On its 50th anniversary, Western Kentucky University’s Master of Arts in Folk Studies program is facing a potential suspension.

While the Potter College of Arts and Letters has not yet officially closed the graduate program, its future is not guaranteed.

The Folk Studies department has been having a hard time adjusting since the loss of faculty during the pandemic and in the last few years of budgetary issues, said Darlene Applegate, Folk Studies department chair.

Faculty were not replaced, which was not her department’s decision, Applegate added.

The program currently employs two full-time, tenure-track faculty members and has 11 graduate students. Student enrollment is consistent; it ranged from 10 to 12 between 2018 and 2022.

While the student-professor ratio is technically acceptable, according to WKU guidelines, alumni like Paul McCoy say that the program has never fit into the typical mold.

“Folklore is huge, and folklife is huge,” McCoy said. “You need more than two people to be able to cover the breadth. It would be like having a music program that wants to teach jazz studies and yet you’ve got an oboe player and a violin player. You’re not gonna get very far.”

Generally, people think of folklore as telling legends and passing down folk songs, McCoy said, but it’s much broader. Folklorists study and document all the ways cultural traditions evolve and are shared, he said. At the time of his WKU education, program specialties included historic preservation, traditional music, folk belief, folklore and literature.

In the past 50 years, WKU graduate students have documented Bowling Green’s Bosnian immigrant community for an exhibit at the Kentucky Museum, written the application to add the Shake Rag Historic District to the National Register of Historic Places and worked to tell the story of Jonesville.

“(Folklife) amplifies marginalized voices,” McCoy said.

Potter College of Arts and Letters Dean Terrance Brown met with folk studies faculty to discuss suspension alternatives in October.

Brown proposed funding an instructor-level position for the 2023-24 academic year, and then, if the graduate program recruited four additional students, committing to a third tenure-track professor beginning in the 2024-25 academic year.

Folk studies faculty rejected the proposal and opted to suspend the program instead “due to insufficient resources to run it in the manner of excellence we’ve done for the past 50 years,” Applegate said.

The decision was not endorsed by dean Brown’s office, he stated in an email to the Daily News. He wrote that he hoped his office and folk studies faculty could find another way to keep the program alive.

Other options in “ongoing” conversations between Brown and Applegate include “online options, revamped course rotations, merger with another department while having folk studies as a strong concentration, (and/or) donor support for positions,” Brown wrote.

The pair also discussed bringing in external consultants to find more viable options using the department’s current resources, he added.

If the program were suspended, current students would be able to finish their degrees through a teach-out program upon approval by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC), Brown said. Suspension would not affect the major or minor in anthropology or the folklore minor.

Michael Ann Williams, a folk studies professor emeritus, said that PCAL never gave a warning sign about the program’s future being in danger. In fact, just a few years ago, she said that WKU’s president and provost were pushing for a folklore doctoral program in addition to the Masters of Arts and minor degree.

“I was just devastated,” Williams said. “I had every faith that when I retired, the folklore program would go on.”

WKU’s folklore program is renown, Williams said. It is one of 22 universities across the U.S. and Canada that offers a MA in folk studies, according to the American Folklore Society, and one of even fewer to teach public folklore, a specialization preparing students to work in public-facing folklore at places like the Smithsonian or the Library of Congress.

Folk studies are just as important now as they were decades or centuries ago, McCoy said.

“It’s 2022, our stories aren’t the same stories, they change – the folklore of our country, the culture of our country, the culture of our community,” he said. “This work is vital, and WKU is one of the few training grounds out there and the only one in the commonwealth that teaches people how to do it.”

CORRECTION: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that a few years ago, there was a proposal for a folklore bachelor’s degree program supported by the WKU administration. The proposal was actually for a doctoral program.