Dear Alumni and Friends,
Budget cuts are never easy. During the confidential stages of the process, rumors swirl, speculation runs high, and the stress of wondering what might be on the chopping block is exhausting. With a $27.5 million shortfall and conversations about college consolidations and program eliminations, it’s no surprise the entire campus has been on edge.
These budget decisions are not just numbers. They touch the lives of our students, faculty and staff and impact the programs that make the University of Nebraska such a vibrant community. I know the uncertainty has weighed heavily on everyone, and I share in the concern this process has caused. For more on how we got here, see President Gold’s State of the University Address. But the bottom line is that our bottom line is red.
How the Cuts Affect CoJMC
The Chancellor’s proposed budget reduction plan includes a cut to the College of Journalism and Mass Communications, described as “administrative and staff efficiencies.” Make no mistake, the College of Journalism is among the most efficient on campus. (See this By the Numbers report for background). So, why are we facing a cut?
In August, the University of Nebraska announced a Voluntary Separation Incentive Program (VSIP) to encourage tenured faculty who are at least 62 and have completed 10 years of service to retire. To guide further budget decisions at UNL, the Chancellor’s Executive Leadership Team (ELT) developed teaching and research metrics for academic program analysis, using weighted Z-scores to rank programs and identify the top and bottom 25 across campus. Professionally focused programs like ours, and others that emphasize creative work, fared poorly on the research metrics. Both journalism and broadcasting were placed in the bottom quadrant.
Our Record of Growth
These rankings don’t reflect the remarkable progress we’ve made. Last year, we welcomed our largest freshmen class in the history of the College while maintaining our high retention and graduation rates. At a time when enrollment is declining on campus, we have increased enrollment by 4.6% over the last five years. In that same time period, we have increased research publications by 250% and the number of faculty pursuing external funding has grown by more than half, driving an 83% increase in grant applications and 500% increase in sponsored program funding – all without increasing faculty.
We achieved these gains by leaning into our “do from day one” culture, incentivizing research for our tenure-track faculty and celebrating our professors of practice who teach the high-touch writing and production classes across our majors.
Unlike many colleges, we operate as a single faculty body without departments. Our professors routinely teach across programs, making their “home” major less important. For example, among broadcasting faculty, only about 20% of the classes they teach are in broadcasting, 20% are in sports media and more than 50% are in our college core.
This structure allows us to balance tenure-track faculty, who drive research, with professors of practice who power our teaching mission. Yet when the ELT applied its metrics, they grouped faculty by majors rather than how we operate as a college. Because many professors of practice were hired into journalism and broadcasting, those majors showed lower research activity in the analysis.
The Immediate Impact
In the current proposal, we are losing faculty to retirement who will not be immediately replaced and another $100K in funding designated for alumni relations, part-time instructors and student workers. If the Board of Regents approves the proposal in December, the college will realize a 7.46% budget cut.
For students, this means we will offer fewer open electives because we have fewer faculty to cover required courses. Some class sizes will grow, although enrollment caps for skills courses will remain in place to meet accreditation requirements. Thanks to an incredible gift from Cindy and Mick McCaffrey, we will be able to continue to support student employment in the college. I welcome your ideas on how we can maintain alumni engagement without dedicated college staff support moving forward.
Adapting to the New Landscape
To remain strong within the new metrics, we will merge journalism and broadcasting into a single major with two tracks, allowing us to continue offering curriculum in both journalism and broadcast media production while more than doubling the major numbers used in the teaching metrics. We will also realign professors of practice across majors to better balance the research and teaching metrics set by the ELT.
The University of Nebraska has been successfully educating journalism and mass communications students for more than 130 years. The rules have changed, and we will adapt to meet the new expectations while protecting the quality of our programs and continuing our mission to nurture curious and creative minds to thrive in the ever-changing media and communication professions.
The progress we have made and the future we envision are possible because of the people who choose to invest in our students. In the coming year we will be launching a new strategic planning process and we will need alumni engagement. If you are interested in serving on one of the strategic planning task forces, please let me know.
Your belief in the power of journalism and communication, whether shown through mentorship, advocacy, partnerships or financial support, fuels the opportunities we can offer and ensures that Nebraska remains a place where all students feel welcome to engage in hard work, collaborative problem solving and the ethical pursuit of truth to uphold democracy.
If you have any questions about the budget process, please reach out to me directly or pull me aside at our upcoming Homecoming Celebration on Oct. 3. Your involvement and support make what we do possible. Thank you for being part of the CoJMC family and for helping us carry forward the tradition of excellence in journalism and mass communications.
Go Big Red!
Shari
