In college, it can feel hard to slow down. Classes, studying, exams — for 23-year-old Josie Miller, a dirt path along Missoula’s Clark Fork River is her refuge. On a warm May morning, she walked along the rushing water.
“I think nature is just a very relaxing place to be, and a lot of times when I’m dealing with the noise of society, being next to the river just helps ground me in what I do,” Miller says.
Miller spent a lot of time here this year. She and her peers in the University of Montana’s English department learned in December administration intended to terminate one of its oldest graduate programs — its Master of Arts in Literature.
Miller wrote letters. She helped organize rallies in support of the program. The faculty government voted overwhelmingly against terminating it. But less than six months later, the decision was finalized.
Administrators say they had to make hard choices for the university’s future. But those choices have left some students like Miller wondering if they were heard at all.
“That, to me, signals that this was already, kind of, a foregone conclusion,” Miller says. “That they wanted to cut it — that they had their own vision for the university, and for some reason, literary studies is not in it.”
University administration insists that was not the case. But now Miller and some of her colleagues and mentors are wondering how many more cuts UM can withstand and still hold on to its reputation as Montana’s premiere humanities university.
That’s professor Eric Reimer, director of the department’s graduate studies in literature, says the university’s move to cut the literature master’s program hit them “pretty blindly.” Reimer says he heard several explanations for the termination he found confusing or conflicting. Those included low enrollment, budget balancing and a lack of “sustainability.”
But Reimer says enrollment has been stable after taking a hit during the pandemic, and matches other graduate degrees on campus. He says the program only requires a handful of teaching assistants, or TAs, to run — a relatively cheap expenditure compared to other degrees.
“They’re sacrificing a program with over a hundred-year history for basically one TA position,” Reimer says.
Reimer acknowledges the program has had its struggles. Its final cohort will include fewer than a dozen students. But he says the end of this program is another chip in UM’s reputation as Montana’s destination school for students seeking advanced study of the arts, writing and rhetoric.
“I’m waiting — we’re waiting — for our leadership to articulate how we can move forward and still think of ourselves as the ‘flagship’ humanities institute in this state,” Reimer says.
Provost Adrea Lawrence, in charge of overseeing academics at UM, says that still holds true. She notes UM still has a strong undergraduate English degree, plus philosophy, history, environmental studies and arts programs.
“I would argue that the humanities is much bigger than just one academic program,” Lawrence says.
Lawrence says changes to academic programs are common — nearly 40 certificates, concentrations and degrees are set to end this year at UM. But most of those are ground-up cuts, recommended by faculty in those programs. The decision to end the graduate literature program was top-down, made by administration.
That prompted intense pushback from the faculty senate, a body of professors that advises UM administrators. More than 80% of members recommended UM keep the literature graduate program. According to minutes from the April meeting, members said administration hadn’t justified the decision to end the century-old degree.
Student Alex Anderlik is finishing his literature master’s degree and serves on a subcommittee of the faculty senate.
“There’s been frustration and fury and sadness,” Anderlik says.
Anderlik believes advanced literature studies have never been more important. As corporations invest heavily in AI and students increasingly fold it into their studies, he wonders whether future generations will have the opportunities he did to learn how to learn — how to think critically and communicate.
“We are really just shooting ourselves in the foot,” Anderlik says. “We are blinding ourselves by divesting from the humanities.”
Back along the Clark Fork, Anderlik’s fellow student, Josie Miller, weighs the responsibility of being one of the last graduates from UM’s literature master’s program.
“Because the last thing that I would want is to have a hundred-plus-year legacy end on a downward turn,” Miller says. “So, I struggle a lot with the burden of that.”
Her goal is to write the most impactful thesis she can in the year she has left.
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