Miami University to Phase Out Western College: Fall Class Will Be Last in Innovative Program
Posted on: Sunday, 25 June 2006, 15:00 CDT
By Kathy Lynn Gray, The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio
Jun. 24--Western College will be just a memory at Miami University by 2008.
The Miami Board of Trustees unanimously approved the school's demise yesterday, based on the recommendation of President Jim Garland, who retires Friday.
This fall's class will be the last accepted into Western, the trustees decided.
The faculty at the school, officially known as the School of Interdisciplinary Studies, will be transferred to other schools at Miami.
Although trustees said they wanted to continue the school in some fashion, they made no decision on that. Instead, they asked the University Senate to recommend in December whether Miami should set up an honors college and have interdisciplinary studies as a major in that college.
In voting to dissolve Western, trustees ignored the Senate's 40-6 vote in April that a decision should be postponed for a year.
The Senate is made up mostly of faculty members and has oversight over curriculum, programs and course offerings. Garland said in April he considered the Senate's vote advisory.
Western has operated with its own faculty and dormitories since 1974 as a sort of small, liberal-arts school within the university that allowed students to create their own majors. About 200 were in the program this past school year, with 30 signed up to enter this fall.
"It's a tragic day for innovative educational programs," said Tim Matune, a 1981 Western alumnus from Youngstown who had been fighting Garland's recommendation. "It was a bad decision and a bad process."
But Matune said he wasn't surprised. Public records he obtained from Miami indicated that school officials had preordained the school's future this year.
The trustees' vote follows months of lobbying by Western alumni, students and faculty members to save the program. Some of them said university officials had marginalized the school in the past few years so that enrollment would fall and administrators could point to that as a reason to shut it down.
Outside reviewers in the past two years have praised Western as remarkable and unique.
Students at Western had been unaware until early March that the program might be discontinued. Then they came out fighting, setting up a Web site with information about the program and lobbying alumni and the public.
A handful of Western alumni and faculty begged the trustees during yesterday's meeting to postpone a decision about the school's future.
Miami's new president, David Hodge, starts next Saturday. Hodge is former dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle.
kgray@dispatch.com
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Copyright (c) 2006, The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.
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Source: The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio
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