Regarding “UConn faculty, students fearing cuts” (Hartford Courant, October 22, 2024):
The current program review at the state’s flagship university is an exercise in academic eugenics. It is short-sighted. To remove any program is easy, but to reinstate a program is complicated and costly. Most interdisciplinary programs such as environmental studies and women’s studies are directed by a professor within another department — biology or history, for example. Usually, at any institution of higher learning departments must go through a periodic self-review.
This new mandated review is additional to that practice. To judge a department only on a single fact (major completion, in this instance) is absurd and the apotheosis of poor administrative oversight. Will administrative units (which have grown exponentially as faculty has declined) look at their own budgets? And the huge omission here seems to be the athletic department which we know loses between 40 and 50 million a year and has the state’s highest paid employees. Now that is unsustainable.
Dennis Barone, West Hartford
