Cuts at SUNY Potsdam Perturb Professors

   SUNY Potsdam is cutting funding for 14 academic programs within the next few years in order to decrease its yearly $9-million-deficit gap, according to University President Suzanne Smith. To the surprise of many, SUNY Potsdam’s performing arts department will be one of the first to be dissolved.   

         Smith announced in a campus-wide meeting on Sept. 19 that SUNY Potsdam will be eliminating its art history, chemistry, physics, public health and theater programs, among others. “Once monthly salaries are paid, Potsdam is already in debt, with nothing left to fund other day-to-day operations,” Smith said in an interview with North Country Public Radio. “This is clearly not sustainable.”   

         The decision to cut funding for SUNY Potsdam’s performing arts programs shocked students and faculty alike. The news came after the SUNY Potsdam administration expressed they were committed to investing in performing arts programs and after the build of the Performing Arts Center. The facility was completed in 2014 and includes a 350-seat proscenium theater, a 200-seat black box theater, and a dance performance hall, according to the SUNY Potsdam website.   

The COVID-19 pandemic negatively impacted university theater and performing arts programs nationwide, according to Jay Pecora, the Department Chair of the Theatre and Dance program at SUNY Potsdam. Pecora says that he and his colleagues are frustrated with the Potsdam administration’s decision, which was issued despite their consistent efforts to bump up enrollment in performing arts programs post-pandemic. The performing arts department was the only one in the entire School of Arts and Sciences that implemented a recruitment and retainment program, says Pecora, and still, it didn’t make the cut.   

What’s more, students enrolled in performing arts programs had to make snap decisions about their futures. Emily Gilligan, a SUNY Potsdam senior double majoring in theater and arts management, says that she’s graduating a whole year earlier just to finish out her degree with the professors she knows. “It’s created a sort of race to the finish line because I want to get my degree with the professors that I’m here for,” says Gilligan. “I’m also sad for the freshmen and sophomore students who have chosen to be here and be in this environment and now have to choose differently or choose to stay here and see what happens.”  

Gilligan is involved in several different community theater programs. She’s worked with children at the North Country Children’s Museum, the Potsdam Public Library and Little River Community School. Gilligan mentions that she’s seen the positive impacts of theater on the Potsdam-Canton area firsthand. “For communities that have less exposure to the arts, theater is more accessible,” says Gilligan. “I think theater causes compassion and empathy, and by cutting theater, people will no longer be exposed to the stories of others.”    

Faculty involved in performing arts departments at other colleges in the North Country are also concerned about the SUNY Potsdam administration’s decision. Michael Osinski, a professor in the Performance and Communication Arts department at St. Lawrence University, says that SUNY Potsdam’s choice to cut funding for performing arts programs reflects a larger trend among universities across the United States. “It worries me because if you have STEM without the arts and humanities, you’re not thinking about why we have STEM programs in the first place,” says Osinski. “I feel like the core of what it means to be a good human comes from a theater program.”   

Like Gilligan, Osinski acknowledges the significance of university theater programs for a campus, as well as the surrounding community. “Theater provides a voice for people who feel like they don’t know how else to speak, or they don’t always get that amplification,” says Osinski. Without the performing arts programs at SUNY Potsdam and other universities in the area, residents of the North Country won’t have access to live theater shows or community theater programs. “I think it’s dangerous because the North Country could become a performing arts desert,” says Osinski.  

In spite of the bad news, members of the SUNY Potsdam Theater Department are still making the most of their situation. They hosted one of their last shows, a reenactment of George Orwell’s “1984,” during the last weekend of October.