Voting without dissent, the Penn State trustees approved Friday the discontinuation of the university’s Science, Technology, and Society Program, to take effect in June 2012.
The trustees also approved the merger of the Department of Counselor Education, Counseling Psychology and Rehabilitation Services (CECPR) with Educational and School Psychology and Special Education (ESPSE), both in the College of Education.
Both decisions marked the first formal board action on cost-reduction recommendations from the university Core Council, the administrative group charged with finding at least $10 million in expense savings and new revenue.
The council has delivered cost-control proposals to all the University Park colleges in recent months, and will communicate with Commonwealth Campus chancellors within weeks, Provost Rodney Erickson said.
‘Most of our cost savings are coming from administration and operations rather than core academics,’ he said, though specific figures were not immediately available.
Since early 2010, the administration-appointed council has combed through university entities in search of relative inefficiencies, often targeting ‘under-enrolled’ course sections and big-ticket expenses such as health care and employee travel.
The effort is the latest step in two decades of — and more than $200 million worth — of strategic budget reallocations at Penn State, slimming some expenses while redirecting funds for areas of growth, relevance and student demand, Erickson said.
But ‘the reallocation process is difficult and becoming more so each year as we cut deeper into some areas in order to sustain others,’ he said. ‘ … The main goal that we’ve had is really to trim recurring costs.’
At this stage, Erickson said, the cost-control push is ‘turning over every rock in a way that we hadn’t done systematically before.’
The Core Council gives each college and other university entity an opportunity to respond to council members’ proposed trims and new-revenue strategies. Many of the proposals go before the Faculty Senate for review before they’re implemented. Others — such as program closures, major and minor changes, and department mergers — will require trustees’ approval.
In many cases when a program is reduced, Erickson said, the university is able to retain the program’s faculty members — and their expertise — but reduce the administrative structure around them. He said more Core Council recommendations are likely to go before the trustees in the fall.
With regard to the interdisciplinary Science, Technology and Society Program, trustees David Joyner said Friday that the program offers no major and only three ‘very small’ minors.
It was established 40 years ago, when interdisciplinary approaches in academia were more unusual, said Joyner, who chairs the board Committee on Education Policy.
‘Times have changed,’ he said.
Administered jointly by the College of Engineering and the College of the Liberal Arts, the program has recently enrolled fewer than 30 students, according to Penn State. Some STS courses and the STS minor will be discontinued, but other courses offered through the program will be retained by participating faculty members’ home academic departments.
The other two minors offered through STS — bioethics and medical humanities, and disabilities studies — will be relocated to other areas in the College of the Liberal Arts. Six faculty members with partial STS appointments will move ‘entirely to their home departments,’ according to a university document.
But five untenured faculty members ‘will receive termination notices,’ it reads.
Beyond Joyner’s remarks, the trustees did not specifically discuss the STS program in public session Friday; they voted swiftly to dissolve the program. The university Faculty Senate Council objected earlier to the dissolution, having asserted that program faculty members were not properly consulted in the review process.
The trustees also did not converse in public session Friday specifically about the merger in the College of Education. Approved briskly, the move will merge the Department of Counselor Education, Counseling Psychology and Rehabilitation (CECPR) with Educational and School Psychology and Special Education (ESPSE). The merged units will form a new department: Educational Psychology, Counseling and Special Education.
The change, to take effect in July, will save administrative and support-staff expenses, foment greater collaboration and allow more savings from faculty attrition over time, according to a university document. The Academic Council on Graduate Education, the College of Education dean and the Faculty Senate Council all endorsed the move.
In light of the overall cost-control strategies, trustee emerita Helen Wise said she was concerned Friday ‘that we don’t overemphasize the numbers.’
Addressing the board in public session, she pointed out that a key program in vocational agriculture has just 17 students enrolled. But it’s still a critical endeavor, Wise said.
‘I just want to be sure that we don’t cut a program just because it’s small,’ as programming in agricultural areas tends to count smaller enrollments, she said. ‘ … We have to be real careful about that.’
Erickson appeared sympathetic to Wise’s sentiments, underscoring that department closures often allow the retention and relocation of the affected university faculty members — ‘so the expertise is still there.’
But ‘we can’t be all things to all people any longer,’ Erickson said.
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