Penn State Altoona has recently announced cuts to math, science, political science, world languages, communications and integrative arts programs. Currently, these take the form of cuts to faculty in math, political science, Arabic, Korean, Russian, theater, and music/communications, and the closure of math, science, political science and integrative arts majors. Faculty and staff have been informed that the budget cuts will continue into next year.  

With the majority of these cuts happening within the Division of Arts and Humanities, cutting these programs simply on the basis of enrollment numbers does not take into account how they serve students, the campus community, and the Blair county area. These programs serve students—from all academic programs—directly who participate in dance, music, and productions. Integrative arts collaborates with English, the world languages, history, political science, and others to bring student work in those areas into artistic expression. Through these productions, our communities are introduced to concepts of Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion through the students themselves and the issues with which their work displays. While all these cuts (math, science, political science, foreign languages, communications and integrative arts) are devastating, the following petition focuses on those in Integrative Arts.

The impact of cutting Integrative Arts will weaken Penn State Altoona and threaten enrollment in all of its programs. Students come for a full university experience; the performing arts are a vital part of that experience. This threat will mean further enrollment decline. Such decline could force the Altoona campus into financial exigency, the step that precedes a campus’s closure. The fate of the campus is in our hands. We need Penn State University to explain why these budget cuts are now required when the public PSU financial records do not show substantial changes from previous years. We need Penn State University to respond to specific plans for these programs to maintain and even expand their enrollments, plans that have been put forward since 2017. We need the cuts to be reversed and plans for sustaining programs be undertaken. 

Cutting integrative arts, indeed, attacks one of our campus’s most vital centers of diverse student and faculty populations. It works against the very idea of interdisciplinarity, a tenet on which PSU has built its general education program. 

Your signature asks PSU to reverse these cuts and reinstate the programs at Penn State Altoona that are in the process of being closed.