West Virginia University leaders have recommended discontinuing 32 of its majors at its Morgantown campus as the school is feverishly working to make up for a multi-million budget shortfall.
The preliminary recommendations, released Friday afternoon, said 12 of those programs are undergraduate majors and 20 are graduate-level majors. Other programs were told to reduce their faculty size — 169 faculty jobs are on the line for cuts.
Programs marked for discontinuation included: master’s and doctorate in Mathematics; master’s and doctorate in Higher Education Administration; master’s of Public Administration; master’s of fine arts in Creative Writing; and a bachelor’s in Recreation, Parks and Tourism Resources.
The Department of World Languages, Literatures and Linguistics, which includes Spanish, Russian and Chinese studies, was marked to be completely dissolved.
“My colleagues and I are still in shock; it’s inconceivable that our state flagship, R1, land-grant university, the place where we’ve all built our homes, careers and lives is completely eliminating the teaching of languages,” said Lisa Di Bartolomeo, a teaching professor of Russian Studies.
The university is also reviewing plans to eliminate the language requirement for all majors. “Eliminating language instruction will close avenues of opportunity, career advancement, and personal fulfillment for current and future WVU students,” she added.