After RIC Gives 20 Degree Programs the Axe, Some Question What Could Have Been Done to Save Them

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The indefinite suspension of 20 degree programs and concentrations at Rhode Island College (RIC) — including Portuguese, art history, and Latin American studies — surprised some people on campus.

But the low enrollment in those programs was obvious, according to an April 16 email to the campus community by RIC President Jack Warner.

“I understand that change of this kind is often a source of trepidation,” Warner wrote. “I can’t emphasize enough that this work should be a regular part of our housekeeping processes; it only seems new and novel because it has not been done for so long.”

Warner’s email linked to a 32-page report conducted by the RIC Provost’s Productivity and Efficiency team to comply with statewide policy for academic program review. The Office of the Postsecondary Commissioner (OPC) oversees public higher ed in Rhode Island and mandates that schools review their offerings “no less frequently than every six years.”

But such an exhaustive program review is “something we have not done in many years,” Warner wrote.

Students in affected programs can complete their studies, and courses and minors in the affected topics will still be offered, Warner said. But when the new academic year starts in the fall, no new students can enroll as majors in these programs — a process known as “teach-out.” The majority of the affected RIC programs have awarded fewer than five degrees in each year since 2021. Neither Francophone studies or respiratory therapy, for instance, have awarded a baccalaureate degree since 2021.

Under statewide policy, programs that haven’t awarded at least 11 associate or bachelor’s degrees, six master’s, or four doctorates over a three-year period are subject to elimination, merging with other programs, or continued review. The RIC report recommended consolidating 15 programs and shuttering the 20 others.

Warner said the curricular spring cleaning is not expected to impact faculty positions, and that the move “was not an immediate cost-cutting measure.”

Students hold protests

Postsecondary Education Commissioner Shannon Gilkey said in an emailed statement that the program review process is “consistent with practices among colleges and universities across the U.S.”

Best practice or not, the maneuver left some RIC faculty and students flabbergasted with some claiming the process was performed less transparently than Warner suggested. Dozens of students held a “Save Our Majors” protest at the Rhode Island State House on April 24.

“Why can’t we have a say about what majors get shut down?” Hak Kay, a gender studies and film major said at the protest as quoted in RIC’s student newspaper, The Anchor.

Rhode Island College students protested at the State House on April 24 — the same day that had been slated for a celebration of RIC Day at the State House, until the event was canceled out of respect for the death of former Senate President Dominick Ruggerio on April 21.

Still, the Rhode Island Senate praised RIC in a resolution passed May 6, one led by its freshly elected President Valarie Lawson, also a RIC alum. The resolution stated RIC was “on the cutting edge of programs in cybersecurity, biotechnology, data science and artificial intelligence.”

Students and faculty at Rhode Island College have raised concerns about transparency and equity in the process that will see the discontinuation of 20 academic programs at the public college.

Vincent Bohlinger, a RIC film studies professor, said in an interview the process was inconsistent with the college’s internal policies. Bohlinger’s program survived the efficiency study for now, as did 21 other underenrolled programs included in the provost’s report but spared from discontinuation or consolidation.

All programs of study included in the report began filling out reviews in January after being identified as underenrolled, according to RIC’s website. Faculty members who needed to fill out information for their programs’ reviews had some troubles with the process, Bohlinger claimed.

“It was really like building a plane while it’s on the runway,” Bohlinger said. “The templates were changed, data was updated, they changed the deadlines, they moved them back, and then they moved it up for some people. It was really chaotic. …When the end game is actually suspending programs and reducing the options that students have for academic study and for career paths, it seems like process becomes more crucial than ever.”

Bohlinger objected to the timing of the report’s release in spring, when students are deciding which colleges to attend.

“RIC is cutting 20 programs. That’s the headline,” he said.

Dante DiGregorio, a junior majoring in political science, thought the school should redo the evaluations of low-enrolled classes and, like Bohlinger, claimed RIC did not follow either internal rules or the specifics of the OPC review policy.

“I think they should either suspend it or redo it, because they want to do this every year, and if this is how they did the first time, how will they do it the next time?” DiGregorio said. “Procedurally, it was just awful.”

DiGregorio’s comments came after an April 29 State House press conference hosted by Rep. Karen Alzate, a Pawtucket Democrat and member of the Rhode Island Black, Latino, Indigenous, Asian-American and Pacific Islander (RIBLIA) Caucus.

