So much for One K-State

By Daniel A. Hoyt

On September 18, Kansas State University President Richard Linton gave his state of the university speech at McCain Auditorium, our campus performance space. He strolled across the stage with a wireless mic. He danced a little. He's a skilled public speaker, plainspoken, lively and engaging. He's good at this stuff, the public-facing work. He has posed for hundreds of photos, maybe thousands, while making the W-C hand gesture that represents the Wildcats—his fingers must curl into this shape instinctively whenever he smiles. During his speech, with just the slightest nod to budget difficulties, Linton celebrated the future of K-State and his ongoing plan for the "next-generation land-grant university."

Oddly enough, he did not mention the College of Arts and Sciences. It's almost as if we did not exist, and with the exception of the physics faculty members who work with Kansas State's nuclear reactor, maybe he wishes we didn't.

A week earlier, members of this college (I am one of them; my department, English, has been part of Kansas State University since its founding, since 1863), gathered in person and via Zoom to hear Provost Jesse Perez Mendez announce that the college "owes" central administration $13.5 million and that the debt is now due.

That news, which had been foreshadowed for months, albeit with emphasis on the shadows part, was devastating. There's a $2.5 million gap, according to administration, between what the college's budget is or should be and what the college is currently due to pay out, mainly in salaries. Somehow a college that in the academic year of 2025 taught 40.53 percent of the credit hours across the entire university is not profitable enough or useful enough anymore. It's not even clear how this budget gap is being tabulated—the numbers provided by administration are neither lucid nor complete. Moreover, the budget models overseen by administration appear designed to diminish the college, the place where students might learn about sociology or anthropology, where they might write a poem, where they might learn about gender or other scary topics, you know, like diversity, even if we’re no longer “allowed” to use that word.

The college is going to be rearranged and disabled. Programs will close, and, even more exciting, faculty will get the opportunity to review the programs of other departments! We will get the chance to fight with each other in the academic Hunger Games for the survival of our jobs, for our non-tenure-track colleagues, for our staff members (who are already multitasking across departments), for our graduate programs, for the Classics, for teaching loads that allow us time to do research and creative activity.

It is my hope and belief that the departments will not compete, and I am not alone. Apparently, the college's department heads are already collaborating, trying to figure out if some form of equalized budget cuts can somehow close the gap.

Whether or not these program reviews are arranged to make departments compete, the work being asked of us is real and substantial. We are being asked to plan our own diminishment. Over the last year, the administration and the Kansas Board of Regents' mandated service duties for faculty have multiplied at an unsustainable rate. This year, across the university, we have a new system for post-tenure review, and each review requires a committee of five faculty members. Our syllabi must be loaded into CourseDog. We must update our pages on Wildcat Scholar. We are being asked to do more and more and, way too often, to do it quickly. Our time is finite. The tasks multiply, and even finding the basic resources to do our work of shared governance has become harder.

When I set out to launch this blog in my role as the president of the Kansas State University chapter of the AAUP, I had hoped to be able to do actual reporting, but instead, I find myself writing commentary. The provost declined my interview requests over the summer. We are not quite a news desert, not yet, but only the student-run K-State Collegian has thus far produced a written story on the Arts and Sciences budget crisis. (With thanks to Collegian news editor Amylee Gil: kstatecollegian.com/2026/09/16/college-of-arts-and-sciences-to-face-future-budget-cuts/)

Do the K-State Arts and Sciences alums across the nation even know that the programs that helped form them into better, smarter, more knowledgeable human beings might disappear?

The situation is so precarious and dispiriting that Provost Mendez brought in a hired gun, a temporary dean who will handle the dismantling, because no serious regular candidate would want to come in and do this job.

How can these two major announcements/speeches co-exist? How are we supposed to celebrate the next-generation land-grant mission, when a key component of the original land-grant mission, the liberal arts and sciences, is being diminished?

Much of the next-gen K-State plan is worthwhile and necessary. The Kansas Water Institute, for example, might ensure the survival of Kansas farms before we pump the Ogalalla Aquifer dry. But as the web site of The Association of Public & Land-Grant Universities, puts it, “The original mission of these institutions, as set forth in the first Morrill Act, was to teach agriculture, military tactics, and the mechanic arts as well as classical studies so members of the working classes could obtain a liberal, practical education.” The liberal arts are not anathema to the idea of a land-grant mission—they were and should remain a key component of it.

So much of K-State’s next-gen plan is being driven by the needs of industry, not necessarily the needs of students, and there's a self-fulfilling prophecy at work. Students see the shiny new buildings of the favored programs, and of course they are drawn there.

The arguments, of course, are almost always for industry, for the future workforce. But we don't even know what jobs will look like in five years or 10, especially if AI takes over the way tech bros want it to take over. Five years ago, students in computer science were aiming to code. Now the comp-sci students in my Video Games as Literature class expect to work in IT. We do not know the extent of what the future demands, except we do know that it will need thinkers and deep, careful readers and people who understand ethics, which, oddly enough, is what a College of Arts and Sciences is designed to produce.

In March, when President Linton came to present a 2026 Commerce Bank and W.T. Kemper Foundation teaching award to one of my colleagues, it was unusual circumstances. My colleague lives out of state and teaches solely online, so the usual classroom drop-in ceremony was impossible. Instead, President Linton came to one of our on-campus department meetings, along with the former dean of the College of Art and Sciences (now a dean at South Carolina), and an executive from Commerce Bank who held fast to one of those oversized checks. Most of us didn't know this contingent was coming—I didn't at least. When Linton walked in the door—the group brought celebratory balloons too—he took a look around the room at the few dozens of us.

"Who are all these people?" he asked.

It was an offhand comment.

It was maybe a joke.

It certainly doesn't seem like one now.

Dr. Daniel A. Hoyt is current president of Kansas State University's chapter of the American Association of University Professors. This commentary is his alone.

Slides from two very different recent K-State presentations.