Stephen Easton, president of Dickinson State University, wants you to know that the North Dakota public college is not in financial crisis. On its face, that makes his decision to pursue a massive rework of the university’s academic operations, announced Wednesday, appear a little strange, he said in an interview. Easton maintains, though, that distilling the university’s nine academic departments into four schools, and cutting a yet-to-be-determined number of tenured faculty members, is necessary to get ahead of the roughly $1 million budget shortfall he’s forecasting due to inflation.
