USM responds to cuts

As details of Monday's announcement sink in, faculty and students are disappointed to learn how professors and programs have been affected.

Chair of the history department Phyllis Jestice said she will join the department of foreign languages to appeal the termination of tenured Latin and Greek professor Mark Clark, who has taught at USM for 30 years.

"Instruction in Latin and Greek is absolutely indispensable for advanced study in several fields of history," she said, "and Dr. Clark's Latin and Greek program is a very impressive tribute to his dedication and hard work."

Jestice said, too, that Clark's classes are "enormously popular." Clark currently teaches 139 students in his five Latin classes. In the spring he teaches Christianity and the Roman Empire and Ancient Greeks, along with others. He also directs a fair number of honors theses, independent studies and master's theses in history, Jestice said.

After his class on Tuesday, junior Latin student Barbara  McClendon said, "Dr. Clark is a scholar who has done a multitude of research and been recognized for his work. Go to the foreign language website and read his bio – or better yet, have a conversation with him – and decide for yourself whether this is a professor that our university needs to lose."

"It's hard to imagine a real university without instruction in Latin and Greek," Jestice said. "And there's something truly horrifying about firing tenured professors. I'm not sure students realize how different this can be from just losing a job. We work for years, sometimes decades, to reach tenure, and with it the expectation of a job."

Despite her disappointment in the loss of the Latin and Greek program, Jestice said the administration went about the cutting process the right way, drawing in faculty, staff and students to provide input. She said, however, that the outcome seems uneven.

"It feels like the College of Arts and Letters was hit disproportionately hard, especially considering the tuition revenue that classes like Comparative Religion generate for the university. It feels like the administration was hit disproportionately lights, and that athletics continues to demand and get an unfair proportion of the university's budget."

President Martha Saunders commented on the large number of cuts from the College of Arts and Letters.

"The process was never intended to be proportional," she said. "Instead, the priorities were set given a set of criteria including enrollment, centrality to the mission of the institution and cost, among other things."

Dean of the College of Business Lance Nail said the cut of the Management Information Systems program in his college was a reasonable choice.

"The one academic program that has been slated for elimination in the College of Business was the most rational choice on the basis of enrollment trends," he said. "We would have preferred to avoid eliminating the MIS program, but the size of the budget cuts was simply too large to avoid cutting academic programs."