Recent legislation by the Trump administration has sparked conversation across the nation as college funding is being threatened at the federal level. Recently, CWU President Jim Wohlpart released a series of emails detailing CWU’s response to this new legislation, as well as separate emails covering staffing, policing, future CWU plans and more.
The Observer sat down with Wohlpart to discuss these recent emails and how CWU plans on handling new federal policies. The following is a Q&A, which was conducted in person on March 7.
Q&A edited for length and clarity.
Q: Federal funding is being threatened due to new legislation by the Trump administration. How do you see CWU responding to this new legislation, and where do you see CWU aligning itself on these more polarizing issues?
A: We get $17 million a year in Pell Grant funding; that’s 43% of our students. We receive $42 million a year in federal loans; that’s probably about 60% or 70% of our students. We have TRIO programs that receive $1.6 million a year. We hire about 30 staff, many of them students, to run those programs, and then we have all of our contracts and grants … That is what’s at stake. I’m very cognizant of the fact that if there was any pause or loss of those federal funds, half of our students would disappear and we would probably not be here. It’s huge.
So how are we responding to that? We’re being very thoughtful. We meet on a regular basis with people in the Attorney General’s Office. We meet very regularly across the six institutions. In fact, I had a meeting this morning with the other five presidents; we all talked about what we’re working on and what we’re doing. What we have been doing is in compliance with federal and state law. We don’t exclude people, we don’t segregate people, we don’t stereotype people, all of which is listed in the Dear Colleague letter, so we feel confident that the path we have gone down is one that fits with federal and state law.
Nevertheless, what’s in the Dear Colleague letter and the FAQ that came out afterward is taking a certain interpretation of federal law and court cases that is different from what has happened in the past. So we are being very thoughtful in gathering people together to think deeply about all that stuff and have a conversation about what changes we might make. Nothing’s been determined yet, but we will have those conversations.
Q: If a conversation is to take place about how to handle these new policies, have there been talks about when and how, and will there be a place for, just broadly, student voices?
A: We are in conversation now at the executive leadership team about when and how. We always include our shared governance groups, so we would reach out to Malik, who’s the president of ASCWU, and ask him to be a part of that conversation or have him appoint somebody.
For instance, if we decided to change our vision statement, we always get feedback from the campus community. The board is the one who approves that. So yes, there is always opportunity for faculty, staff and students to be involved.
Q: In reference to the evolution of the vision, mission, values and strategic plan, you stated that “the pace of the evolution may be increased based on what occurs this week at a federal level.” With the week wrapping up, have there been any changes on what this evolution now looks like? Has the timeline advanced?
A: Through the Dear Colleague letter, there is a website now set up for anyone to go in and launch a civil rights complaint. We didn’t know how fast that stuff would happen and how fast the Office of Civil Rights might come to do an investigation on campus. We didn’t know who they’d target first and how that would happen. The only institution that I have seen this week that has been targeted is Columbia, and their federal funding has been threatened. $5 billion that is not around DEI but around student protests. So that was the focus of that federal funding. I have not heard of anything else that has happened … Not much has happened, that doesn’t mean it won’t. It could pick up at any point.
Q: The fall to winter retention rate just increased from 91% to 93%, the highest it has been since COVID. What were some of the changes made on the institutional level that helped this change come to fruition? What changes can we expect to keep it going forward?
A: A whole host of things. More attention [was] paid by our resident assistants in each of their halls, more touch points with students, more intentional work done with students as they come up to the registration deadline to make sure that they know that the registration deadline is. More attention [is] paid by the advisors as they’re reaching out and making certain students have the information they need to get registered. More scrutiny on holds that students have. Why do they have holds? Do those holds need to be there? Can we take those holds down so that they can get registered? A change in what happens in our classrooms, our faculty are taking attendance and using a new software we have called Civitas, so if a student is gone for a period of time or struggling, they can send a message to advisors, who can reach out to them and find out what’s going on.
