TU is failing liberal arts students

True Committment’s damage to the Kendall School of Arts & Sciences has yet to be reversed.
When former TU president Gerard Clancy announced his plan to eliminate or otherwise cut down 40% of the degree programs offered at TU, he declared that this change would only affect 6% of students. That alleged 6%? Primarily students enrolled in the Kendall College of Arts & Sciences. From undergraduate programs in theater and religion to graduate programs in fine arts and anthropology, all 15 departments in Kendall College were slated to be cut and reduced to four divisions — a plurality among a total culture shift as the University of Tulsa altered its status from a liberal arts college to a STEM-focused school. For the good of its student body, TU should focus more on the humanities and liberal arts going forward.
Liberal arts are on the decline at TU. This is largely due to the True Commitment reorganization plan introduced in the spring of 2019, detailed above. In the words of Clancy, True Commitment aimed to move from “siloed departments to interdisciplinary divisions” in an attempt to reduce the costs of less popular degree programs. However, according to Robert Jackson, a tenured professor of English at TU, in a 2019 Tulsa People interview with Barry Friedman, “Invoking interdisciplinarity [was] simply an attempt to make an unpopular administrative power grab sound intellectually defensible.” Indeed, much of the student body and even professors revolted against this change. Thankfully, Clancy stepped down and Brad Carson eventually took his place as TU president, but the damage had been done — damage that liberal arts majors still feel today.
As an English major, I get a front-and-center view into the post-reorganization university we attend. One of the most damning examples of how TU fails to adequately support its humanities students is the limited turnout of our recent career fair — not limited in number of booths or companies, but limited in variety. I knew not to expect much going in, but even then I was sorely disappointed by the lack of humanities-adjacent opportunities available. Opportunities involving photography and journalism publications, legal offices, teaching programs and design studio internships were nearly entirely absent. Furthermore, the school itself suffers from its lack of liberal arts funding. For those who attend school football games, the size of our marching band is proof enough of the lack of care directed toward our fine arts. We have no school musical put on by the theater department because we have no theater department. The University of Tulsa is a liberal arts school, but we are no longer developing our liberal arts programs. Instead, we are allowing ourselves to fall victim to the influx of vocational bias: the idea that college should be direct training for a career. But in the words of Andrew Delbanco, a noted Melville scholar, “At its heart, college is — or should be — about truth-seeking,” about making “connections among seemingly disparate phenomena.” The issues of humanities opportunities in our current status quo reflect the core of this debate.
We have established that the students at TU, in some way, are negatively impacted by the reduction of attention to liberal arts. What then? Now we engage with solutions. Thankfully, President Carson has already started putting his best foot forward in supporting liberal arts, declaring in an interview with Connie Cronley for Tulsa People that he would reintroduce a “strong emphasis on liberal arts, fine arts, humanities and social sciences.” One good solution for students is looking into and participating in the International Engineering/Science and Language program, or ISL, which allows STEM majors an easy way to double major in liberal arts. Revitalizing programs for liberal arts students to meet and discuss with mentors in their chosen field is another good way for the school to support its liberal arts students. As described above, there are plenty of ways for us humanities majors to be included in such activities as the career fair. Change occurs on an institutional scale, but it starts with us. Simply by showing support for Kendall College events can go miles for supporting liberal arts themselves. We may just be 6%, but we are your classmates, your roommates, your friends. Above all, we are students at this school and demand that TU shows its commitment to us.