ST. CLOUD Minn. – After years of unrelenting enrollment losses, St. Cloud State University announced massive cuts to stay afloat financially. The cuts include 54 professors and 42 degree programs. The goal is to address a $14.4 million deficit, the university said. The cuts were engineered by the university’s president the past six years by Robbyn Wacker in a desperate 11th-hour attempt to balance the budget. Knowing the cuts would end her career, Wacker suddenly resigned six weeks ago. Her interim successor, Larry Lee, was blunt: The university failed to adjust its student-to-faculty ratio during decline from 18, 000 in 2010 to 10,000 students this year. To be sure, Wacker had initiated cost-saving projects but they were too little too late. Undergraduate progams being eliminated:
> Criminal justice
> Earth sciences
> Economics
> Entrepreneurship
> Environmental engineering
> Environmental science
> Environmental studies
> Gender and women’s studies
> Geography
> Global studies
> Health and physical education
> Hospitality and tourism
> Hydrology
> Manufacturing engineering
> Music performance
> Music teaching K-12
> Music therapy
> Music
> Nuclear medicine technology
> Physical education
> Physics
> Physics/general science education
> Sociology
> Spanish
Graduate programs:
> Criminal justice studies
> Gerontology
> Rehabilitation counseling
> Cultural resource management
> English education
> English studies
> History MA
> History MS
> Music performance
> Writing studies and rhetoric
> Child and family studies
> Early childhood special education
> Educational leadership and technology
> Biological sciences
> Electrical engineering
> Geography
> Public administration
Verbatim
Lee: “We’ve just been really inefficient in how we deliver our courses, but we’re just trying to right that.”
MnSCU universities
Enrollment tallies by full-year equivalencies:
Mankato, 14,800
St. Cloud, 12,000
Winona,8,200
Metro, 6,100
Moorhead, 5,900
Bemidji, 4,200
Southwest, 3,600
Fifty 50 minors also were eliminated. Staff cuts, besides 54 full-time faculty, include 42 staff abd four adminstave positons. Meanwhile ghe Minnesota State system chanellor, Scott Olson, has asked the former Illinois State University, Larry Dietz, to come out of retirement to be iSt. Cloud State’s gterim interim president starting in July. Lee is following through on plns to become of Blackburn College in Illinois.