We changed how we bill residence halls and dining. We used to front load that bill in the fall quarter because if a student decides then to leave, we can’t refill that room necessarily. And so we lost revenue. That’s why it was front-loaded. I think it was 40% of that total bill that was due in the fall. The problem is that financial aid is spread out evenly over each quarter, and so if you don’t get financial aid, you may not be able to pay that full bill. So we now spread it out evenly.
Q: Enrollment has been a challenge since COVID. Are there any plans to increase enrollment, and if so, how will that impact funding in the future?
A: One thing that impacts enrollment is your retention rate. The more students you keep, the more students you have, the more students you lose, the lower your enrollment is. In the state of Washington, since the pandemic, students simply haven’t come back. I think our high was about 63% of students in high school going on to post-secondary enrollment; that dropped down to 51% during COVID. It’s since ticked up to about 52%. So that’s not unique to us. We have had a larger freshman class every year since I’ve been here; we also had really big freshman classes before I got here, and those freshman classes have now all graduated, so we think that we’ve hit the bottom, and we’ll start going up in terms of our overall.
Q: With Bob Ferguson recently coming to campus, we were wondering if he has announced any potential changes to funding from the state level that we can expect to see impacting Central. If so, how is Central going to adapt to those changes?
A: He has suggested a 3% cut to higher education. The house will put out the first budget, he’s not actually putting out a budget. He’s just talking about ways to fix the state-level deficit. So the House will put out the first budget, and then the House and the Senate and the Governor will negotiate where that goes, what that looks like. The house is leaning very heavily towards revenue generation, increased taxes. The governor’s leading towards cuts. I’m sure they’ll meet someplace in the middle. That will impact us in some way, we will probably have a reduction, like most state agencies. But we are prepared for that because of the hard work we have done over the last four years in living into the state budgets that we’ve been given. We are going through an exercise now to rethink, restructure, reimagine many of the things that we do here at Central and as we do that work, we will be prepared for whatever it is that happens in terms of the state budget.
Q: Recently, the Community Policing Task Force released its final report about policing at Central, stating that while the cops on campus are reported as approachable, there were concerns both about cultural competence and racial profiling. Have there been any talks yet about addressing these concerns?
A: Our public safety officers are always going through training, including cultural competence training, so they will continue to do that work and find ways to continue to build bridges with the campus. They do fantastic work, and they will continue to do fantastic work, and that is their training.
Q: Recently, the current Vice President of Student Engagement and Success announced their departure from the role, following in line with another couple of staff positions that were also vacated or moved on from. And since COVID, staffing at CWU has faced pretty consistent restructuring. How has CWU been handling staffing changes? Has there been pushback about these changes from the staff level? If there has, has CWU talked about or rethought how they’re going to continue handling these changes?
A: That’s part of that restructure, rethink, reimagine, and that is something that we’re asking everyone across campus to do. We recognize we’re down 130 full-time employees, and that’s a lot of employees. That’s 14% of our workforce, and that’s largely because of the drop in enrollment and tuition dollars and the reduction in state funding. This isn’t something that we wanted to do; it was living into our budget, and that restructure, reimagine, rethink, is a challenge for us. We’re trying to find ways to do that work across the board with everyone, and there are exercises going on to do that work. I sympathize with the drop in the number of our employees and the work that still has to get done.
Q: Is there anything else you want to add?
A: This is a time of transition for Central, and a tough time because we grew our enrollment over a 20 year period. We slowly, methodically added programs, added faculty, added staff, and lost all of that in four years. That transition is a hard one to live into, and we’re still trying to figure out what that looks like and what that feels like. So that’s hard on everyone, and I want to acknowledge the challenge that this is for everyone across campus. Somehow, we have to figure out how to make reductions across the board, including administration, and we’re looking at that in serious ways. But I think our future is bright. I don’t know if you all saw the headline for Western Washington yesterday; they have an $18 million budget deficit and are laying off 70 people. That’s not where we are, we’re not doing that. We’re not laying people off. So, we’re in a better place than other institutions as a result of our hard work.
