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These Utah lawmakers, including some Republicans, defended liberal arts during a debate over higher ed cuts

The arguments came as legislative leaders are pushing to cut $60 million from the state’s eight public colleges and universities with a focus on efficiency and workforce placement.

A handful of state lawmakers are pushing back against budget cuts for Utah’s public universities — worried, like many faculty members, that it will lead to reducing or eliminating programs in the liberal arts.

And without those programs, one Republican senator questioned: What is the point of traditional higher education?

“We need to think seriously about what’s the difference between a university and a technical college,” said Sen. John Johnson from North Ogden, who is also an emeritus professor at Utah State University.

From his perspective, Johnson said, a university degree should be about more than just job preparation. It should be about teaching students how to think critically, be flexible and become leaders, which are skills he said are taught in the humanities and social science classroom.

“We need to get back to where we understand what it takes to build a thinking individual that is going to have a lifelong impact,” Johnson added.

It was a perhaps unexpected defense from the senator and a few other members of the Higher Education Appropriations Subcommittee — including other Republican lawmakers — during the group’s first meeting of the legislative session last week.

It comes as Utah’s legislative leaders have pushed forward with plans to cut $60 million from the state’s eight traditional public colleges and universities. That money would then be set aside for what they are calling “strategic reinvestment.”

Schools could petition for their share of the money back only after showing that it will be reallocated for high-demand and high-wage programs — and that they have been cutting “inefficient” majors, identified by a state audit for having low enrollment and little impact on the state’s workforce.

Since then, faculty in Utah have been afraid that the liberal arts will land first on the chopping block, without taking into account those studies’ other benefits that are harder to quantify.

“The rumblings I’m hearing is we’re cutting all our social sciences and arts,” said Sen. Kathleen Riebe, D-Cottonwood Heights.

Riebe, who works in K-12 education, said that would be a disaster. She said she is “disheartened” by the metrics that have been discussed to measure the success of higher education degrees — high wages, in particular — and joked about how it has left her aligning across the aisle with Johnson, a staunch conservative.

“I’m glad you’re all sitting down, because I couldn’t agree with Sen. Johnson more, and that’s not something I say frequently,” she said. “… We don’t go to universities only to make money.”

(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Sen. Kathleen Riebe, D-Cottonwood Heights, Senate Transportation, Public Utilities, Energy and Technology Committee at the Utah Capitol in Salt Lake City on Thursday, Jan. 23, 2025.

Sometimes, she said, like with her career in teaching, people go into a career as a life calling. Everyone in her family, Riebe added, has been a civil servant.

“It shouldn’t all be about the dollars and the cents,” she said. “There are a lot of jobs out there that are important to our community but don’t pay a lot.”

Geoff Landward, the commissioner of higher education for the state, said he is glad to hear that lawmakers appreciate the liberal arts. He’s been working to add in those benefits to how schools will calculate the value of their majors, which he said has been difficult to figure out.

“It’s encouraging to hear that the approach to this process is not as simple as A + B = C,” he said.

The Utah Board of Higher Education, under Landward’s direction, will be tasked with coming up with the guidelines and measurements that schools will use to determine where to make program cuts. Landward has said that decisions will not be based on one number, such as wages, but on a holistic view of how a program adds to a college and community.

For him, that importantly includes jobs that the state needs, such as teachers and social workers and therapists. It’s not just nurses and engineers, as the audit stated.

“These all provide value to the state,” Landward said. “These are critical needs, they’re strategic needs.”

Rep. Karen Peterson, R-Clinton, who is running the measures on university funding, said there are 750 programs offered in the state. And many of those, she said, are duplicative and wasting money. Others, she said, only graduate one student a year.

Peterson, who acknowledged that her degree is in liberal arts, said she sees the value in the humanities and isn’t pushing for those majors to be thrown out. But that doesn’t mean that there can’t be streamlining.

“Sometimes we want to jump and say this is about liberal arts,” she said.

Sen. Evan Vickers, R-Cedar City, though, contended that every student benefits from taking liberal arts classes. As a pharmacist, he won’t employ people who only know the science of the profession, he said.

He needs people who can think and adjust beyond that. “I have to have people who can take the profession to the next level,” he said.

Landward said a lot of that education reaches students through their required general education coursework, usually completed before taking specified classes for a degree. But colleges, the commissioner added, could do better at explaining to students the skills they should learn in those classes and how they will help them throughout their lives.

The Board of Higher Education recently cut back on the requirements for general education so that no school can mandate students take more than 30 credit hours to fulfill that. But Landward said it’s not going away.

Johnson said he is worried, though, that the focus at the state’s schools is only on the workforce and not on shaping citizens. Last session, Johnson pushed for a bill for the University of Utah to pilot a new general education program focused on western education traditions, mainly European communities, and to specifically include “the rise of Christianity”; the measure did not pass.

(Chris Samuels | The Salt Lake Tribune) Sen. John Johnson, R-Ogden, before the beginning of the legislative session at the Capitol in Salt Lake City, Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2025.

During the discussion Thursday, he mentioned the Founding Fathers of America getting that kind of education.

“I think we need to bring back the great academic traditions that we’ve had in the past,” he said. “I’m a little concerned with the focus on — did this person get a job?”

Riebe added that ideas are what connect people, talking about philosophy and art. On weekends, she said, people often don’t go tour a factory; they visit museums or geologic wonders. And those are what makes society rich.

She said: “Efficiency ratios don’t make me want to come to your university.”