Zach Burke, vehicle design major, stands in front of an award-winning Western-designed car. Ella Banken//AS Review
By Soleil de Zwart
At an engineering and design department meeting on Wednesday, Nov. 14, the faculty voted the Industrial Technology-Vehicle Design program into moratorium.
At the next Academic Coordinating Commission meeting on Dec. 4, the commission will vote on if the moratorium will go into effect this academic year, or next year.
If it goes into effect this year, a new class of students will not be accepted into the program. If it goes into effect next year, the pre-majors will be accepted into the program and will be allowed to graduate from the program, according to Brad Johnson, dean of the college of science and engineering.
A moratorium bans any new students from applying to the major. The majors currently in the program are still able to graduate, but any pre-majors are not.
To get the program out of moratorium, the department would need to receive long term funding from the state and expand the available courses and faculty within the program, according to Eric Leonhardt, director of the Vehicle Research Institute and the program’s only professor.
Currently, the program is an unaccredited degree, meaning it has not met the academic standards of the Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology.
Jeff Newcomer, chair of the engineering and design department and the University Planning and Resources Council, said, accredited degrees in the engineering field are not only an advantage, but most often a requirement. An unaccredited degree puts the graduates at a disadvantage and in most cases, will come back to haunt them.
“The belief is the degree is underserving the students who get it and the disparity is growing between it and other programs,” Newcomer said. “And therefore, it’s inappropriate to continue to offer a degree that we know does not provide the same career opportunities as our other degrees.”
Some students in the program disagree. Weston Renda, left the program due to issues with the moratorium.
“I can’t say that [the program] was underserving me because honestly, I was still getting good internships and getting really good industry connections,” Renda said. “And honestly, now that I’m in an accredited program, I haven’t really seen an increase in class quality.”
Mitch Hooper, current senior in the program, did not think the program was underserving them.
“It seems kind of silly that at a college level institution, they’re making these decisions about students futures without ever consulting the students about how it might affect their future,” Hooper said.
What was the process?
The vehicle design program was first voted into moratorium in spring 2018, but the Academic Coordinating Commission, which oversees curriculum matters and ensures academic standards are met, believed the vote was rushed and requested a revote, according to Eckman.
The idea to place the program into moratorium came up in a discussion of what the engineering department was willing to change within the program, Newcomer said.
“What we ended up with was starting a movement that the program as it was wasn’t ethical to continue, because it’s underserving the students,” Newcomer said.
Leonhardt was not present at the meeting where the moratorium was discussed. Therefore, another meeting was scheduled where Leonhardt could be present for the vote, according to Newcomer.
The initial departmental vote to place the program into moratorium was eight in-favor, four against and three abstaining, according to Juliet Knowles, AS board assistant for academic shared governance.
“[The] Academic Coordinating Commission wasn’t even made aware of [the moratorium] until October. Which again is a huge kind of red flag,” Levi Eckman, AS VP for academic affairs, said.
The commission had a meeting with students in the program, faculty and people in the industry to review the process of the moratorium, according to Knowles.
Newcomer sent an email to the declared majors in the program on May 30 to notify them after the faculty voted on the moratorium.
“This email caused a serious panic amount the IT-VD students since there was no warning prior to this,” Renda said in an email.
On Nov. 6, students from the program met with Eckman and Knowles.
At the meeting, Eckman and Knowles surveyed the students about who was in the major or pre-major, how they were made aware of the moratorium, if they ever felt intimidated to switch majors and if the proposed moratorium changed their estimated graduation date, according to Eckman.
Many students said they were encouraged to switch out of the major.
Renda changed from the IT-VD major to plastics and composites engineering because of the uncertainty surrounding the moratorium, he said.
Several students have switched majors and students planning to come into the IT-VD program at Western have gone to the University of Washington instead, Leonhardt said.
Why was the major placed into moratorium?
The engineering and design department has requested funding from the legislature for the vehicle design program for four budget cycles, covering the last eight years and spanning the 2013 to 2019 budget proposals, according to Newcomer.
The program was missing the support needed to make it a priority for the university in the first few budget cycles. In the past, the other engineering programs were of more interest to the legislature in Olympia, according to Johnson.
The students agree that the program could use help, but believe the department isn’t giving it the support it needs. Their fear is the program won’t return after it’s placed in moratorium, according to Hooper.
Leonhardt is currently working on the pre-proposal decision package for the next budget cycle in 2019. If approved, the funding wouldn’t be available until July 2021, according to Leonhardt.
Before 2013, the program was the most productive program in the engineering department with the highest number of graduates in the last ten years, according to Western’s Office of Institutional Research.
After 2013, Newcomer capped the enrollment at 12 students per academic year to reduce the impact on departmental resources, according to Leonhardt.
The program has been at the forefront of creative problem solving in vehicle technology, Leonhardt said.
The Vehicle Research Institute, which houses the IT-VD program, was one of the first programs to put a three-way catalytic converter, for nitrogen oxide filtration, on a car that passed California auto emissions standards. The program was also one of the first to develop honeycombed carbon-fiber structures for impact absorption, later adopted by the car racing community and used in motorsports, according to Leonhardt.
To develop the program to an accredited level and meet the standards of the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, Newcomer believes the department would have to hire three new faculty members.
Leonhardt agreed the program needs increased funding and faculty to become accredited.
Currently, the program is about four or five credits of math and science courses short of qualifying for accreditation, Leonhardt said.
“We’ve been asking for money, and it seems sudden, in the sense of, we seem to have finally hit the point where we’re not willing to do this limping forward anymore,” Newcomer said. “But it’s not sudden from an internal perspective. We’ve been trying to do something about this for many many years and no one wants to pay for it.”
What happens next?
The budget request for the engineering and design department is the current plan on getting the program out of moratorium, according to Newcomer.
Program alumni have donated more than $100,000 to support the program, according to Leonhardt.
“That money is being used now to help enhance the experiences of the students currently in the program,” Johnson said.
The timeline of the moratorium and what happens next with the program will depend on Dec. 4’s Academic Coordinating Commission vote, according to Leonhardt.
There are 20 pre-majors in the program, four of which currently have the necessary requirements to continue with the program and two who are still trying to get into the major, according to Johnson.
“Our goal is to get the program accredited and that we’re looking for the support of the community and of employers, and the legislature to provide the funding so we can get a few more faculty in the department to support the program,” Leonhardt said.