The students marched in just as the words “Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies” left the lips of Eastern Washington University’s (EWU) faculty government president Ginelle Hustrulid. They stood along the walls behind faculty senators seated at tables, holding signs inscribed with quotes from Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies (GWSS) graduates. Hustrulid was about to call for an advisory vote on the fate of the Bachelor of Arts in GWSS degree, which may land on the chopping block of the EWU Board of Trustees this summer.
“I was able to learn more about myself and my place in the world, about the good I can do in it, than I ever would have without Gender Studies,” one sign said.
It was May 11, during the regular faculty government meeting, and GWSS Interim Director Jessi Willis took the mic.
“Yesterday was Mother's Day,” Willis told the group gathered in a Tawanka Hall conference room. “However you spent the day, it's true for all of us that we come to this planet through the body of a woman.”
To a faculty government that was about to consider a proposal to axe the GWSS degree from the university — one of nine programs Provost Lorenzo Smith had proposed to cut — Willis narrated a history of hard-won victories for women through the history of the United States and at EWU.
“The first women’s studies courses at EWU were taught in 1974,” she said. That year “was also the first time women could apply for a line of credit without the permission of her father or husband.”
Willis noted that the Trump administration is trying to erode those rights. Part of that effort: sidelining or getting rid of any programs that emphasize women’s studies — a central mission of GWSS.
A few seats to Willis’s left sat Smith, the provost who came to EWU in June of last year — a couple of years into the university’s new branding as a “polytechnic” institution, meaning one that emphasizes hands-on education rather than theory as its core mission. He took his own mic to respond to Willis’s remarks:
“ I recognize the value in the GWSS curriculum,” he said. “ I, in fact, met with some students last fall after the Board of Trustees meeting … and I said, ‘Please come to my office. I want to hear from you.’ They never followed up, OK? It was an opportunity for me to get that qualitative assessment, hear from them. And so I encourage students, please, yes, there's great value in what you're doing right here, raising visibility. But please reach out also to people like me so I can hear from you directly, and we can have that exchange. So again, qualitative assessment on top of numbers is not — it, it's critical, it is essential.”
Smith and a program review committee at the university are talking about cutting the nine degree programs because they have graduated fewer than 10 students on average per year for the past half-decade. Those programs: the Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies; the Master of Science in Applied Math; the Bachelor of Science in Data Science; the Bachelor of Arts in English as a Second Language; the Bachelor of Arts in GWSS; the Bachelor of Arts in International Affairs; the Bachelor of Arts in Urban and Regional Planning; the Bachelor of Arts in Early Childhood & Special Education; and the Bachelor of Science in Applied Technology.
The faculty government was gathered in Tawanka that day to give advisory votes on those cuts. The professors recommended cutting both master’s degree programs. They tabled discussion on Data Science, English as a Second Language and GWSS. (Those cuts had been contested by senators, and the GWSS cut had been challenged by the Undergraduate Affairs Council.) They recommended that everything else should not be cut.
But two senators questioned the idea of cutting GWSS. First, Dale Garraway, a professor of mathematics, pointed out universities have a responsibility to preserve diversity programming at a time when marginalized communities are under attack in the US.
“Maybe it's time to just take a small stand and say, ‘No, we're gonna protect this’ — not because it's a big money winner, and I would argue it's probably not a big money loser, but because it's the right thing to do in the situation we're living in,” Garraway said. “We need to push back against what's happening in this country.”
Some degree programs at EWU, like biology and general education, graduated more than 100 students in recent years, but Martin Garcia, a professor of Chicanx studies, suggested the number 10 was arbitrary.
“I heard Provost Smith talk about numbers,” Garcia said, “and I was surprised when we asked: ‘Tell us a little bit about why that number?’ There didn't seem to be a logical explanation other than, ‘Well, it was just a number.’”
In an interview after the meeting, Smith addressed this criticism, saying every university has to grapple with programs that don’t graduate a lot of students.
