Allocation Evaluation
A years-long examination of EWU resource distribution enters its final phase.
Like many colleges and universities, Eastern is always looking for ways to better serve its students, support its faculty, and maximize the value it provides to the wider community.
One recent initiative, a potentially transformative, two-year “strategic resource allocation” review, reached a critical phase earlier this fall.
In September, senior administrators issued their initial response to recommendations made by a Strategic Resource Allocation Task Force comprised of EWU faculty and staff members.
Those recommendations, divided into separate reports for “university services” and “academic programs,” contained the task forces’ findings on whether particular university programs and services should be expanded and invested in, maintained as currently operated, streamlined, transformed, or disinvested.
Moving forward on the recommendations will be a multi-year process, Shari McMahan, EWU’s president, has stressed, adding that she does not expect that any of the reallocations will involve faculty or staff layoffs. But some form of restructuring, she wrote in a letter to the university community, is inevitable.
On the services side, McMahan said, her leadership team “has prioritized finding ways to maximize productivity, reduce redundancies, and build a better customer service and learning environment for the campus community and visitors.”
Decisions on investment, transformation, or disinvestment of academic programs, meanwhile, will be finalized in early 2025, said Jonathan Anderson, EWU’s provost, in an earlier campus communication.
At this stage, he said, 27 programs have chosen to make program modifications, whether through curricular reorganization and/or resource reduction. Plans from those programs were completed by Nov. 1.
Additionally, Anderson wrote, “55 programs mutually agreed to consolidate or eliminate their offerings. There are currently 20 programs working through the program review and discontinuance process as outlined in academic policy. We expect the Board of Trustees to take final action on discontinuance recommendations in February 2025.”
Strategic allocation decisions are never easy, and administrators have said difficult choices will need to be made throughout the university.
But the goal, they add, is straightforward: “To ensure that our academic programs are best aligned to meet regional workforce needs, and our university services aligned in such a manner as to ensure the student experience is meaningful and campus resources are efficient and effective.”
