Another university sacrifices the queen, plus some other pieces

Another American campus decided to perform a queen sacrifice.  Iowa Wesleyan College announced drastic cuts and layoffs:

it will eliminate 22 of its 52 faculty positions; it has cut 23 staff members and 16 of its 31 academic programs… After the faculty layoffs take effect at the end of the year, there will be no math professor on staff.

As with previous instances of the queen sacrifice, the terminated faculty and programs seem to cover a relatively small number of students:

[College President Steven] Titus said the relatively small number of students affected by the cuts shows why they were made: only 52 students were enrolled in the 16 programs that were cut. So, that half of the college’s majors enrolled only 5 percent of the college’s students.

Note, too, the emphasis on the humanities, as programs facing the ax include “math, history, music, secondary education and English”.

See also the attack on a liberal education, especially as core curriculum:

Kent John Chabotar, the president of Guilford College in North Carolina, said colleges attempting what Iowa Wesleyan is doing can find success if they focus on majors that enroll more students and do a good job of selling those programs. “The only way you have a regional reach is to have majors that have regional reach,” he said. “You’re not going to do that with a classic curriculum.”

When I’ve noted other institutions doing queen sacrifices, those cases typically saw smaller cuts than IWC’s.  This College is dropping more than the one piece.

(thanks to Glenn Everett for the link, and Louise Docker for the photo)