“Even at a 35,000-student university, if there's a degree program that has one graduate per year, you kind of have to ask some questions,” he said, noting that he derived the 10 graduate figure from a program in the University of Texas system and that nothing is finalized. “This is not a new concept at all. It is a conversation starter. … It absolutely demands additional qualitative assessment, which is not unlike what you heard here. At some point, I'm gonna reflect upon everything that I've heard very carefully and make a recommendation to the president.”
Annette Carpenter, a GWSS major who protested on May 11, told RANGE they chose EWU because it had one of the strongest arrays of diversity-oriented programs they could find in the American West.
“I think the school would struggle less if they highlighted those programs and instead made it a selling point,” said Carpenter, who will graduate this year and is accepted to the master’s degree program in social work at EWU.
Actually, EWU is not struggling that hard financially, Smith said. The proposed cuts are about priorities and resource allocation.
“We have resources,” he told RANGE after the faculty government meeting. ”They are limited. We have to make the most of them for the taxpayers, right? We are serving the taxpayers, and so we take our resources and make the most of them and put them in areas that are in demand.”
The faculty’s advice now falls in the lap of Smith, who, based on that recommendation and other criteria, will tell the university president and the governing Board of Trustees what he thinks should be invested in and what he thinks should be cut. The BOT, which “directs the university’s implementation of initiatives and programs and controls the university’s property and facilities” and hires and fires the president, according to its website, will make a final decision at its June 25 meeting.
But students, alumni and supporters of the GWSS degree aren’t waiting for that meeting — which will take place during the summer when most students are not in classes and many are out of town — to make their opinions known to the BOT. On May 15, they will again protest at a meeting, this one the BOT’s May gathering. Starting at noon, just before the board opens the floor to public comment at 1 pm, students, organized by the student club Scary Feminists will rally outside of Tawanka, where the board will meet, for a “Show Out.”
Demonstrators at the faculty government meeting handed out flyers advertising this future demonstration. They are also distributing a petition to keep the GWSS degree, which is currently signed by nearly 600 people and organizations.
In 2024, EWU rebranded itself “The Region’s Polytechnic,” a label that emphasizes hands-on learning programs rather than theory. Many faculty worried this would hurt the humanities programs at EWU. In the lead up to that decision, faculty evaluated all programs at the school and recommended many for cuts. GWSS professor and former GWSS Director Judy Rohrer wrote an op-ed in RANGE in July 2024 outlining a pattern at the university of cutting off resources to programs that help queer programming and noting the abrupt 2023 firing of Vanessa Delgado, who’s led the school’s Student Equity And Inclusion Services.
Another signal program in that discussion was the football program, which faculty suggested should be moved to a less expensive conference. That seemed to be a nonstarter for the BOT, which kept football where it was even as it axed or downsized other academic programs.
Some faculty have also pointed out that EWU President Shari McMahan was awarded a 13% raise in 2025, bringing her salary to nearly half a million dollars, at $485,467. This is a much larger salary than most public university presidents in the US, the average of which is $369,121, and some feel it reflects a lapse in priorities as cuts are being proposed for academic programs.
Asked about this, EWU spokesperson Linn Parish sent the following statement to RANGE via email.
“The program discontinuance process is in place to ensure Eastern Washington University’s offerings and resources align with student demand,” Parish wrote. “The process isn’t unique to EWU, nor is it exclusive to this academic year. Put another way, the process isn’t in place to address specific budgetary needs or challenges. In that context, the decisions made through the process aren’t related to compensation decisions for EWU employees. President McMahan received an increase in salary about a year ago to align her compensation with that of her male counterparts at the other two regional universities in Washington state, Central Washington University and Western Washington University. This is precisely the type of equity decision that those who advocate for gender studies have championed for all women.”
For his part, Garcia, the senator who questioned the metric of 10 graduates, pointed out that the university was thinking about deemphasizing programs that support women, gender and diverse sexualities at a time when both EWU and the faculty government are led by women.
“I just think it's kind of ironic that we may decide on the elimination of women and gender studies when we have women in leadership positions,” Garcia said. “I hope the women’s and gender studies major continues.”
Editor's note: We updated this story to reflect the correct spelling of Jessi Willis, the Interim Director of the Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies program. And we added a link to a petition to keep the degree program.
