Southern Oregon University's major in German will perish, three programs that faced elimination will be spared and three schools will unite into one under a final plan announced Monday for making up a $4 million budget shortfall.

"This final budget plan presents a less painful approach than what we unveiled in January," said SOU President Mary Cullinan.

Years of dwindling enrollment combined with shrinking state support and rising energy and health-care costs culminated into a budget crisis that prompted the three-year plan for cuts.

The plan calls for paring geology and geography and consolidating both majors into one degree program that includes environmental studies.

Sharon Bywater, a senior majoring in geology and German, said she is concerned the combined degree will jeopardize geology students' chances of admission into graduate schools at other universities.

Advertisement

But the heads of those departments said an interdisciplinary degree likely would give students an advantage in gaining admission to graduate school, especially in the booming areas of mapping and geographical information systems.

The fate of an honors program remains tentative.

A committee of faculty and students will be formed to assess the honors program's value in recruiting students to campus and to identify options for survival under budget constraints, SOU officials said.

"I think the honors program really benefits SOU," said honors freshman Katherine Gohring. "It helps the university's academic reputation and prepares students for upper division coursework."

Women's studies and international studies programs will remain in place but with reductions.

The schools of Arts and Letters, Social Sciences and Sciences will be rolled into one College of Arts and Sciences under one dean instead of three, reducing the number of departments from 23 to 14. Officials will choose the dean after a national search.

In all, 22 academic programs will undergo budget reductions. A total of 24 faculty positions will be eliminated by 2010. Half will result from retirements and unfilled positions. Five will be layoffs. The remainder comes from a reduction in faculty work hours.

More than half of the cuts come from academics.

The German major will end with the retirement of Gundrun Gill.

Adjunct faculty will continue to teach basic German courses, and it is still uncertain whether the courses will be enough to equal a minor.

"If adjuncts are going to teach it, the program is dead," Gill said. "We would rather eliminate it than do something like this."

Even as officials called students and staff to action to help market the university to outsiders, some students noted that the cuts are a blow to the institution's image.

But, they added, the image problem is not unique to SOU as the state has dropped to 48th in the nation in its support of higher education in the past 15 years.

"It comes down to Oregon as a state not funding higher education," Bywater said.

Programs were eliminated or reduced based on enrollment trends, cost of upkeep, class sizes, grants and gifts generated, effect on other programs and general quality.

The preliminary plan for trimming the budget was announced at the end of January. Since then, officials have received more than 300 e-mails and letters in responses to the proposed cuts.

Cullinan said plans call for capitalizing on the institution's reputation as a liberal arts university.

Bywater said the university also needs to advertise its other attributes such as quality science programs.

Those programs are not well known even in Jackson County, she said.

On the Web: www.sou.edu/president/.

Reach reporter Paris Achen at 776-4459 or e-mail pachen@mailtribune.com.