Cutting Physics Programs

Nature News:

Texas higher-education officials delivered a stern message to physicists yesterday that the state is likely to stick to plans to phase out 'low-performing' physics programs within the next year or two if they cannot demonstrate compelling plans to improve.

Members of the American Physical Society requested yesterday's meeting with the state's Higher Education Coordinating Board (HECB) after announcements in recent weeks that nearly half of the 24 undergraduate physics programs at state funded universities could be on the chopping block if they fail to graduate at least 25 students every 5 years. . . .

Texas is not singling out physics, but trying to phase out all programs that don't have a sufficient number of students. Some physics professors say the small programs play an important role despite the numbers:

Statistics provided to Nature by the American Institute of Physics suggest that some 35% of the undergraduate physics degrees awarded in the United States go to students in programs that would not meet the Texas board's requirements for staying open.

But small schools in far-flung places are important to ensure diversity in science, says Lawrence Norris, managing director of the National Society of Black Physicists in Arlington, Virginia. "It's a mistake to paint every low-performing program with the same brush," Norris says.

Robert Thorne, a physicist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who has redesigned the university's introductory physics courses to increase their appeal to students, says that it is logical to consider closing some smaller physics degree programs. Faculty members could then refocus their efforts on teaching introductory physics and encouraging students to transfer to larger programs for advanced physics courses, he says. But he agrees that student diversity could suffer with the Texas approach.

I find it interesting that these American initiatives give no special status to science. Very different from Britain, which is trying to close humanities programs no matter how many students they have and force more students to study science.