Jacksonville University's Rip Current Athletic Band held a concert Thursday, April 22, 2025, outside the campus to protest the closure of the school's music and theater programs. | Dan Scanlan, Jacksonville Today
Published on April 22, 2025 at 4:53 pm
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Brass instruments flashed in the sun Tuesday as Jacksonville University’s Rip Current Athletic Band continued to protest the loss of music and theater programs from the private university.
The cuts, which take effect at semester’s end, are intended to align the university’s courses with the needs of today’s working world and save $10 million, President Tim Cost said.
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But the cuts mean about 100 students must either graduate into the job market or find another music or theater program. And 40 faculty members will leave the Arlington campus for good on June 30.
One musician protesting outside the university’s main gates was music major Imani Waters, who must graduate in June instead of taking extra summer courses that now have been canceled.
“We are out here to show that the arts matter. We are here to show that without music, you have no pep band for your basketball games, you have no musicians for your holiday parties, no orchestras or symphonies or musicals to go to,” said Waters, the band’s logistics manager. “I am not sure if we can make a difference, but we as sure as heck are going to be as loud as we can about it. It is awful what is happening. A lot of our professors are fired effective in June.”
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Piano teach Scott Watkins, one of the laid-off music faculty members, honked at the students as he drove onto campus. He admitted that their protest may not make any difference.
“I think the students are really standing up for the faculty they know or love,” Watkins said. “Being swept aside as we were is very hurtful. It’s very deceitful, and I think the students know that and we are so proud of them. They have so much courage now.”
The program cuts are part of a drive to create long-term financial sustainability at the private, 4,200-student school, Cost said. What JU calls “consistently undersubscribed and specialized fields of study” — 22 art, music and other programs — will be sunsetted after current students complete them this semester. But undergraduate majors and minors in highest demand will remain.
Students learned about the program cuts one week ago at a brief meeting with administrators, while teachers had their own meeting a few minutes later. After the cancellations, some faculty posted images of empty music rooms as they announced their firings on Facebook.
Three fired faculty members appeared Monday on WJCT News’ First Coast Connect. One was Philosophy Department chair Erich Freidberger.
A JU faculty member for decades, Freidberger said he believes JU tried to expand too quickly and mismanaged the school’s finances, ending up having to slash staff and programs.
“We were told by the provost in our last faculty meeting that there were 50 more faculty than were required to teach classes. How did that happen?” he said. “That’s not on us. That’s on management. That’s on the administration. They’re the ones that messed this up. We are the ones paying the price.”
He and other soon-to-be former faculty members also confirmed that many issued a vote of “no confidence” in Cost at a faculty meeting April 15.
Students have protested since. About a dozen joined 27 Rip Current band members next to the main gate on Tuesday, holding protest signs.
JU’s finances
Cost said a week earlier that the program cuts were the result of a six-month process to understand demand for various programs. Students are not enrolling in programs like glassblowing, world arts or languages as much anymore, he said, while there’s an increased emphasis on health care, business and technology, “which I think reflects a lot of what is going on in Jacksonville.”
Cost would not say specifically whether the changes were the result of debt that had to be addressed in the not-for-profit university. But four months before the cuts were announced, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges issued a statement about JU’s accreditation.
The association stated Dec. 19 that it had issued a warning to JU after a determination of “significant non-compliance” with core principles of its accreditation. The warning also noted JU’s “failure to make timely and significant progress toward correcting the deficiencies that led to a finding of non-compliance.”
At the time, Cost issued a statement saying that the performance for fiscal year 2023-2024 was “not up to our historically high standards” — but that since then, the school had taken action to implement measures to ensure financial health, “focusing on revenue growth, cost efficiency and operational sustainability.”
JU spokesperson Matthew Harris said Monday that the school remains “fully accredited” by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges through 2033.
“The university has informed our accreditors of the recently announced plans to realign our academic offerings to support long-term financial stability and the university continues to work closely with” with the association, Harris’ statement said.
The program and faculty cuts also followed an 18-page Academic Financial Task Force report issued by 10 key administrators in late March. Jacksonville Today obtained a copy of the report, which basically represented a blueprint for possible program and staff cuts to “restore financial health and long-term stability.”
The report found that while net student revenue per student had increased, the amount the school had to spend for each student also had gone up — $2,213 more in per-student service costs, for example.
The report added that a central problem leading to the financial situation was that the university has not implemented proper processes to enable the “planning and assessment of the finances necessary for clear, data-driven decision-making.”
Reducing the size and scope of majors and core requirements would give students and administration more flexibility in meeting academic requirements, the report said. That can only be sustained by eliminating and reducing curriculum to “retain as many full-time faculty positions as fiscally possible as they are at the front line of our primary function,” the report said.
The report also listed many programs that could be eliminated based on enrollment.
The students’ view
For Waters, a senior who planned to take more musical training at JU after her graduation in June, the program cut puts her in the job market now, she said.
“I had expected to take through next year to figure out exactly what I wanted to do, to take lessons with my private teacher,” Waters said. “Now I will have to find a job this fall — it’s always good to work, but we are being pushed out a little earlier than expected, and its very sudden and jarring.”
A new online petition opposing the cuts has been created by a group calling itself “The Committee to Protect Jacksonville University.”
“We have been told that more external pressure from alumni and community members, the less the Board of Trustees can ignore or look the other way,” the group said in a news release. “Faculty, please share with your current and former students as well.”
Tuesday’s protest came one day before the final public performance of the Jacksonville University Orchestra, conducted by director Marguerite Richardson. The performance is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at the university’s Terry Concert Hall.
The concert will feature the student winners of the annual concerto competition, while the encore will welcome alumni to join a performance of Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9. The concert will be live-streamed here.
Michelle Corum of Jacksonville Today contributed to this report.
