Cuts in Faculty, Majors Proposed in 5-Year Plan for Chapman College : Education: President’s draft also calls for elevation to university status. Plan sends shock waves through campus.

Chapman College President Allen E. Koenig has put forth a controversial, five-year proposal that would cut faculty positions by nearly 20%, hold down professors’ salaries, increase class size and reduce the number of majors available to students.

The plan also calls for the elevation of Chapman College to university status to reflect its growing graduate and professional school programs; the plan offers Charles C. Chapman University as one possible name.

Traditional liberal arts programs, such as humanities, social sciences and natural sciences, would be hit hardest by the proposed cuts. The proposed School of Humanities and Social Sciences would lose 10 of its current 23 faculty members by the 1995-96 academic year, while the School of Natural and Health Sciences would lose 11 of 24 current teaching positions.

Two of the reorganized institution’s five schools would gain teaching positions: the School of Business and Economics (from 15 to 18) and the School of Psychology and Education (13 to 15). The School of Communication Arts would lose four of its current 32 positions.

Koenig has also proposed cutting the number of majors available to students from 40 to 25--although he has not outlined which majors he would like to see cut. The proposal calls for an increase in the teacher-student ratio from 13 to 1 to 18 to 1, would decrease sabbaticals and would allow pay increases solely based on merit throughout the five-year period.

A working draft of the proposal has already sent shock waves through the small, stately campus. The faculty will discuss the proposal at an emergency meeting Thursday, and Koenig is scheduled to make a formal presentation of the plan to the entire faculty Monday.

“I see it as an all-out assault on the liberal arts,” said Mike Martin, chairman of the philosophy department. “He is essentially changing the nature of the school. It’s always been devoted equally to liberal arts and professional education. This simply turns it into a professional institution.”

Martin said he doubted that the proposal would ever be implemented as it is currently written. “This will probably meet a wall of resistance,” he said.

Karl Reitz, a mathematics and social sciences professor who sits on the faculty’s planning committee, said the proposal “is causing a lot of nervousness. . . . I’ve been here 26 years, and this is probably the best faculty we’ve ever had. It’s painful to me to see a reverse of that kind of progress.”

The proposal calls for 60% of the faculty cuts to come through retirements or resignations. But with the cuts concentrated so heavily in a few departments, faculty members wonder how Koenig’s goals can be reached without some professors being forced out.

“People coming up for tenure won’t get it, and anyone eligible for early retirement will be ushered out,” Martin said. “There will be an across-the-board erosion of our very best people. This will affect the quality of teaching we offer.”

Koenig was out of town Tuesday and unavailable for comment. But Earl Babbie, the college’s vice president for planning and research, said the proposal is simply a working draft intended “to generate conversation on campus” and will no doubt undergo change before any of its parts are implemented.

“The plan is more of an acknowledgment of what we have become than a proposal that we go off in some radical direction,” Babbie said. “It calls upon the faculty to look at some restructuring. But the president’s intention is to come out of this with a liberal arts core at the center, as well as the professional programs.”

The school’s communications, psychology and business administration programs are heavily subscribed, while liberal arts programs are not drawing similarly large numbers of students.

College provost Harry Hamilton said the proposal encompasses changes the school must make in order to hold onto its share of qualified students in a diminishing pool of applicants.

“Change is very difficult,” Hamilton said. “But we must confront economic and demographic realities.”

The school has a healthy enrollment of about 2,300 undergraduate and graduate students, but it is having to work harder to attract those students, Hamilton said.

“There are fewer 18- to 23-year-olds, but there are the same number of colleges and universities,” he said.