A petition signed by over 200 NIU faculty was delivered to President Lisa Freeman on Monday morning.
It demands that the university allow the Master of Fine Arts Acting program to recruit its next class of students. Mark Van Wienen is the tenured & tenure track faculty union president.
“This program has a cohort of every three years," he said. "Telling them that they cannot recruit means that there will be no MFA actors on campus next fall. Effectively, the program may exist on paper or in the e-catalog, but it will not exist in point of fact of actually having students.”
Van Wienen says this was an abrupt decision made without faculty input. NIU is operating under a nearly $32 million deficit, and he says faculty are anxious.
“They've talked about multi-million-dollar structural deficits. They've professed that they are going to be transparent in dealing with this structural deficit," he said. "Transparency, though, does not extend to actually discussing potential cuts until they are simply announced, and faculty are then forced to adjust. We think of this as a kind of quiet cutting.”
As for the acting program, he says that if the deficit is the reason here, the program is very small and not very expensive anyway. The faculty union president also says this decision undercuts other programs, like scene design and theater tech, that rely on it.
Alumni from the Master of Fine Arts Acting program include ‘Sons of Anarchy’ creator Kurt Sutter and ‘Chicago Fire’ star Joe Minoso.
In statement, the Dean of the College of Visual & Performing Arts said this is part of a regularly-scheduled reaccreditation process to review and analyze the program's viability.
