Eighty-two academic programs within the Universities of Wisconsin have been suspended or eliminated since 2022, according to records obtained by Isthmus in an open records request. A majority of those cuts were in the humanities or social sciences, according to an Isthmus analysis of the records.
Individual campuses recommend their own program suspensions and eliminations. This is often done when programs have low enrollments of students or when universities restructure academic divisions. Suspended programs stop enrolling new students and can be eliminated or reinstated within five years of being suspended, according to UW system policy. Eliminated programs cannot be reinstated without approval from the UW Board of Regents.
There is no universal classification scheme for academic disciplines. Isthmus employed the classifications used in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ “Humanities Indicators” project, a widely respected source for data related to humanities programs, to determine which category a suspended or eliminated program would fall under.
According to the records received, the UW system has since replaced 14 of the 82 programs. A number of programs related to animal science at UW-Madison, for example, were replaced with similar programs after the Departments of Dairy Science and Animal Sciences merged in 2020.