Paper Cuts: Reconstructing the Slow Death of a Language Major

The French major at Midwestern State University never got a funeral. There was no faculty vote recorded in the minutes, no announcement in the student newspaper, no candlelight vigil outside the humanities building. What it got instead was a sequence of documents — a hiring freeze memo dated March 2021, an enrollment audit circulated that October, a curriculum revision filed the following spring — each individually unremarkable. Read together, they constitute something closer to a coroner's report.

This magazine obtained the paper trail through open-records requests and interviews with nine faculty members and former students, several of whom asked not to be named because they still work in the state system. What emerges is a case study in how American universities now retire entire fields of knowledge without ever appearing to make a decision.

Death by Subtraction

The mechanics were elegant. First, the department's one tenure-line retirement was left unfilled — a "resource reallocation," in the provost's language. Then the introductory course sections were consolidated, then moved to a 6 p.m. slot, then assigned to an adjunct teaching on a one-semester contract. Enrollment, predictably, sagged. The sag was then cited as evidence of insufficient demand.

"It's a closed loop," said one senior lecturer who has since moved institutions. "You starve the program, you measure the starvation, and then you report the measurement as the diagnosis." She described the process as administratively frictionless precisely because no single act was large enough to trigger shared-governance review. Under the faculty handbook, program eliminations require a senate vote. Attrition, apparently, does not.

The final memo — four sentences long, filed in an internal portal — noted that the major would be "sunsetted effective the next catalog cycle" and thanked the department for its "flexibility." Eleven students were enrolled in the major at the time. Two were within a year of graduating.

The People Left Holding the Syllabi

The university offered those eleven students teach-out arrangements, which on paper sounds generous. In practice, the teach-out meant finishing their degrees through independent studies supervised by a single professor already carrying a four-course load. One of them, a first-generation student who had chosen the program partly for its small classes, described the final year as "doing a major through office hours."

The faculty fared worse. The two remaining lecturers — both women, both in their fifties — were placed on "reassigned duties" while their positions were quietly absorbed into a generalist humanities pool. One now teaches composition; the other left academe for a job in secondary education. Neither was laid off, a fact the administration cites whenever the case is raised. Neither has a job in her field anymore.

This is the pattern labor scholars have documented across the sector: institutions that never formally reduce staff nonetheless shed expertise through non-renewal, reassignment, and the slow erosion of anything worth staying for. The paperwork reflects no termination. The outcome is a termination in everything but the verb.

Who Decides What a Campus Keeps?

Defenders of the decision point to honest arithmetic. French enrollments were falling nationally; the state legislature had cut appropriations; every dollar spent on upper-division literature seminars is a dollar not spent on nursing or engineering. A spokesperson for the university declined to make administrators available but noted in a statement that the institution "regularly reviews its academic portfolio to serve student demand and workforce needs."

That sentence deserves scrutiny. Student demand, in the case of Midwestern State, was measured after the supply had been degraded — sections cut, advising deprioritized, the major removed from some recruitment materials before it was removed from the catalog. And "workforce needs" is a category that can accommodate anything a provost has already decided to fund.

The deeper question is procedural, not pedagogical. When a program dies through a chain of small administrative acts, no body ever weighs the trade-off on the record. No senator votes. No minutes preserve the reasoning. The decision, distributed across two dozen memos, belongs to no one — which is precisely its appeal. Accountability requires an author, and this method produces none.

A Catalog of Absences

What remains is a catalog entry marked discontinued, a faculty line that will never be refilled, and a generation of students who will assume the program never existed. The university's website now lists the French minor under "archived programs," a phrase that does quiet work: programs are not killed, they are archived, as though knowledge were a document no one consults anymore.

Other campuses should read the record closely, because the method travels. It requires no board approval, survives budget hearings unmentioned, and leaves the institutional self-image — student-centered, deliberative, transparent — fully intact. A university can lose an entire field the way a body loses heat: gradually, invisibly, and without any single moment in which anyone could say it happened.

The paper trail, at least, survives. It is the only honest obituary the French major will ever get.