A draft proposal circulating among Bellwater State University's faculty senate would consolidate three of the university's oldest academic departments into one administrative unit, the latest ripple effect of an enrollment shift toward biotech and clean-energy majors that has left humanities departments with fewer students and, faculty fear, less institutional weight.
Under the draft proposal, presented to the faculty senate last week by Provost Dr. Miriam Osei, the three departments would retain their distinct majors and course offerings but share a single administrative chair, one budget line and consolidated staff support, replacing the three separate department structures currently in place. Osei said the change is projected to save roughly $380,000 annually in administrative costs, savings she said could be redirected toward faculty lines in growing technical programs.
“This is a structural change, not a curricular one,” Osei told the senate. “No course is being eliminated. No major is being eliminated. We are asking three departments that have all seen enrollment declines to share administrative overhead rather than each absorbing that cost separately.”
Faculty see a familiar warning sign
History department chair Dr. Franklin Ostrander said he doesn’t doubt the administration’s math, but questioned the timing, coming amid a broader enrollment shift toward biomedical sciences and renewable-energy technology that Chancellor Eleanor Castellano presented to the board last year. “Every consolidation I’ve read about at other universities started exactly like this,” Ostrander said. “A shared chair becomes shared faculty lines becomes a shared major becomes a smaller department than any of the three started as. I’m not accusing anyone of lying about their intentions today. I’m saying I’ve seen where this road tends to go.”
English department faculty senator Dr. Louisa Brandt said morale in her department has already suffered from years of watching enrollment climb in biotech and clean-energy majors while humanities sections shrink. “Being told our combined enrollment doesn’t justify three separate department chairs is a specific kind of message, whether or not it’s intended that way,” Brandt said.
Administrators point to other universities’ experience
Osei pushed back on the comparison to consolidations elsewhere, arguing that Bellwater State’s proposal preserves all existing tenure lines and does not touch the departments’ separate curricula or degree requirements, unlike some consolidations at other public universities that eliminated majors outright. She pointed to the university’s recent embedding of a technical-writing requirement, taught by English faculty, across the biomanufacturing and clean-energy coursework as evidence the administration values humanities instruction rather than seeking to shrink it.
Every consolidation I’ve read about at other universities started exactly like this. A shared chair becomes shared faculty lines becomes a shared major becomes a smaller department than any of the three started as.
Dr. Franklin Ostrander, Chair, History Department, Bellwater State University
“We are not the university that decided technical writing didn’t need English faculty,” Osei said. “We built that requirement specifically because we think the humanities have something essential to contribute, even to our most technical programs. I understand the skepticism, but I’d ask people to judge us on what we actually propose, not on what other universities have done.”
A vote still weeks away
The faculty senate is expected to vote on the proposal within the month, though the vote is advisory; final authority rests with the board of trustees. Philosophy department chair Dr. Amir Rostami said his department, the smallest of the three with only six full-time faculty, has the most to lose if the consolidation eventually leads to shared faculty lines rather than shared administration alone. “Six faculty members is already a small department,” Rostami said. “If this becomes the first step toward folding philosophy’s faculty lines into the other two departments over time, there may not be a distinct philosophy major left in a decade.”
Castellano, who has largely let Osei lead the public discussion of the proposal, said in a brief statement that she supports exploring administrative efficiencies but wants the faculty senate’s vote and feedback incorporated before any final decision goes to the board. She said no changes would take effect before the following academic year at the earliest, giving the three departments time to propose alternatives if the senate rejects the current structure.
Osei said she remains open to modifying the proposal based on faculty feedback but stood by the underlying logic. “We have three department chairs doing largely administrative work for departments that, combined, have fewer majors than our biomanufacturing program alone,” she said. “I think we can find a structure that respects these fields’ importance without pretending that reality away.”
Students caught in the middle
English major Callie Thornbury, who is minoring in philosophy, said students in the affected departments have mostly learned about the proposal secondhand from professors rather than through any direct communication from the administration. “We found out through our professors mentioning it in class, not through any kind of official student notice,” Thornbury said. “For a decision that could shape whether my minor exists in its current form in a few years, I’d have expected the university to at least loop students in directly.”
Thornbury said she doesn’t necessarily oppose the consolidation itself but wants assurance that course offerings in smaller departments like philosophy won’t shrink as a side effect of shared administration. “I picked this university partly because a state school let me double up on a humanities minor alongside a practical major,” she said. “If that flexibility disappears because philosophy ends up an afterthought inside a bigger combined department, that’s a real loss for students like me, even if no one officially eliminates the major.”
A national pattern, seen locally
Dr. Samuel Iyer, the university’s labor economist, said Bellwater State’s proposal reflects a pattern he has tracked at public universities nationally as enrollment shifts toward professional and technical majors. “This isn’t unique to Bellwater State, and it isn’t really about this university’s specific finances,” Iyer said. “It’s what happens almost everywhere state funding formulas reward enrollment growth, and technical fields are the ones growing. The humanities didn’t get worse. The funding incentives around them changed.”
Iyer said he generally supports the university’s broader push toward biotech and clean-energy programs given regional workforce demand, but cautioned that treating humanities departments purely as a cost center risks undervaluing the technical-writing and critical-thinking instruction those departments already provide to students across the university, including in the very biomanufacturing and engineering programs driving the enrollment shift.