SPOKANE — Faced with a drop in enrollment and a budget crisis, it was clear when President Shari McMahan was hired she had to get creative to get things at Eastern Washington University back on track.
One of her solutions went from an idea to a solid plan this week with an email to faculty and staff in which McMahan announced the university would start branding itself as “the region’s polytechnic.”
Traditionally, a polytechnical institution focuses on STEM — science, technology, engineering and math.
But EWU officials see the concept differently. The move will be largely a rebrand rather than changing academic programs, with a new definition of polytechnic as “applied learning in high demand fields,” McMahan said.
The main programing change, McMahan said, will be a renewed focus on hands-on learning over theoretical discussions. She plans to ask the Washington state Legislature for funds to create a new office at the university to coordinate and expand the existing applied learning opportunities at the school.
The move has drawn criticism from faculty and students, who say the new branding will be confusing and could turn away students in the arts or those who struggle in math and science.
“I don’t know how we explain to students that we’re calling Eastern a polytechnic but it’s not a polytechnic, it’s experiential learning,” said Larry Cebula, a history professor at the university.
Recent EWU music graduate Whitney Bertholic, 21, said she initially thought, “What the heck is a polytechnic university?” when she heard about the new branding direction.
Having changed colleges three times before landing at Eastern, Bertholic has concerns that the rebrand will prevent prospective humanities students from giving Eastern a shot.
“I’m a little concerned about how it’s going to affect enrollment, specifically for the music and arts departments,” said Bertholic, whose music focus is vocal performance. “Polytechnic, it means more hands-on. People don’t often think music as being more hands on, and they tend to think towards STEM and sciences.”
Though she expressed support for the sciences, Bertholic said she is worried about the music community disappearing from Eastern.
“They have such a great community and such incredible professors and students who care so passionately about what they’re doing,” Bertholic said. “And to see that not being supported properly because of a lack of enrollment — it really hurts, because I know that it can be so much more than what it already is.”
Budget woes and repositioning
EWU’s budget woes pre-date McMahan and the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2019, the university and then-president Mary Cullinan drew criticism for raising money to pay for a new football stadium as it made campus wide academic cuts.
A year later, the faculty senate held a vote of no-confidence in Cullinan over her handling of the financial crisis. EWU’s Board of Trustees continued to back Cullinan, however, saying the crisis was aggravated by the pandemic.
Two months later in August 2020, Cullinan resigned.
After two years of being led by an interim president, McMahan was hired in 2022. She quickly pointed to increasing enrollment as one of her top goals.
The first way to do that, she said in her first week at the university, was to highlight EWU’s unique programs that set it apart from peer universities.
The polytechnic rebranding is the way McMahan plans to do that after two years on the job.
The focus on experiential or applied learning is an untapped market, McMahan said, especially combined with the general education foundation Eastern offers above and beyond the average community college, while remaining affordable.
“Because Eastern is known for its affordability and access, we want to continue to promote that, because there’s nowhere else in a four-year, six-year degree … are they going to find this competitive pricing,” she said.
She hopes to expand the existing applied learning opportunities like the dental clinic where dental hygiene students work on real people or how cybersecurity students provide services to small businesses, she said.
Funding from the state would help create an office to coordinate those efforts. She also plans to raise money from local philanthropists and reach out to the business community to provide funds for stipends or placements for interns who are paid to make experiential learning opportunities financially viable for the majority of EWU’s students, who work while taking classes.
McMahan agrees that many students don’t know what “polytechnic” means, which she posits makes it a great time to redefine the term.
“That’s what we see in the surveys with prospective students and parents, that they don’t really know what it is,” McMahan said. “So we have a really good opportunity to define it.”
At this point, EWU isn’t planning to change its name or significantly alter its educational program offerings, she added.
EWU professor of sociology Pui-Yan Lam said she is worried that the term “polytechnic” may scare off students not interested in the sciences.
“I just worry that when some students hear ‘Eastern is a polytechnic,’ then they would jump to the conclusion that ‘Then, it is not for me,’ “ Lam said.
Lam, who has taught at EWU for more than 20 years and is a former president of the faculty organization, also said that some faculty members have expressed confusion over the reasoning for the brand shift at all.
“We have a strong identity,” Lam said. “This identity is about Eastern being accessible, and we serve all kinds of students, and we give students opportunities through the education that they get from Eastern.”
EWU student and student body government member Johnny Curtis said he is concerned the rebranding will “put Eastern in a box.”
“I think that it could bring in new students potentially that are interested in that sort of experience,” Curtis said. “But I think it would also turn away, or draw away, other students who are looking for more of a broad university experience.”
Curtis said the rebrand could hurt the perceived diversity of EWU.
“My major is vocal performance and music education, and I really just have a hard time seeing how that fits in a polytechnic institute or university,” he said.
Travis Masingale, professor of design and member of the group that came up with the polytechnic identity pitch, is optimistic about the identity shift, calling it a “bold idea to move forward in the face of enrollment drop-off.”
Masingale said EWU will never lose its liberal arts core, and that taking on the identity of polytechnic will help to differentiate the college from Central Washington University and Western Washington University — the other two regional comprehensive universities.
Curtis says he doesn’t “think just adding a simple name to our marketing is gonna make the changes we want to see to bring enrollment back up.”
Separate from the rebrand, EWU went through a yearlong process to evaluate its programs, in which two committees ranked everything the school had to offer into categories: Invest, maintain, streamline, transform or divest, the Inlander reported.
Implementing those rankings and eliminating repetitive services is an ongoing process, McMahan said.
For more than five years, Eastern faculty has called on the school to save money by cutting athletic programs or going down a division. One of the loudest voices asking for a reduction in athletics over academics has been Cebula.
He pointed to the Board of Trustees’ continued decisions that put athletics over everything else as the main problem at Eastern.
“Eastern is at a crossroads, and it’s a perilous time for basically all of higher education,” Cebula said. “Eastern has an additional constraint, and that’s that we have a Board of Trustees that is absolutely adamant on Division 1 athletics, no matter the cost.”
That push constrains what McMahan can do for academics, which he said led to an ill-considered polytechnic plan.
“The board is going to be the ruin of Eastern Washington University,” he said. “It is a preposterous idea to call ourselves a polytechnic but not be a polytechnic.”
The plan did not go through the strategic planning process, he added, where the faculty senate is heavily involved but instead was handled through a separate entity, the EWU Identity & Marketing Workgroup.
“It was a runaround proper procedure,” he said.
Cebula is supportive of expanding applied learning and getting more funding to do so but said the university could do that without the confusion of the word “polytechnic.”
Lam shared a similar sentiment and questioned the rapid commitment to a rebrand.
“I think it might be very premature to just zero in on one option when there might be, you know, several options to get to what we want to achieve,” Lam said.
