One week after the official program, faculty, and staff reductions were announced to the community, several areas of the college are learning how the specific reductions will affect them as Houghton moves past this moment of financial rigidity.
Mullen emphasized the importance of seeing the college as a single entity rather than several disparate parts. "Whatever brings [students] here, when they graduate they won't say, ‘well, I graduated from this department.'"In the past, the school has tried to address falling enrollment numbers by increasing the number of programs offered at Houghton, said Mullen, but "enrollment has remained remarkably stable in the last 10 years," forcing the college to support numerous programs without a wider tuition base to draw from. "The very deliberate goal in this moment is to try to limit the number of programs to those areas that we really think describe Houghton's character."
The specific faculty reductions were largely based on an analysis done by the Austen Group which compared department spending with academic load. "The two areas of the college that had the highest differentials between percentage of academic budget that they called on and the percentage of credit hours sold," said Mullen, "were Music and Religion…. In Music, that difference was even higher than in Religion… I know that in a moment like this, people assume that there is a sort of arbitrariness. I'm saying that there is pretty strong data for the fact of the two areas where those decisions were made."
In Music, the reduction of one untenured faculty is particularly difficult because the department was "asked to reduce their budget by $100,000 last year, and that included the reduction of one position," said Mullen. She also pointed out that, "there are times in the history of the college where there were more music faculty than there are now, full-time faculty, when there wasn't an endowment."
Professor Ben King, the Director and Associate Dean of the Greatbatch School of Music, Houghton College, was contacted for this story but declined to comment.
Regarding the reductions in the Religion/Philosophy department, the Graduate Program in Theological Studies as well as two faculty positions, drew on historical perspective, saying, "in other times in the college's history, the Religion department has had fewer people than it does now."
Addressing the concern that the reductions in the Religion department may be indicative of a move away from the spiritual heritage of the school, Mullen said, "it's hard to make the case that the spirituality of the campus is inherently linked to the number of faculty in the Religion department... One of the historical hallmarks of the Christian liberal arts tradition is that the Christian foundation of the college was never intended to be carried by the Religion department alone."
The reductions in faculty will mean that "many courses now offered annually will be offered on an every-other-year basis. This is going to make it necessary for students to get good academic advisement and to plan ahead," said Professor J. Michael Walters, professor of Christian Ministries. Walters also noted, "It's possible that the newly implemented four credit majors will need to be re-visited, and perhaps adjusted since they were done with current faculty personnel in mind. This is particularly true in the Bible major, which, in addition to taking on a four credit system, has also ‘inherited' the Biblical languages, and added Biblical Theology and a Bible Capstone to their loads."
Although the department would have liked to maintain the graduate program, Mullen argued that the cancellation will allow them to devote more time to the core mission of undergraduate instruction. Mullen also said that the cancellation of the graduate program was not at all connected to a lessening of the importance of the theology and religion program. According to Walters, one position in Religion was tied to the graduate program, but for almost five years of full-time teaching, "every dime of [that] salary has been paid for by Graduate Theological funds."
"The reduction of one [of the two] position[s]," confirmed Mullen, "is directly linked to the funding for the grad program."
The announcement of faculty and staff reductions was also accompanied by the announcement of a hire of Dr. Keith Horn as the Associate Dean of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. The hire coincides with an increased focus on the sciences in general. "Our science faculty is smaller than it was in the seventies and for a number of our programs, we have barely enough resources to keep them going," said Mathematics professor Kristin Camenga. "You look at overall numbers, we have about 18-19% of all majors at Houghton and yet we only have 14 out of almost 100 faculty. So the numbers don't match there."
According to Mullen, Horn will be "working to facilitate the interdisciplinarity of the faculty, working to facilitate programs that help people who want to enroll in graduate programs as well as those looking to enter the health professions." Horn's job will also include crafting a five-year plan for the sciences and raising money to fund that vision. "It takes a lot more money to run a science program than it does to run a humanities program," said Mullen.
"Right now we're trying to build a new wing… or renovate," said Camenga, "it's still entirely up in the air as to what we actually do. It's likely we're going to build something, but we don't know exactly what. We want that space to be usable and flexible for the next forty years, the way Paine has been for the last forty years so that means we're going to need a sense of where we're going… What different sorts of programs are we going to need to develop, what sort of strengths are we going to develop, that we will need space for."
Camenga also pointed out that when "you look at the number of science faculty vs. the U.S. News and World Report ranking, there's a strong correlation between more science faculty and a higher ranking… As we're building up the sciences, we don't want to pull away from the rest of the college."
Physical Education and Recreation and Leisure will also experience significant cuts. Increased academic requirements for certification in recreational therapy, as well as Professor Andrea Boon's volunteer reduction from full-time to part-time, have resulted in the cancellation of the recreational therapy program.
Thom Kettlekamp, professor of Recreation & Leisure Studies, also hopes that increasing boarding and lab fees, and more actively marketing Houghton's horse shows "will increase our revenues by $40,000" in the equestrian studies program. "At the same time we're going to reduce our herd from about 27 to 17, that way we can cut our expenditures by about $40,000. I'd rather do this than lay off another faculty member… We can do this and still offer an excellent program."
According to Kettlekamp, maintaining the Recreation & Leisure program is vital for the school. "The Recreation & Leisure program is the fifth largest major at the college and the equestrian program link is the most clicked link on the Houghton website," said Kettlekamp. "It's one of the biggest recruiters for Houghton College. It's a niche, meaning very few other Christian colleges can offer this type of program."
"I don't criticize any proposals that were made to cut the program," explained Kettlekamp, "but it is kind of disheartening to hear when you look at the Houghton College website and you see all over the place, ‘Transforming People, Transforming the World.' I would safely say that our Recreation program is one of the programs that transforms lives as much or more than any other program on campus." Kettlekamp also argued that the word "Leisure" often confuses people, but assured that for the past 30 years he has tailored the program to fit the liberal arts approach of the college.
In Physical Education, the loss of the fitness major and sports ministry minor will lead to a greater focus on health and certification programs.
The reduction of one athletic trainer position will also result in the loss of six teaching credits and a probable reduction in training services. "Athletically, I think it is going to be a reduction in services because what happened this year with our trainers was that they added JV women's basketball and JV women's soccer," explained Professor Trini Rangel, Chair of the Physical Education department. "And those are two teams that will require service with one less certified trainer on staff… they've increased the number of teams that need this service while reducing the number of trainers."
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