Voices: This fall, Utah college students will find a degraded experience

You’ve seen the headlines: Higher education in this country is under attack, and in many ways, Utah’s institutions are on the front lines.

If you graduated from a Utah public university or college before 2020, consider yourself fortunate. Starting with the coronavirus pandemic and continuing with strong-armed mandates by the ever-meddling Utah Legislature, life on campus has suffered in myriad ways.

COVID-19 forced instruction online and out of classrooms, labs, libraries and study halls. We’ve never recovered from that necessary transition to virtual college. Online is just too convenient.

State lawmakers and their lackeys at the Utah System of Higher Education (USHE) are another matter altogether. They just can’t leave alone an educational system that has been phenomenally successful for generations. And they’ve used budget cuts as the cudgel to exert their red state makeover.

The damage these mandates have done to college campuses would fill far more than a brief editorial but, as an educator, let me share some of the lowlights.

As students return to campus they’ll find far fewer international students (thanks to President Donald Trump’s disdain for most foreigners and their fear of ICE), frozen research grants (defunding everything from climate to cancer to community research), closed cultural centers (some, like the University of Utah’s Women’s Resource Center, have been around for more than 50 years), shrunken general education opportunities (who needs the liberal arts?) and hundreds of departments closed, majors and minors cancelled and faculty careers cut short (they were deemed “inefficient” in USHE parlance).

My own university — Weber State — is “pioneering a three-year bachelor’s degree” as part of the Legislature’s push to graduate students faster and cheaper, which, despite defending the humanities, even The Salt Lake Tribune’s editorial board seems to support. Bachelor’s degrees have been 120 or more credit hours for more than a century. Cutting one-fourth of a student’s coursework usually comes from general education requirements, electives and no longer requiring a minor.

This is not a baccalaureate, and it will deprive students of the very classes that make them broadly educated citizens, parents, employees, consumers and voters. Call it a three-fourths B.S. or a B.A.-lite or something else, and then think about is this really what we want out of our graduates. Are you okay with your doctor being three-fourths trained? How about your airline pilot?

The Legislature’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) hostility has, among many other things, left our campuses without any affinity centers. Gone are the Hispanic, women’s, first generation and many other student centers that used to welcome students with familiar places to fit in. The generic Student Success Centers that replaced them are a bit like visiting a food court in which all the vendors serve baloney on white bread.

The general education courses that have always provided the bedrock of a well-educated person have been steadily diminished through reduced credit hours (now only 27 statewide), absurd minimum passing grades (now a D-), substitution of high school-taught classes (often with little control over content and rigor) and credit for prior experience (such as work, service, travel or a mission).

Interestingly, BYU, at one point the alma mater of the majority of the state’s legislators, requires at least 39 general education credit hours. Apparently, what was good for them isn’t good for the rest of us.

With the statewide DEI ban, we’ve struggled to rename offices, websites and courses — and to avoid an entire list of what are now considered taboo words and topics. Diversity, equity and inclusion were just the beginning. Climate change, gender, social justice, clean energy, racism, sustainability, equal opportunity, marginalized, environmental quality and feminism are just a few of the hundreds of words Trump seeks to purge from the federal government and, by derivative, from college campuses.

While it’s true that higher education (like all institutions) was in need of reform, the nationwide DOGE-type strategy of burning down the house in order to remodel it will lead to many, many unexpected consequences (like tuition hikes, key staff reductions and low morale). Despite those, you can be sure the Utah Legislature is not done wielding its wrecking ball through the state’s colleges and universities. Just wait until next session.

Having said all of this, I want to assure students that my colleagues and I are committed to delivering the best possible education, even though we labor in a national and state environment that doesn’t value our efforts (or your degree) like it once did.

The challenges facing the world and its inhabitants have never demanded more broadly educated and thoughtful people, and we’re committed to deliver on those essential obligations.

Eric C. Ewert is a professor in and chair of Weber State University’s Department of Geography, Environment & Sustainability. His current research and teaching interests lie in environmental studies, the American West, population, historical and economic geography and geospatial technologies. Views are the opinion of the author and in no way represent Weber State University.

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