Faculty and students often decide to depart for greener, out-of-state academic pastures. Legislators and governors say keeping Wyoming’s best and brightest from leaving is a top priority, but the state accelerates its infamous “brain drain” with each new round of cuts. Meanwhile, surviving programs typically have a harder time recruiting full-time faculty and must hire people for temporary positions, diluting the quality of teaching and forfeiting potentially lucrative research opportunities. UW understands what’s at stake. The faculty positions being considered for elimination are filled by real people who work hard for this university,” UW Executive Vice President Kevin Carman stated in a news release. “The magnitude of what we are proposing is, as far as we can tell, unprecedented in the university’s modern history.”
