Officials with the university did not put a dollar estimate on the gift, but faculty members say it approached half a million dollars. Its music education bachelor program debuted roughly the same time that Margery Dosey, Lock Haven council of trustees vice chair and a 1966 alumna, donated the pianos to the school to support music and the arts, as did her late husband, Seymour Krevsky, according to university records. Lock Haven University, in Clinton County, sits on the west branch of the Susquehanna River in the central Pennsylvania mountains, about 110 miles north of Harrisburg. “I think it is incredibly problematic that the State System administration is attempting to solve a system-wide problem on the backs of these six rural schools.” What bothers him is that the State System, he said, is creating winners and losers as it focuses on merging schools that are part of a larger problem of price, management and demographics. “The liberal arts just aren’t throw-away majors.” “Students at rural universities need a well-rounded education just like anybody else,” said Andrew Koricich, executive director of the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges and a professor at Appalachian State University in North Carolina who grew up in rural Pennsylvania. The issue at Lock Haven, though, also seems to be whether a state university system is obliged to offer the same breadth of academic choice to rural students - many first generation and not in a position to travel to nearby cities like Pittsburgh or Philadelphia to study - as students from metropolitan areas receive. Lock Haven’s enrollment, approaching 5,400 students when the program debuted, is half that now.Ĭompetition for funding by the arts, the humanities, and hard sciences and business isn’t new. Not long after the music program debuted, enrollments across the State System began falling, from a high of nearly 120,000 in 2010 to fewer than 89,000 today. Some wonder how the school got there and why faculty positions were being cut at roughly the same time the program was supposed to be growing.Ĭampus leaders, in effect, “killed the program” through departmental reductions that were “ridiculous,” said Eddie Severn, 58, who lost his job at Lock Haven as full-time music teaching positions went from seven to two. “The program is simply not viable as a major.” “It’s not a verdict on music as a field of study but rather a realization of demand, revenue and cost,” he said. Darbeau, who arrived on campus last year. Five years of enrollment data told him so. Ron Darbeau, Lock Haven provost, said it was obvious that the music program was not sustainable. Half of the much-heralded Steinways are being donated to other schools. Music education majors at Lock Haven who once numbered about two dozen by some estimates are now at zero. California, Clarion and Edinboro also are being merged in the west. The bachelor of music education, created little more than a decade ago, has been eliminated as Lock Haven merges with Bloomsburg and Mansfield universities, two other system schools facing hard times. ![]() To some faculty, students and others, it not only was a campus miscalculation amid a revolving door of university presidents, but more broadly, a State System failure to properly quarterback a big decision made by a member school. It spoke to confidence there and across the State System of Higher Education, where enrollments were rising and campuses were putting up buildings as if unaware an enrollment bubble was about to burst. A donation of 22 pianos, and the sought-after all-Steinway designation that followed, coincided with a new bachelor degree in music education.
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