Alzate, a 2013 RIC graduate, took to Room 135 of the State House to decry the cuts and noted that RIC is the first federally designated Hispanic Serving Institution in Rhode Island. Evaporating programs like foreign languages doesn’t make sense, she said, especially in the current political climate.

“How are we making ourselves competitive when we’re getting rid of something that is so important right now because of what’s happening with the federal administration?” Alzate said after the presser.

Alzate couldn’t argue against the low enrollment, but she questioned if any outreach efforts were initiated to connect with potential students. “What were you doing in order to get students to come to RIC who will major in these things?” she said.

Were low-enrollment programs ignored while cybersecurity promoted?

Alzate had several allies in the audience, including Rep. June Speakman, a Warren Democrat. In a phone interview, Speakman said her solidarity with Alzate derived partially from her own experiences as a political science professor at Roger Williams University in Bristol, where the school conducted a similar program review in 2023 that identified underenrollment in programs flagged for potential phaseout. (Full disclosure: This reporter previously worked at the same university during the time of the program review.)

Smaller, private colleges like Roger Williams University are more likely to lack the resources to sustain less popular offerings in the humanities or liberal arts, especially in recent years. The post-COVID era saw enrollment patterns slide downward by 10% from 2012 to 2022 — a reduction of about two million students nationwide.

Rep. Karen Alzate, a Pawtucket Democrat and Rhode Island College alum, defends degree programs she says are vital to the college’s public and cultural mission at a press conference at the Rhode Island State House on April 29, 2025.

Humanities often bear the brunt of the cuts at state-funded colleges and universities too. 2023 data from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences showed that humanities graduates make up a small chunk of the nationwide workforce, ranging from 1.9% in Mississippi to 8.3% in Vermont. Rhode Island had 5.8% of full-time workers holding humanities degrees.

The interaction of economic constraints and student demand were not lost on Speakman, who sits on the New England Board of Higher Education. She understands how intense fiscal pressure can influence administrative decisions to cut courses. A hypothetical philosophy classroom with only three students in it, Speakman said, doesn’t satisfy the idea of healthy enrollment.

Speakman said the challenges facing the arts and humanities at the college level echo what’s happening in elementary and secondary schools.

“Those programs have been under assault in schools for years…I don’t want to sound overly mushy about it, but these disciplines — art, music, philosophy, literature — they make us fully human.”

Speakman said the General Assembly mostly gets involved in public funding to K-12 schools, but she acknowledged one area of higher ed where the state has invested significantly: cybersecurity, with RIC at its epicenter via a $73 million share of a $160.5 million bond voters approved last November.

“My concern is that these are going to become the province of the wealthy again, as they were in the middle ages, where you had wealthy people being able to study literature and art…and the rest of us…we were apprentices at the blacksmith,” Speakman said. “That’s kind of a ridiculous example, but…all of us, no matter what our paying job is, should have access to those areas of study.”

Brighter enrollment outlook for some, but not all, programs

RIC has started to reverse its enrollment decline, Warner shared in his recap of the college’s past year at a March 25 hearing before the Senate Committee on Finance. New, high-demand programs introduced since 2023, like cybersecurity, sports management and biotechnology, are seeing healthy demand, the president said.

Warner foreshadowed the forthcoming announcement of cuts after a long process in which “it was an important priority for us for any program affected to be heard.”

Higher education, Warner said, is “a mature industry, not just growing and growing and growing. So if you’re going to put new programs into place, you have to make room for those by constantly evaluating the programs that might no longer be serving in ways that they were originally intended.”

The Community College of Rhode Island (CCRI), had slightly different results when it reviewed its programs. Between 2020 and 2023, it removed from its catalog 18 mostly technology-related offerings, many of them certificate programs, in which enrollment declined or the curriculum no longer aligned with today’s job market.

But CCRI also replaced the defunct programs with new offerings, like certificates for cyber defense and graphic design, or an associate’s degree in cloud computing.

“Each change is the result of a thorough academic and industry review and reflects our continuous efforts to offer programs that lead to meaningful careers for our students,” Amy Kempe, chief of staff at CCRI, said in an email. “And, we actually came out a net positive one program!”

What programs were recommended for suspension at RIC?

The following 20 programs, some of which are concentrations offered under the umbrella of other degree programs, were marked for suspension in the Productivity and Efficiency report. Numbers from RIC show the number of people who obtained a degree from the program in 2024. In fall 2024, RIC had a total full-time enrollment of 5,420 students, both graduate and undergraduate.