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CLEVELAND, Miss. (AP) — About 80 Delta State students and faculty held a mock funeral Wednesday to mourn the loss of five undergraduate degree programs eliminated because of budget cuts.
The Clarion-Ledger reports (http://on.thec-l.com/1xqSfEK ) the mock funeral was complete with a hearse, urns, ashes and eulogies.
Athletic training, theater and communication studies, modern foreign languages, journalism and real estate/insurance will vanish as the university seeks to reduce spending by $1 million in expenses. Students who have completed upper-level courses in the majors can finish their degree.
"I'm here only because I chose journalism," said Darya Hushtyn, an exchange student from Belarus.
The Delta Statement, DSU's student newspaper, to a digital-only format, sometime in 2016. The paper currently prints every Thursday.
"The first words of mine that were ever published in a real American newspaper were in the Delta Statement," Hushtyn said. "I could actually show it to my family."
Junior music major Sarah LaBue, who transferred from Mississippi College, said her involvement with the theater department helped her build the circle of friends she's built at Delta State.
"To Delta State, I'm just a number," she said. "I'm just tuition. But to those people, I'm Sarah. It's not just a program they're cutting. They're cutting opportunities for people to communicate with each other."
President Bill LaForge, in a letter to students and faculty earlier this year, said the academic cuts would represent $447,560 of the $1 million in total savings and non-academic areas would make up the rest. Twenty-four positions will be eliminated, eight of them academic, with 14 subject to attrition.
School officials said the degree programs cut either had fewer than 20 undergraduate or 15 graduate students enrolled, had produced fewer than 10 graduates per year over the last three academic years or were responsible for less than 300 credit hours per year. The process that identified the five to be cut produced an additional 10 that will be reviewed.
"Hopefully we can get the programs back as minors so we can keep the teachers," said James Tomek, a professor of French.
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Information from: The Clarion-Ledger, http://www.clarionledger.com
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