Proposed curricular cutbacks alarm faculty

Lewis & Clark administrators have proposed turning the religious studies, classics, and world languages & literatures majors into minors, ending the college-wide world language requirement and eliminating most contingent faculty positions in the WLL department. These changes would be part of a plan to cut $720,000 from the College of Arts & Sciences budget.

The administration says the plan is meant to match the college’s size to a consistently shrinking student body. The $720,000 target is part of a $7.4 million CAS operating deficit, according to the administration.

First brought to department heads at an Oct. 1 Chairs and Directors meeting, the Office of the Dean’s plan outlines several major reductions across the curriculum.

The proposal includes eliminating the WLL major along with reducing the religious studies and classics majors strictly to minors.

The proposed plan also reduces French and German studies to minors, which would leave Spanish as the sole remaining language major. Japanese, Chinese and Russian would still be offered in their capacity as minors.

Additionally, the proposal removes the  foreign language requirement from the undergraduate General Education curriculum and eliminates most  of the contingent, or nontenure, faculty and staff positions within the  WLL department.

The proposal was brought to the broader faculty on Oct. 6 at its monthly meeting. 

According to CAS Dean Jerusha Detweiler-Bedell, the proposal reflect an institutional recalibration following a sharp drop in fall enrollment. While the college targeted an incoming class of 520 new students this fall, actual numbers came in at 413. Expecting the overall student body to remain roughly 20% smaller in future years, as the college projects, administrative calculations relied on three years of enrollment data tracking the 10 departments with the fewest declared majors when constructing their proposal.

However, interviews with department chairs, faculty letters and financial analyses reveal an academic community grappling with strategic pragmatism, deep concern over lost institutional knowledge and rising anger over administrative spending.

Faculty responses across affected programs vary, ranging from a desire for cooperation to more active resistance.

Religious Studies Department Chair Paul Powers stated that his department is not opposing the proposal to transition its major to a minor, calling it a realistic response to years of reduced departmental support.

“The Religious Studies department kind of saw this coming,” Powers said. “We were not that shocked by it, and we are not fighting it tooth and nail. We decided we’re going to work with the deans.”

For religious studies, the decision follows a period of dwindling faculty. After tenured professor Rob Kugler retired two years ago under an early retirement incentive, the college opted not to replace the position, leaving the department with three full-time professors — one of whom, Susanna Morrill, is currently on leave.

Powers described the situation as a “self-fulfilling prophecy.”

“If you starve a department of resources, you can’t be surprised when it doesn’t attract more students,” Powers said.

Given the ongoing demands on the remaining faculty to contribute to General Education requirement classes, overseas programs and interdisciplinary minors, the department has struggled to offer enough upper-level courses needed for  majors.

“In a way, we feel like we are misleading students by saying that we can offer a full major to them,” Powers said. “So we’re adjusting to that reality.”

By moving to minor-only status, religious studies aims to maintain its place in the curriculum and ensure that courses in world religions, premodern history and cultural studies remain available to the broader student body.

For the WLL department, news of the proposal came directly in a meeting between WLL Department Chair Therese Augst, professor Keith Dede, Detweiler-Bedell and Associate Dean Rachel Cole.

Augst recalled that while she anticipated discussion around majors with low enrollment numbers, the proposal to eliminate the General Education language requirement came as a shock.

“I was really shocked about the language requirement,” Augst said. “It felt like, ‘Well, we’re not even going to try to make this work. We just have to cut this because we can’t staff it.’”

Augst views the decision as a capitulation to national trends limiting access to language study, arguing that language requirements are central to LC’s stated mission of cultivating global-mindedness.

“The idea that one can develop a sense of global-mindedness without having to study a language at all is a mystery to me,” Augst said. “The way to really connect with people across cultures and borders is through language.”

Augst also raised equity concerns, noting that language requirements level the playing field for students whose high schools lacked robust language programs.

She pointed to a former German major who had never flown on an airplane before coming to LC and studying abroad in Munich.

“The institutional encouragement to study a language helps people discover something they didn’t experience in high school,” Augst said. “Without that encouragement, language study will be reduced to only those who enter college already knowing they want to study a language.”

According to departmental tracking, an average of 21 students currently major across the three WLL programs proposed for elimination.

Augst clarified that the proposed changes would take effect for the next catalog year, meaning current students can still complete majors or minors in these programs.

In a collective statement sent to CAS faculty, Augst and 17 WLL colleagues emphasized the tangible outcomes of language study.

According to the statement, over the past five years, 100% of LC’s 17 Fulbright recipients from the past five years have studied abroad, 82% studied languages beyond the intermediate 201 level and around 60% held a major in a language program.

Central to the administration’s rationale for eliminating the WLL major and world language General Education requirement is the removal of all nontenure-track staff within the department to achieve budget targets.

Currently, 10 of WLL’s 20 instructors hold contingent contracts, representing half of the department’s teaching staff. Nearly all have taught at LC for well over a decade.

According to Augst, the contingent staff facing potential termination includes Marie-Eve Thifault (French), Megan McDonald (Spanish), Cecilia Beninati (Spanish), Adrián Miller (Spanish), Satomi Hayashi Newsom (Japanese), Keiko Ueda (Japanese) and Catherine Sprecher Loverti (German).

The department’s contingent faculty also includes two of the last four CAS Teacher of the Year award winners, Satomi Hayashi Newsom and Yoshiko Reynolds. 

Associate professor of Hispanic studies and director of ethnic studies, Magalí Rabasa, is the sole tenured member on the school’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Committee on Contingent Faculty. In a conversation with The Mossy Log, she voiced criticism of the administration for treating long-serving educators as flexible line items.

Rabasa recalled the recent faculty meeting on Oct. 6 where Associate Dean Rebecca Lingafelter presented budget pie charts outlining which areas of the budget could legally be reduced.

