Defining "indispensable" necessary to prioritization

I would like to start by thanking the PSC, particularly Loren Swartzendruber and Jack Rutt, for their efforts at transparency and for the time they have taken to field questions and communicate with students.

At the student forum in Common Grounds Monday evening, amongst all of the questions and responses, a very important issue was raised that calls into question the validity of the prioritization results. Loren stated that there are certain programs that are so important to EMU being a liberal arts institution that they will not be cut no matter what they ranked in the prioritization. It is my understanding that the prioritization process was designed in such a way that programs like these would rate well. For instance, if a major is absolutely central to the mission of EMU but isn't a money maker or doesn't fill up its classes, it should still rank well in the prioritization ratings. The process was designed so that all of these things would be taken into consideration and these numbers would give administration an accurate picture of what should be a priority at EMU. If, in the end, the PSC has to sift through these numbers and disregard an indispensable program's low rating to justify keeping that program, clearly there is another set of criteria that is being used to judge which programs are indispensable and should be prioritized.

What are the criteria that make a program indispensable to a liberal arts institution? This is the question the PSC should have been working through somewhere in this process so that these ratings would actually mean something. What happens if there are two programs with below average ratings and one gets cut while the other stays? The justification for keeping the below average program might be that it is essential to a liberal arts university, while the justification for not keeping the other poorly ranked program could be that it did not pass the prioritization test. In this example, there were two sets of criteria used in the decision of which program to keep. It seems like a very real possibility that the prioritization ratings will be used to make more convenient the cutting of a program that was doomed based on another set of measures.

Before any decisions are made about what goes and what stays, the PSC needs to better define what it is that makes a program indispensable to a liberal arts university. I, along with other students, need to be included in this discussion.