By Anna Hansen
John Leonard, chairperson of the Edgewood College religious studies program, says it’s not the right time to eliminate low-enrolled majors.
Leonard who has worked for Edgewood for 25 years, said it’s important for the college to evolve, but a lot of change is proposed at Edgewood.
“While everything on Earth has to change in order to live, and new academic disciplines can and must evolve from those which are offered now,” Leonard said, “it just doesn’t seem to be the right time to eliminate so many ‘low-enrolled’ majors unless it can be demonstrated that doing so will increase enrollment and decrease the budget shortfall.”
At this time, Edgewood College administrators said they could not provide a dollar amount of expected savings from the proposed cuts. This year’s goal is $4.5 million through cutting faculty and low-enrolled majors.
This has prompted departments like religious studies to attempt to restructure and cut costs through their own efforts. Leonard even offered to step down to assistant professor, a position with lower pay, to save the college money.
According to Leonard, “The department’s counterproposal following the UCC’s initial examination into the matter of budgeting demonstrated that all the courses needed for the RS Major could still be offered in rotation by only two full-time faculty members.”
This indicates that, to continue offering the Religious Studies major, Edgewood would be paying no more than it takes to simply offer courses in the discipline as general education tags.
In the 70s and 80s, Leonard said that the RS Major was “very popular” following the Second Vatican Council, which demonstrated an increased “need for academically prepared laypersons to work in a variety of parish ministries.” Thus, employment was readily available in this field.
While things have changed since then, Leonard said the major is still symbolically integral to Edgewood’s identity as a Catholic liberal arts college – its very existence is “a concrete expression of our Catholic-Dominican distinctiveness.”
“It simply makes no sense to me,” said Leonard, “that we cut so much all at once if we are going to offer students options in a liberal arts education as the foundation for their own work in creating a more just, compassionate, and sustainable world.”
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