Program cuts and campus consolidations were the two most contested items on the agenda as regents met to deal with the $25-million shortfall facing the system, which has around 26,000 full- and part-time students. The programs that were cut will affect nearly 700 students and save close to $4 million, according system officials.

Among the programs eliminated on Friday was the system’s only degree in sociology, as well as degrees, some undergraduate and others graduate, in creative writing, environmental studies, geography, and theater.

The board delayed action on cutting two programs: the master’s of science and the doctorate of philosophy in atmospheric science at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. Supporters of those programs say their work in climate change and Covid-19 research are especially crucial now.

Accreditation requirements call for multiyear “teachout” plans to allow students majoring in the affected programs to complete their degrees.

Critics of the program cuts, including Cachet Garrett, a graduate student in Fairbanks and the sole student regent, said there wasn’t enough evidence that they would achieve the cost savings regents were hoping for.

“Students are texting me right now that they’re feeling very upset that certain regents are trying to shut them down,” Garrett said at one point as she tried to persuade the board to vote separately, and allow discussion, on each of the more than 40 program cuts on the agenda. As a compromise, the board held separate votes on 13 of what Garrett considered the most controversial cuts, and voted on the others as a block. In the end, nearly all were eliminated.

“Do we want to be the only public-university system that does not have a sociology department, especially as we see what’s going on in the nation today?” Gloria O’Neill, a regent from Anchorage, asked. The university will retain one faculty member in sociology to allow students to take an introductory course, but the department and major will be eliminated.

The chair of the sociology department at Anchorage, Zeynep Kiliç, expressed her frustration in an email to The Chronicle shortly after “the board nailed shut our coffin.”

“Although we appreciate the difficulties our admins face, we do see a pretty large inequity at play here in terms of how the cuts are distributed across and within campuses,” she wrote.

“If I have four children and starve my one kid while fattening up the other three because I think they will become doctors or engineers and generate a lot of income for my family, I would be considered an abusive parent,” she continued. “UAA College of Arts and Sciences, and specifically the programs recommended to be discontinued with tenured faculty to be fired, are that abused child at the moment.”

Another professor in the department, Nelta M. Edwards, also questioned the board’s priorities.

“At a time when the global pandemic has laid bare the inequalities of race and class and the recent murder of George Floyd has set off a wave of rage against racial oppression endemic to this society,” she wrote, “this is not the time to delete a program that teaches students to understand these inequalities.”