Cancelled classes disrupt students and upset faculty
By: Kavahn Mansouri
-Editor in Chief-
Students and faculty alike were left in a rush to reschedule classes at Clark Hall on Aug. 16, 2012. The cutoff date for classes to be reviewed for salvaging had arrived, and the final classes that did not meet ‘sustainability’ were given the ax. Approximately 30 courses were cut Aug. 16, yet other courses were cancelled in previous weeks, according to Vice President of Academic Affairs Andrew Langrehr.STLCC-Meramec President George Wasson said that cancellations fluctuated as a result of enrollment numbers increasing and decreasing as the college goes through a time of transition.
“It really is a scheduling management issue in many ways. When enrollment is changing, and enrollment is down this semester – we scheduled courses anticipating we would have numbers like last fall. We have less than that,” Wasson said. “That means that sections aren’t filling as fast, and some will be hit harder than others.”
Wasson said that he understands students and faculty members may be upset, but in the wide range of offered courses few classes are affected.
“Are people upset? Yes. Would I be upset? Yes,” Wasson said. “But when you look at the overall number of sessions that we have here at the campus, it is a small percentage that actually get canceled.”
The Honors Program was one of the heavily affected areas according to English professor and former Honors program coordinator Eric Meyer.
“We ended up cancelling five out of nine of the honors program courses; students need these courses. They’ve signed papers that they have to take a course to keep their scholarship; no course,” Meyer said. “They have to have these courses to graduate as honors program scholars; no course.”
Meyer added that the cancellations were a ‘disruption’ to the flow of the semester.
“It doesn’t serve students. It wreaks havoc on faculty. It’s a mess in the bookstore. It disrupts instruction,” Meyer said. “This is a pretty large speed bump and it has to be addressed.”
Langrehr said that the college does everything it can to help a class meet its minimum course enrollment and avoid the cut.
“From a student’s perspective, a faculty member’s perspective and the college’s perspective we don’t want to cancel [the classes], so it’s a big deal,” Langrehr said. “We try to avoid it to the best of our ability while trying to be responsible with the limited amount of resources we are given. We hate to change things in the end.”
Wasson said that lower enrollment has been a major cause of the cancellation issue.
“If we did not have the reduced funding, we’d have more flexibility. If we didn’t have fewer students, we wouldn’t have as many courses on that list for review,” Wasson said. “Right now on the Meramec campus we’re down about 959 students. You can imagine if you’ve scheduled for those students to be here that’s going to make an impact on how many classes are going to need to be reviewed.”
Langrehr said the college is always looking out for the student’s best interest.
“This year and years in the past we’ve always tried to minimize the number of students affected,” Langrehr said.
Wasson said adjustments are made to course schedules based on the budget that is made available to the campus.
“We are responsible for our own campuses. Each of the presidents and their vice presidents are working in a similar manner to manage this schedule. Everyone’s looking at this reduction,” Wasson said. “People have to understand that we have to work with the enrollment we have. We have to make those adjustments.”
Wasson said that people have to understand the fiscal responsibility that brings on these cancellations.
“You have to realize we have to pay for the instruction, the overhead, admissions, registration, financial aid… all of this is part of the system and that’s what it takes to be sustainable,” Wasson said.
As financial burdens increase the college will have to continue to be fiscally responsible Wasson added.
“We do have financial issues,” Wasson said. “This isn’t our first year, and as these things continue it becomes more and more difficult. This is cumulative. You have $4 million taken out of your budget one year, $4 million the year before, and 4 before that… these are cumulative. It’s not like you get that four back and start over.”
Wasson said when revenue is increasing STLCC can be more flexible, and when revenue is decreasing it reduces flexibility.
“The college has to be conscious of how it handles fiscal responsibility. We have to maintain this college for everyone. We have a duty to all of our students, so we try to balance that with the needs,” Wasson said.
The Magic Number
Classes that did not meet the required minimum of 15 students were considered for cancellation while classes near 15, or had ‘special’ reason to be salvaged, were saved from the cuts. ‘Special’ can mean several things, according to Langrehr.
“In normal cases, with 15 students, classes are safe from being cancelled. We’ve kept a number of classes with under 15 open,” Langrehr said. “There’s usually something special about that class; it’s within a program and a student needs it to graduate within that program and there’s not a whole lot of other choices.”
Wasson used the example of a Classic Piano II class that had fewer than 15 students to explain what can make or break a course.
“We’re looking at the programmatic issues,” Wasson said. “For example there’s a class, Classic Piano II. This class is offered under a low enrollment formula and it’s the only Classic Piano II class offered at the Meramec campus. It’s required to move onto Piano III. We have currently 33 students in Piano I; so we know we have a progression here; we know they can move through. So we save that.”
Langrehr added that 15 is not a concrete number.
“You can see it’s not a line in the sand; anybody looking at the schedule can see it’s not a line in the sand,” Langrehr said. “There are plenty [of courses] in there that are lower than 15 and there was a good reason to keep those classes. Fifteen and above, we don’t have to discuss anything. Below that we have to have a discussion.”
