At the last Board of Trustees meetings, which took place on February 27 and 28, the decision by the provost and president to discontinue several degrees offered at Eastern was made official.
These changes come as the Strategic Resource Allocation process comes to an end and the recommendations that came from the process will begin to be implemented.
The Strategic Resource Allocation, or SRA, is meant to “examine the ways our resources are being invested and address all institutional costs that will provide a plan to rebuild EWU financial health and sustainability,” according to the Inside EWU website.
The plan to conduct the SRA was originally presented to the Board of Trustees in December 2022.
“It was what I call a broad audit of the institution. And I’m not sure we’ve ever done anything like that before,” Jon Anderson, the Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs, said at the Board meeting.
As a part of the SRA, programs and services were reviewed by a faculty organization, the provost and President McMahan. They placed Eastern’s programs and services into five quintiles: 1. Investment, 2. Maintain, 3. Streamline, 4. Transform, and 5. Discontinue.
“The goal of this is to say we have the right money in the right locations,” Anderson said.
On February 27, the Eastern’s leadership team posted their official action plan in response to the recommendations of the SRA process. The document includes 171 pages detailing a plan for each program and service that was reviewed.
The provost, president, and faculty organization all agreed on the decision to discontinue the following degrees: Bachelor of Arts in Education Studies, Bachelor of Arts in Education in Physics — Secondary, and Bachelor of Arts in Physics.
In addition, the provost and president maintained that the Bachelor of Science in Physics and Bachelor of Arts in Technical Communication degrees should also be discontinued, even though the faculty organization believed they should be in the transform quintile.
All three agreed it would be best to discontinue the Minor in French and Minor in German.
Carlos Castillo-Garsow, the faculty organization’s president, released his report to the senate on March 10.
“I was sad and disappointed when the Board of Trustees voted to discontinue the BS in Physics and the BA in Technical Communications. (Faculty Organization) Exec put a lot of work and passion into arguing the merits of those programs,” Castillo-Garsow wrote in his report to the senate. “And I can only imagine how the faculty in those programs feel themselves. For them, the anxiety I had at the beginning of SRA turned into something real.”
No tenured faculty will lose their positions and the course content will be moved into other degree programs. Degrees will be officially removed from the catalog in the 2025/2026 academic year, but Eastern will ensure that currently enrolled students in these majors have a reasonable opportunity to complete their degree, university spokesperson Pam Scott said.
“As a regional comprehensive university, it is EWU’s goal to ensure that our academic programs are best aligned to meet regional workforce needs,” the program website says.
The implementation plan is set to happen over the course of multiple years but has no definitive timeline.
“We didn’t get everything that we wanted. We had some painful losses, but we also had some big wins,” Castillo-Garsow said in his report. “We didn’t save every program that we wanted to save, but we saved a lot of them.”
