Over the next two weeks, I will be publishing a series of blog posts entitled, “The Five Sunset Rules.” These rules are based on a presentation I recently made at the annual Association for Continuing Higher Education conference in Palm Springs. I argued that while there are many resources for administrators who are interested in creating new academic programs, there are very few available for those charged with closing them out. However, I believe that the story of our HUX Reboot offers an opportunity to grapple with this topic, since we were ultimately able to rescue and salvage many components of the Legacy HUX MA program and repurpose them for the new program. We also employ several faculty who taught for the older program (whom I refuse to refer to as “components” here), so it is indeed possible to sunset or teach-out a program while looking for ways to make the experience more positive or even constructive.

I hope that this blog series will serve as a useful and perhaps even inspiring resource for any folks out there who have been charged with closing a program. I can tell you that it is solitary and usually unrewarding work, but that does not mean it has to be lonely.
– Matt

As a rule, endings are harder than beginnings. We celebrate birthdays and mourn death days. Pet adoptions are Instagrammed, while trips to the “upstate farm” are not. Buying a new car is easier, safer, and much more fun than selling—or totaling—one. And as a homeowner who is now in his family’s second house, I definitely prefer the excitement of closing on a property over the nervous anxiety (nine months of it in our case) that goes into selling one.

Academic programs are no different. Opening a new one is a cause for celebration, but the process of closing one creates at best mixed feelings and at worst controversy. However, most non-endowed programs have their own life cycle: they are born, they grow, they mature, they educate, and in time students (or administrators) lose interest, which prompt their closure.

Consequently, there are a lot of important resources out there for administrators and faculty who are interested in creating a new program. There’s even an entire job classification dedicated to it: “academic program developer.” A recent web search of the term showed that, as of October 31, 2024, Indeed.com listed nearly 1000 job positions matching that title.

Conversely, there is no such title reserved for those whose job it is to close, teach-out, or “sunset” an academic program. There are few, if any, resources on how to do this. It is dour, hidden, yet necessary work, because programs close all the time. And with traditional undergraduate enrollments expected to decline by as much as 10% within the next 13 years, there are going to be a lot more of them.

I recently presented about this at the ACHE Conference in Palm Springs. Entitled “The HUX Reboot: Teach-Outs, Redesigns, and Reflections on the Lifecycle of an Academic Program,” my talk listed some of the lessons I learned while teaching out our Legacy Master of Arts in Humanities (HUX) degree from 2016 through 2021. However, several other attendees at the conference seemed disappointed when I told them that I would be primarily discussing the program we taught out, as opposed to the successor program (HUX Reboot) that we created in its place.

Program sunsets and teach-outs are non-violent affairs, but as a ranching historian I can’t help but think of Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men and his terrible, yet anodyne captive bolt pistol. Program closures might offer financial rewards for the administrators who order them, but for all those people who learned, taught, or worked in that program over the years, they represent a far greater—and incalculable—loss. Perhaps I’m being melodramatic, but as the person who sent the first email to our students in 2016 announcing Legacy HUX’s imminent closure, I can assure you that I felt the gravity of that decision with every shocked, angry, and sad reply I received in the hours that followed.

Of course, the HUX story has a happy ending, at least up through the present time.

My teach-out story has a feel-good, phoenix-rising-from-the-ashes quality to it, which makes it ideal for this conversation. After all, who wants to read about dying programs? HUX’s subsequent reinvention and relaunch gave it new life, but most programs are not as fortunate. They close and then they fade away, turning into paper ghosts that haunt old catalogs. Federal privacy laws and institutional retention requirements usually subsume whatever historical files remain, consigning them to industrial-sized shredders or deep storage vaults, like the one at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. From a historiographical perspective, dead programs are extraordinarily difficult to research for the simple, yet understandable reason that no one wants to be reminded of them.

However, even though we’ve enjoyed a lot of success thus far with the Rebooted HUX, I don’t want to leave the Legacy program in the dust. For 42 years, HUX educated students throughout the world, training professors and prisoners, educating journalists and journeymen, and helping people of all ages and backgrounds achieve their goal of earning a Master’s degree. Numerous “Thesis of the Year” awards testify to this impressive and long track record.

I have a lot of ideas for celebrating Legacy HUX and integrating its story and community into the HUX Reboot we launched just over a year ago. But I found myself wanting a lot more time to talk about the teach-out experience during my recent presentation, so given the dearth of resources on program closures I decided to turn it into some blog content.

In the next couple of weeks, I will be posting my “Five Rules for Teaching Out a Program.” If you are an administrator who is thinking about closing a program, or you somehow drew the short straw and are now tasked with leading the effort to phase it out, these posts are for you. My contention throughout both the Legacy HUX teach-out and the posts to follow is that a program closure can be an opportunity to learn, evolve, grow, and even celebrate.

Have you ever directed a teach-out? What are some things you learned while doing it? If it is something you may be directed to do in the months to come, what questions would you like to ask? Leave a comment below!