Did Hard Grading Spur UNC Greensboro’s Cuts?
Earlier this year, the Martin Center’s Ashlynn Warta wrote convincingly that faculty opposition to academic cuts at UNC Greensboro was best understood as an act of self-preservation. We stand by that analysis. Nevertheless, the Martin Center has since learned that the cuts in question may well have been unethical in part. If that is the case, UNCG should reconsider whether all of its announced retrenchments are indeed in students’ and taxpayers’ best interests.
Among the motives governing program retrenchments were concerns that professors were holding students to too high a standard.As the Chronicle of Higher Education recalled in its own investigative feature last month, UNCG’s “academic-portfolio review” (APR) was conceived in late 2022 as a collaboration between university administrators and the consulting firm RPK Group. Intended to rescue the institution’s finances in the wake of a 10-percent enrollment decline since 2017, the APR took place alongside attempts to outsource custodial operations, right-size the secretarial pool, and merge redundant campus-police processes.
Yet, predictably, cuts with the potential to affect faculty assignments received the most pushback. In January of this year, the UNCG faculty senate voted to censure both Chancellor Frank Gilliam and then-Provost Debbie Storrs, asserting that the pair had “not initiat[ed] consultation with the Senate at the start of the APR process [or provided] a clear rationale of the choice of program closures.” When, on February 1, Gilliam announced his approval of 20 program discontinuations proposed by Storrs, the faculty responded with a vote of “no confidence” in the latter. (Storrs resigned in April, citing health reasons.)
