week. The Regents, who oversee the state’s higher education system, were not specifically discussing the KU degree recommendations. Instead, the board was debating a proposal to hire the rpk Group — a business and education consulting firm that KU already uses — to conduct a statewide assessment of degrees and programs offered at universities across Kansas.

Regent Carl Ice, the former CEO of BNSF Railway, cautioned the consulting group to rely only so much on financial measures, such as return on investment, when evaluating degree programs.

“I would say all the value in higher education doesn’t necessarily come from ROI,” Ice said. “Sometimes things are observable but not measurable. I didn’t hear a lot of that in your presentation.”

Rick Staisloff, founder and senior partner of rpk Group, told the board he understood those concerns. He said the group did not take an approach that every class or degree program had to produce more revenue than it created in expenses.

“Not every program will produce net revenue, and that is OK,” he said. “We don’t think the problem in higher ed is that we subsidize certain programs. We think the problem in higher ed is we don’t have transparency about that. We are not clear where we are making the investments.”

Some faculty members at KU, though, have questioned whether rpk Group looks broadly enough at how certain degrees and programs benefit the university. Lequesne told the Journal-World last week that he’s uncertain that the system rpk Group uses to analyze programs and degrees accounts for “contributions other than financial, and that is a concern to me.”

As reported earlier this week, the Regents ultimately approved the statewide study by rpk Group, noting that the study was important to both legislators and the governor. Staisloff, the rpk Group leader, told the board he understood there would be some fears the consultants would have to overcome with members of the university communities.

“There is often a fear that this is about cutting,” he said. “It really is an emphasis on where we might invest so we can grow and deliver learning that best supports our students and our employers.

“This can’t just be about the bottom line. It can’t just be about the numbers.”