Conservatives interested in higher education reform have spun their wheels for decades. They have demanded free speech, stopping racial preferences, abolishing DEI offices, and ending tenure in the hope of getting universities to appreciate Western civilization. While conservative causes are noble, the mismatch between means and ends predestined its reforms to failure.
Opportunities to reform universities are coming. But conservatives must be willing to take the time to understand how universities work and how to use the levers of power within the academic system to their advantage.
As I show in a new report on the University of Wyoming, one such lever available to conservatives is program review.
Program review, which all accreditors endorse, involves identifying academic programs that lose money or do not fit a school’s mission. Even tenured faculty can be released if their programs do not survive review.
Colleges and universities everywhere are undertaking budget-cutting program review. Public universities such as University of Nebraska at Kearney, Western Washington University, Portland State University, San Francisco State University, University of Nebraska, University of Minnesota, Penn State University, and West Virginia University have conducted program reviews since 2022.
Universities usually bean count when performing program review, consolidating under-enrolled major programs or departments or cutting them entirely. Departments with five faculty that have only 12 majors graduating each year will be cut no matter how important they are to the university’s overall mission. Economic considerations cannot be ignored when balancing budgets.
The University of Wyoming (UW) conducted program review in 2021. Its committees considered factors like needs of the state, UW’s mission, and land-grant considerations. Fourteen programs were eliminated, along with 75 positions, saving UW more than $13 million.
Ultimately, they were mostly unwilling to make genuinely programmatic cuts to shape the future of UW. It saved the School of Culture, Gender, and Social Justice, with its gender studies and black studies majors, by transferring the more popular American Studies program to the School as a means to boost enrollment. The School’s ten faculty remained.
UW kept low-enrollment, high-cost programs such as Veterinary Science and Petroleum Engineering, because they fulfilled UW’s mission, per Wyoming state law, to provide “liberal education” and education for “scientific, industrial and professional pursuits.”
It has become necessary for the Wyoming state legislature—and legislatures across the country—to give more guidance to boards of trustees and committees on its educational vision for higher ed. Legislatures should insist that programs based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and white privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States, which were created to maintain social, political, and economic inequities, will not be funded through state appropriations or other means. In Wyoming this means that such programs are inconsistent with liberal education and education for scientific, industrial, and professional pursuits. A program’s alignment with UW’s mission should be more important to its viability than student enrollment or cost-saving measures.
Right now, UW’s faculty and provost determine what is in the interest of the state and what fulfills UW’s strategic plan. Through their elected representatives, the people of Wyoming should guide the practice going forward.
Another reform that should be implemented at UW but might cause some inconvenience for Wyoming politicians has to do with block grants. UW is currently funded through a block grant that the state legislature passes every other year. The block grant represents a trade-off: the legislature gets some detail about how monies will be spent, but does not micromanage how Wyoming’s institutions of higher education operate. But funding them in this way no longer make as much sense, as confidence in higher education has plummeted.
Wyoming State Senator Cheri Steinmetz sought to bar state funding for “gender studies courses, academic programs, co-curricular programs and extracurricular programs.” The block grant complicates such efforts—something the legislature is beginning to adapt to through adding footnotes to the budget, like the one banning DEI offices in 2024. UW should reciprocate by providing a detailed list of expenses for the legislature’s approval. Such a reversion to old time budgetary authority is more palatable in Wyoming, where there is only one four-year university. This is necessary in a time of expanding administration and ideological departments.
Senator Steinmetz’s proposal is, if anything, too specific and too focused on gender studies. Other programs are inherently political and activist as well. Missional concerns should factor into whether UW keeps a program in place.
Aggressive use of program review, which is legitimate within the current higher education system, would be another step in dismantling the education cartel and restoring the public’s confidence in higher education. Underperforming, inherently ideological programs should be eliminated. Why wait? Budget crises could be avoided by cutting ideological programs now.