Plan to close two colleges

03/31/2005

BY PAUL TOSTO
Pioneer Press

General College students feared for weeks their college wouldn’t be part of the University of Minnesota’s future. They found out Wednesday they were right.

University leaders laid out a package of changes to remake the Twin Cities campus, including closing General College and the College of Human Ecology and spreading their remaining programs and services around the university.

The plan also calls for a new Honors College to attract top students and faculty from across the country and a College of Design that would include programs now in the College of Human Ecology and College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture.

Regents are expected to review the package of academic and administrative changes in May and vote in June after campus and public hearings.

While some elements will be embraced, there’s sure to be a fight over closing General College. For more than 70 years it’s kept a door open for students with marginal high school grades or college entrance exam scores, offering an intensive focus on English, writing and math so students can transfer to other colleges.

It’s the most racially and ethnically diverse college on campus — home last fall to two-thirds of all the new black students and 40 percent of the new American Indian and Latino students. More than 70 percent of its students come from the Twin Cities metro area. University icon and Nobel Prize winner Norman Borlaug is a General College alum, as are many local business and political leaders.

Regents in 1996 rejected a proposal by then-President Nils Hasselmo to phase out General College as part of a plan to boost academic quality across the university. In a similar vein, the recommendations released Wednesday are intended to help the university reach its newest goal to become one of the top three public research institutions in the world.

President Robert Bruininks said General College would be “reinvented” as an academic support department within the College of Education and Human Development to help students across campus. While he worries about the political battle that might be ahead, he said “the biggest risk is to do nothing.”

General College will be phased out during the next two years. Students there and in the College of Human Ecology would be allowed to finish any program they are enrolled in currently.

Katherine Solheim, Human Ecology associate dean, said the school would work with the university in the restructuring. “What we know is that the work will continue, that it’ll just be in a different structure,” she said.

Bruininks and Provost Thomas Sullivan emphasized that the university was committed to diversity and access on the Twin Cities campus and that it would not diminish if General College closed. General College supporters, however, said that’s exactly what will happen.

“Our concern is that they’ll define out most of the students that we’ve been serving,” said Dan Detzner, associate dean for academic affairs at General College, which enrolls more than 1,800 students. “My sense is most of them won’t be here” if the U makes the planned changes, adding that he felt the U was “turning its back” on those students.

The academic task force said in its report that under prepared students accepted by the university should not be put in a separate college but included in degree-granting programs. General College stopped granting degrees in the 1980s.

The report also said the college hasn’t achieved enough academic success in that only 10 percent of its students graduate in four years. General College officials counter that graduation rates are a university-wide problem.

Students at General College say it’s important they have a place of their own and that the smaller classes and closer contact with their faculty and staff are crucial to their success.

“I don’t know what to say. It makes me feel heartbroken,” Khong Xiong, a General College freshman and student leader.

He and Pooja Garg, who transferred to the U’s college of education after about two years in General College, say students and alumni plan to fight to keep the college open. They are contacting alumni and planning a rally.

“This is just a proposal right now,” Garg said. “The fight is never over.”

AT A GLANCE

Major recommendations from the academic task force:

• Turn General College into an academic support department within the College of Education.

• Split up the College of Human Ecology programs to other colleges. Human Ecology now includes schools of social work, design, food science and family social science.

• Create an Honors College to attract top students and faculty from Minnesota and the nation.

• Create a College of Design that would include programs from College of Architecture, College of Human Ecology.

• New writing initiative.

• More cooperation among the four colleges covering biological sciences, agriculture, food, environmental sciences and natural resources.