Editorial: Indiana University, Ball State and Purdue are gutted without logic or thought

Chicago Tribune

07-07-2025

The list of executions is a stunner.
B.A. in French — dead, or in Hoosier political-ease, 'Suspend (with Teach-Out toward Elimination)/Written Commitment to Merge/Consolidate the Program before AY26-27.'
B.A. in Art History — dead. B.A. in Italian — dead. M.A. in Japanese — dead. M.A. in Theater and Drama — dead. M.A. in Chinese — dead.
That's merely a taste of the carnage announced Monday by the Indiana Commission for Higher Education (ICHE), as planned for one of America's great universities, Indiana University in beautiful Bloomington. Since there are 116 degree programs disappearing from Indiana's Big Ten flagship campus, and 222 across the Indiana University system from Indianapolis to Kokomo, we could have filled this entire space with a list.
And, believe us, we were sorely tempted.
But we'd have needed yet more space to include similar cuts at Ball State University, Indiana State University, Purdue University, Ivy Tech Community College and the University of Southern Indiana. Ball State is losing degree programs in philosophy, geology and German, to name but three.
All in all, public schools in Indiana are losing some 20% of their current degree programs.
What on earth happened? The cuts are the work of the ICHE, which would be better to call itself the Indiana Commission for the Gutting of Higher Education.
The ICHE is operating at the behest of the governor and the Indiana legislature, which cut 5% from its budget for higher education in its most recent two-year budget, even as it required schools to keep tuition and fees flat for the next year. At the eleventh hour, the legislature then also imposed a requirement that all programs meet new enrollment guidelines; degrees with just a few students now will be eliminated.
We're hardly reflexive defenders of all aspects of academe. We've called many times for keeping tuition more affordable and for public universities that take advantage of taxpayer dollars to fulfill their mission of excellent teaching and training, preparing students effectively for today's world and emphasizing critical thinking over indoctrination. We acknowledge that many of the programs on this list are small and thus relatively more expensive. And we're well aware of some of academia's loopier inclinations and the overly cushy gigs it sometimes provides those who are able to mow their lawn when most taxpayers are still behind their laptops or in their trucks. So stipulated.
Even so, while revolutionaries invariably favor an axe, this kind of wholesale carnage still is a shocker.
If you read the entire list, you'll likely be struck by how much damage is being done to education in the humanities and the arts. Surely, a determined Indiana student who wants to attend his or her state university should be able to study German, art history or dance, somewhere; if not in Bloomington, then where else in Indiana?
The answer for some, of course, will be out of state or at a private school; the humanities will continue to be protected in the Ivy League or at the University of Chicago. But that doesn't help a lower-middle-class kid with writing talent from Franklin, Indiana.
The ICHE cuts also don't recognize that some of these small degree programs are taught by faculty who work across several programs and most of them have curricula that overlap, too. In many instances, they simply are a means of offering students more choice at relatively little incremental cost within an academic department. And when it comes to doctoral programs, especially, they are small by design. Indiana doesn't need 50 doctoral students in astrophysics, but we'd argue that a robust program with five might just pay the state back its costs, should even one of them set up some kind of innovative shop in Indianapolis, or, 20 years later, teach an astrophysicist who does precisely that. This kind of one-size-fits-all metric is crude in the extreme. There are excellent programs that don't attract a crowd.
Moreover, degree programs go in and out of fashion. Business and finance degrees may be the hottest things now, but they won't necessarily stay that way.
Setting the philosophical justification for these changes, Indiana's Republican Gov. Mike Braun has called for more 'practical' degrees with direct applications to the workforce.
Sure. But who's to say right now what those degree programs will be in 20 years, especially as artificial intelligence threatens to reorder the demands of the workplace?
Those finance majors and accountants may find machines doing much of what they learned to do, even as degree programs like philosophy that promote critical and relative thinking suddenly have more applicability than now is the case. Indiana University-Bloomington should not be turned into a trade school with Division One football and basketball. The state, which long has been proud of IU, needs teachers, thinkers, artists, musicians and poets, too. And it sure as heck needs people with proficiency in languages and cultures other than English.
One final note. Christopher Rufo and other conservatives have led something of a revival of Western civilization-style instruction at campuses in Florida and elsewhere. They've argued that students should be debating, Sophocles-style, and reading Aristotle or Socrates rather than deconstructive or nihilistic texts emphasizing identity, post-colonial guilt and the like. We think students should read and think about all of the above, although we're all for the rise of classically based curricula, for those who choose such an education. We're all products of the liberal arts ourselves.
Yet in Indiana, those old-school, discursive classes are over-represented on the crudest of chopping blocks. If the legislature and the ICHE are really concerned about how the state's young minds are being educated, they should pack away their numbers nonsense and engage with the state's faculty on the future of Indiana's great state university.
Ideally before the best minds get the heck out of the state. Teachers and students.