“She essentially pointed out which part of that staffing budget is available for budget cuts, and it’s the sector that is not tenured or tenure-line faculty,” Rabasa said. “She used the language saying, ‘This is who we legally can lay off.’”

Rabasa argued that treating long-serving instructors as temporary overlooks their structural role in language instruction.

“Lots of folks in those roles at Lewis & Clark say, ‘I’m not contingent. I’m an integral part of this community. I’ve been here for decades,’” Rabasa said. “What we’re seeing now from the administration is a real affirmation that contingent faculty are disposable.”

Augst echoed these concerns, stressing the gap between teaching contributions and job security.

“Our nontenured faculty are the lowest paid, yet in many cases, they are the most celebrated instructors who work the hardest to support students and build community,” Augst said. “Students need to know that the people whose jobs may be eliminated are deeply loved within the community and make a huge impact on students’ lives.”

Professor With Term and Chair of the Classics, Gordon Kelly, expressed disappointment that low operational costs did not shield his department from proposed reductions.

Operating with what he calls one and a half contingent faculty positions, Kelly said classics is the least expensive major offered at LC. By comparison, Kelly noted, Reed College maintains five tenure-line faculty members in its classics department.

Kelly, who said he is currently the only trained premodern historian remaining on campus, noted that unfilled retirements in history and art history have steadily eroded instruction on historical eras prior to 1900.

“I fear that Lewis & Clark is adopting a presentist focus where they’re just focusing on the present-day world, and increasingly a local focus as well, moving away from the international focus that we used to be known for,” Kelly said.

Kelly worries after years at LC, older contingent faculty that may be cut will have a hard time finding work elsewhere.

“As you get older — I’m 63 — if you lose your job, it gets much harder to get a new one,” Kelly said. “I worry about these folks who have given such outstanding and loyal service over the years.”

Kelly, who has 3 years left on his contract, also said he is uncertain of whether or not his position will be renewed

Both Kelly and Powers suggested that reducing humanities offerings may miscalculate long-term labor trends in the age of artificial intelligence, in which employers increasingly seek graduates with qualitative, critical thinking and communication skills.

“Five years ago, it would have been considered a lead-pipe cinch that if you were a computer science major, you were going to walk right into a high-paying job. Now that’s not the case because of AI,” Kelly said.

Powers added that attempting to shift a small liberal arts college toward preprofessional training forces LC to compete with larger state institutions that offer those programs at a lower cost.

“The administration is gambling in certain directions and not in others — they’re gambling on moving away from the humanities when it might actually be time to gamble on sticking with them,” Powers said.

As faculty evaluate academic cuts to reach the $720,000 reduction goal, department chairs across CAS are demanding a full review of administrative overhead before any votes on academic programs occur.

Augst questioned why targeted fundraising or administrative restructuring had not been prioritized over academic cuts.

“We keep hearing, ‘We can’t cut our way out of this,’” Augst said. “To me, that raises the question: why not launch a fundraising campaign to support international study and language education? Playing a game of ‘where should we cut’ creates a ‘Hunger Games’ scenario where departments battle each other.”

In an official statement released following the Oct. 1 meeting, Chairs and Directors cited an external financial report from the LC chapter of AAUP examining administrative and instructional spending at LC between 2019 and 2025.

The report highlighted three spending trends it found. Upper management positions increased by 36%, from 83 to 113 employees, establishing a ratio of one manager for every two full-time instructional faculty members by 2025.

Total management salaries grew by $4.3 million over six years — more than five times the $720,000 targeted from academic cuts — compared with a $3.7 million increase for full-time instructional staff. Management salaries have increased by 18%, while instructional salaries have increased by 12%.

Benefits for upper administration grew by 19%, compared with a 4% increase for instructional benefits. Overall, noninstructional staff grew at twice the rate of instructional staff, by 14% versus 7%.

Faculty chairs pointed to models like the University of Arizona, which recently addressed a $177 million deficit primarily by reducing administrative expenses rather than core academic programs.

“In the interest of full transparency, before voting on any curricular changes, the chairs would like to see a review of administrative and operational support staffing, compensation, and contribution to mission,” the chairs wrote, calling for an the college to embody an “ethic of shared sacrifice and equity.”

However, administration officials push back on the assertion that administrative growth is driving the deficit or that salary reallocations could close the gap.

Detweiler-Bedell noted that administrative budgets fall outside her purview as academic dean, maintaining that redistributing administrative compensation would fall far short of bridging the $7.4 million CAS operational deficit.

Furthermore, college leadership contends that the statistics cited in the AAUP report reflect federal data reclassifications rather than an expansion of administrative personnel. According to Chief Financial Officer Andrea Dooley, positions in areas such as the library, Writing Center, and overseas programs were recategorized for external reporting purposes, creating the appearance of management growth without adding new personnel or expanding administrative costs.

Detweiler-Bedell and Dooley discuss the college’s finances in more detail in a companion story in.

The proposed curricular changes remain pending and must go through the Curriculum Committee before being presented to the full CAS faculty for a formal vote.

In addition to proposed program cuts, the college is attempting to mitigate financial pressures through voluntary faculty workload reductions and targeted academic fundraising efforts.

In the meantime, faculty urge students to make their voices heard through enrollment and direct communication with administration.

“If you are thinking of majoring or minoring in a language, please do,” Augst said. “Take our classes, flood our programs. … Let the higher administration know if you believe Lewis & Clark should stick to its educational mission.”

Faculty across affected departments maintain that protecting the institution’s core educational mission must remain the primary focus of upcoming decisions.

“The core mission of this place is to educate students,” Powers said. “Everything else piggybacks on that, and we have to make sure we do everything we can to protect that core mission.”

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