Two more queen sacrifices in the planning stage

How might a college or university cope with a financial crisis?

One response is to cut academic programs and the faculty who teach in them, aiming to save on labor costs. For years I’ve been tracking examples of these under the header of “queen sacrifices.” Today I’ll point to two new instances at two different types of institutions more than one thousand miles apart.

(The queen sacrifice term comes from chess and names a desperate move when a player sacrifices their most powerful piece — the queen — to save the game. The imperfect analogy in academia is tenured faculty, who aren’t the kings of their institution in chess terms, but have the powers of tenure and institutional governance. You can find far too many examples of this at the above link.)

First, North Dakota State University‘s president announced the university would start merging its academic colleges, of which there are now seven (“Agriculture, Food Systems and Natural Resources; Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences; Business; Engineering; Health Professions; Human Sciences and Education; and Science and Mathematics,” according to Inforum.). This is just the start. Next up: “[President] Cook said no immediate cuts to majors or programs are planned, but eventually there will be some.”