Wasson said that students and faculty should rest assured that the number 15 is a guideline for class sustainability at Meramec and not a definitive rule. He said that 15 is accepted as the nationwide number for class sustainability.
“When we say a number, that sounds like anything on one side of the line is good and everything on the other side of the line is bad. The number 15 is actually a number that is considered nationally of what it takes for paying students to make a class sustainable,“ Wasson said. “That’s kind of our breaking point and it’s not just here, it’s nationwide.”
The number is not a definite, but a way for administration to know which classes needed to be reviewed according to Wasson.
“What I’ve tried to say with everyone is that this is not a line drawn in the sand, so much that if classes are over 15 we know that classes are sustainable,” Wasson said. “We know that when a class is below that we need to look at it. It doesn’t mean that that class is automatically cancelled.”
Classes that are under the 15 student mark are given a chance to make the grade through a review process handled by Wasson, Langrehr and the deans.
“The dean makes the case to the vice president and then the vice president presents it to me,” Wasson said. “This is not done haphazardly. You have to be accountable for your actions and we’re accountable.”
Being accountable is a major part of the review process, Wasson added.
“I can show the chancellor and the district ‘this is why we did this and this is our justifications.’ We need to be accountable to the students and the faculty saying ‘we did review this, this is why we made the decisions we did, these are the things that were used for justification and these were the reasons the class was cancelled,’” Wasson said.
Langrehr said that if a class were to make a good case for sustainability as well as importance the class would survive the cut.
“The deans and the department chairs try to present a case for keeping a class that is less than 15. If there’s a good case to be made we kept it,” Langrehr said. “In some cases, there’s not a strong enough case to represent that it is fiscally responsible.”
Langrehr added that he felt the cancellation process was no different than any year before.
“I think that the process of scheduling the courses, the department chairs working with their deans to make adjustments in classes that aren’t filling, the deans meeting with the vice president and the rationale people use for keeping classes has operated the same from my perspective,” Langrehr said. “In some cases people feel like nothing was going to make with 15 but you’ll see with a number of courses, they have less than 15.”
The Cutoff Date
Final cuts to the Fall Semester schedule were made on Aug. 16, leaving students four to five days to get their schedules sorted out.
The Aug. 16 cutoff date was scheduled to give classes a chance to reach 15, Langrehr said.
“It’s a difficult balance… you don’t want to cut anything in haste. If it has a chance to make you want to give it every chance you can,” Langrehr said.
Wasson said there is a balance that had to be reached when deciding the cutoff date.
“There’s always a balance. The earlier you cancel the easier it is for people to move around and get other classes. For us we have to move faculty and it’s changing schedules,” Wasson said. “The earlier you do it the more time people have to adjust, the earlier you do it the less time those classes have to make.”
Wasson said that Thursday gave the college the longest amount of time to contact students while still giving the class time to fill.
“Thursday gave us the longest amount of time to let the classes make and still gave us time to contact students,” Wasson said. “That’s the tradeoff.”
If a student’s class is cancelled the college will try to make contact with them to get the student enrolled in a version of the class that was not cancelled.
“When we’re cancelling out sections we try to contact students, sometimes all we get are voicemails,” Wasson said. “Let’s say we had cancelled a macroeconomics class, we’d call you and say ‘I’m sorry to tell you but we’ve cancelled your macroeconomics class. We do have open seats in these other sections, will one of these work for your section?’ If one of those worked we have the paperwork right there and we’ll process your paperwork. You never even have to come in.”
The Faculty Dilemma
Wasson said that faculty who are below their ‘load’ for the semester would have to pick up new courses to meet the minimum course requirement to teach at Meramec.
“The basic load for a faculty member is 30 credits a year,” Wasson said. “That’s divided into two 15 credit hour semesters. So if I were teaching three-credit-hours, that would be five three credit hour classes. Some also do overload; they might do six classes or seven. If a class is cancelled that’s in my load then I need to have another class. That is usually accomplished through rescheduling. Either if there was an open section or there was an adjunct faculty member, that would be assigned to a full time because we have to make the full-time person’s load. So a part-time person may be bumped out in that situation.”
Some classes that are similar in teaching formula were combined to save classes and absorb students from courses that were cancelled according to Wasson. For instance, a Color Photography class was merged with a Digital Photography class.
Wasson said that a big part of merging classes is making sure that it works for everyone.
“You have to be very careful; it depends on how a class is taught,” Wasson said. “This is an accommodation. How can faculty work? How can administration work? How can it work for the students?”
Interim Student Governance Council President Gavin Bennet said it is hard to see professors struggling to keep their classes.
“Professors work hard, and I’d hate to see their classes get drop because of enrollment,” Bennet said.
Meyer said faculty members were ‘panicking’ to make load for the semester while students struggled to fix their schedules.
“Students were panicking. Faculty members were panicking. Faculty have to make load and it’s a serious problem if faculty can’t make load,” Meyer said. “It’s serious to them. It’s their job on the line.”
