Due to budget cuts, regent universities in Iowa may be faced with tough decisions on how to trim costs — decisions that could lead to layoffs and program cuts.

As Iowa State and the other regent universities make cuts, the Board of Regents is faced with a variety of options for recovery, typically none of which the universities want to take. Cutting courses, programs, faculty and staff are being considered as an answer to budget woes.

The idea of “unnecessary duplication” and eliminating programs has spawned recent chatter among some of the regents as an option surrounding the universities’ current budget crunch.

However, this is not the first time the suggestion of eliminating duplicate programs has crossed the minds of the regents. The concept of eliminating duplicate programs came to a head at regent universities in Iowa in the late 1980s, with several programs at Iowa State being recommended for elimination.

Employing the auditing skills of the New York-based management consultant firm Peat Marwick Main and Co. in Sept. 1987, the regents searched for an answer to allow the universities to provide quality on dwindling budgets.

Following Marwick’s recommendation, the regents explored the approach of eliminating “unnecessary” duplicate programs at the three regent universities — Iowa State University, the University of Iowa and the University of Northern Iowa.

In June 1989, Marwick’s recommendation slated Iowa State to eliminate the journalism and mass communication program, the industrial engineering program, a portion of the industrial education and technology program and three doctoral programs in education.

With programs, jobs and the future of more than 1,800 students in these programs on the plank, the few months between June, when Marwick’s recommendations were proposed, and October, when the regents made their final decisions on the fate of the programs, proved to be long for those connected to the programs.

Tom Emmerson, professor of journalism and communication and department chairman during the recommendation, called the period a “very, very stressful time.”

The plan called for Iowa State’s journalism and mass communication program to be eliminated and students seeking these programs to enter the program at the University of Iowa. Although the state was experiencing a budget crisis, Emmerson said he did not feel it was fair to pick out the journalism and mass communication department.

“We had to battle a lot of misconceptions,” Emmerson said, regarding the diversity of a journalism and mass communication degree. “We couldn’t get a real handle on what the rationale was to want to eliminate a program that was running at full strength with a lot of students, a lot of demand and not a big overhead.”

The argument for the program being cut was students would still attend Iowa State, just major in something else, Emmerson said.

“You’ve got to be crazy,” he said. “If a person wants to study journalism, they are not going to come here and major in English — they are going to go where they can major in journalism.”

The journalism and mass communication program at Iowa State received much support from alumni across the state and from the university, Emmerson said. The media covered the story extensively.

“We didn’t have a lot of people in high places, but we had some and they made their feelings known,” Emmerson said. “It took a lot of effort for a lot of people.”

The effort did pay off and, following minor modifications, the journalism and mass communication program at Iowa State is still existence.

Patrick Patterson, associate professor of industrial and manufacturing systems engineering and current chairman of the program, declined to comment on the issue, stating the audit took place too long ago to comment on.

In the end, none of the programs at Iowa State were eliminated.

However, Marwick’s audit did result in the elimination of the home economics and materials program at the University of Iowa while the University of Northern Iowa lost its home economics graduate program and three doctoral programs in education.

Regent Robert Downer, Iowa City, said if duplicate programs were to be cut again, the cuts would come more extensively this time.

John McCarroll, director of university relations, has called recent discussion on eliminating duplicate programs speculation at best. ISU President Gregory Geoffroy has said there have been no talks currently regarding cutting any programs at this point.

— Daily staff reports contributed to this article.