The Nevada Sagebrush

Facebook groups, petitions, angry letters and plans for meetings and rallies sprung up on campus last week as students in more than a dozen programs prepared to fight to keep their majors from being cut.

The online groups, with names like “Save CABNR,” gained thousands of members within days, the online petitions already have hundreds of signatures and news reports have aired from media outlets around the Truckee Meadows with messages from affected students.

University leaders expected these objections to happen and they are beginning to surface a week after the release of a plan to close more than a dozen academic programs to fill an impending budget gap.

“It shows that every program has a constituency of people who care about it,” Jane Tors, a spokeswoman for the university, said.

Some of those constituencies were surprised when they were told that, in a year, their majors would be gone.

“The best way to describe what I’m feeling is grief,” Bodie Coates, a 24-year-old marriage and family therapy graduate student, said. “It was a total shock.”

Coates’ program, which falls under the College of Education, is among those suggested to be cut under the plan. Because Coates only just began working on his degree, he said he is unsure if he will finish it by the Fall 2011 deadline. That would mean taking 16 to 18 credits along with intern work, he said.

Even if he can fit the work in, Coates said he would have to “cheat the system” by finding a way around prerequisites.

These factors are pushing Coates to look into transferring to other schools, an expense he wasn’t counting on, but will endure to get his degree. His loss will also be the state’s, he said.

“If (I, and students like me) move to another college, we won’t be coming back (to Nevada),” he said.

That matters for a state among the most in need of counselors in the fields being cut from the College of Education, Coates said.

To fight the proposal, Coates and others from the College of Education are circulating an online petition, writing letters and trying to raise awareness in the community of what’s happening.

“We’re trying to point out that this isn’t the right program to cut, especially in Nevada,” Coates said.

Coates’ possible inability to complete his degree was a problem facing many of the University of Nevada, Reno’s graduate students, Jillian Murdock, the president of the Graduate Student Association, said.

“Unlike undergraduates, it’s more difficult to change your major,” she said.

When the program closure proposal was released, UNR President Milton Glick said the university would work with students early in their degrees to find a similar major, but  the high degree of specialization in graduate programs makes that much more difficult for post-baccalaureate students, Murdock said.

“That is a fantastic solution for undergrads, but not for grad students,” she said.

Stories like Coates’ are easily found among the students organizing resistance to the planned program closures.

Jaclyn Davis, a 23-year-old French and philosophy double-major, said she is upset by the foreign language cuts even though she will graduate in May, long before the French program’s scheduled closure.

“I don’t see this as a problem for me, but for the future of the university,” she said.

Davis said she first heard about the program while waiting for a French class to begin.

“My professor came into class, threw her hands up in the air and said, ‘They’ve done it.’”

It was that reaction from her teacher that persuaded her not only to help fight the proposal, but to take a leading role among foreign language students, she said.

While the foreign language department has been cut before — just last year the German program was reduced to German studies — the proposal to cut majors and minors in everything but Spanish came as a surprise to Davis.

“For those students who already speak Spanish, this robs them of the opportunity to learn another language,” she said.

While Davis is using a Facebook group and a rally planned for Thursday to fight the proposal to cut foreign language majors, she said she doesn’t have any alternatives for university leaders looking to balance the school’s budget.

“I don’t know. I’ll be honest,” she said. “But cutting this isn’t right.”

Despite Davis’ thoughts, and others from students like her, Associated Students of the University of Nevada President Eli Reilly said the university administration made the plan trying to keep the majority of students in mind, and it would be difficult to save a program without cutting another one that might affect more people.

“It’s like picking between cutting off a toe or a finger,” he said. “Either way it’s going to hurt.”

Nevada Sagebrush reporter Thomas Levine contributed to this story. Jay Balagna can be reached at jbalagna@nevadasagebrush.com.

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