A ruthless fact vs. academic aspirations: Kansas universities at a critical crossroad

Some people think physics is a difficult subject.

How could Schrodinger’s cat be both alive and dead?

And what really makes sunshine?

Steve Hawley once took the physics he learned at the University of Kansas and rode the space shuttle Discovery into zero-gravity space. You might say that he handled physics at a high level: 326 miles high. That’s how high he parked the Hubble telescope in orbit.

I called him recently – as well as other university professors, members of the Board of Regents and a state legislator – to discuss how the governing body of Kansas’ six state universities next month might diminish or even gut degree programs teaching physics, philosophy and more.

He sighed.

“Dr. Stevie,” as admiring fellow astronauts called him, is a shy and genial soul, questioning rather than quarrelsome. He likes irony, though. He told a little tale flavored with irony: About how the world’s first physicists became physicists by asking a question that children ask:

What makes sunshine?

Professors of physics or other degree programs are upset right now, even angry.

Hawley hopes the Kansas Board of Regents leaves physics alone.

But the Regents have their own worries.

They might not leave it alone at all.

Hawley was out of this world

Hawley was that bright kid of modest means from Salina, Kansas, who bought his first telescope in a dime store, with his mother, Jeane, encouraging him. He studied physics at KU, then rode space shuttles five times, with Jeane gritting teeth during every fiery launch and reentry. She told me years ago that no one except astronauts and their families know how dangerous space flight is. Her son flew some missions after 14 of his friends died, seven on the shuttle Challenger, seven on Columbia.

In April 1990, Discovery and Dr. Stevie zipped along at more than 17,000 miles per hour. He steered Discovery’s robotic arm and lifted Hubble into zero gravity, all while upside down and sideways, weightless though strapped in, and maybe just a little nervous — one little mistake might nudge $16 billion worth of shiny hardware into empty space.

When I called about how physics might get nudged into lower orbits, he sighed. Not his first such conversation.

At KU, where he taught physics and astronomy after peeling off his last astronaut suit, university leaders, feeling pressure from state officials, asked about low enrollments in his astronomy and physics courses.

“Long meetings,” he remembered. “Some don’t get it.”

No one can make practical and job-generating science discoveries in our complicated world until someone first does pure science, he said.

Science in pure form often looks impractical, he said. Even silly. But you’ve got to learn it first, and to learn it first, it must be taught.

“So,” he said. “Physics started mostly in the early 1900s, when scientists started asking what made sunshine.”

Not practical, that question. For half a century.

But then…that question led to atomic bombs. An end to World War II.

“And eventually they came upon the idea of nuclear fusion.

“And that didn’t come because people thought we maybe now have a way to power the world someday or build a bomb.

“When it started, it was just them trying to figure out what made sunshine, and how the sun sustained that power for billions of years.”

Wichita State professor and SNAPPY’s proud father

These should be happy days for Nick Solomey, friend of Nobel Prize winners, world expert on neutrinos, physics professor at Wichita State University.

His two daughters, Taylor Swift fans, saw her rise last year to become a celebrity artist queen of the world.

The dad of those daughters is also the proud father of a NASA-funded $3.55 million scientific-satellite program at WSU. He might get to see NASA send “SNAPPY,” one of his satellites, into space next year. That achievement for WSU is not all about him: Nine of his graduate students helped build it.

NASA calls this type of satellite a CubeSat, as in “cube satellite.” SNAPPY is a little thing, no larger than a small loaf of bread. The state should be proud of what this means to the education of young Kansans, he said.

But Solomey sent up a distress flair email in February, saying “We need an investigative reporter.” To look at what the Kansas Board of Regents might do next month.

He stood under a mock-up prototype of one of his NASA satellite inventions. Waved a hand at it. “Ask yourself: “Why, at a time when we are doing THIS at Wichita State, are we talking about diminishing the teaching of physics in Kansas?”

“Look at what they already did to Emporia State.”

Elephant landing

Emporia State University in September 2022 sacked 30-odd teachers – and did so after temporarily suspending tenure, the legal construct designed to protect teachers from getting fired at the behest of politicians or others with agendas and axes to grind.

The Regents praised Emporia State’s leadership. But for teachers at ESU, WSU and elsewhere, it was as though a big, fat elephant crashed into the student center dining hall, like the Chicxulub asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.

Professors felt uneasy, in part because of past history involving big university budget cuts, in part because Kansas is a red state where politicians in the past stridently questioned the worth of professors, even their national loyalty. The professors sometimes look at social media — and feel uneasy there, too: Most professors will tell you that math professors teach math, and engineering professors teach engineering, and art teachers teach art, but click on any of many political propaganda websites, and you see that universities are (allegedly) hotbeds of liberal-communist-pinko-woke- hating-their-own-country proselytizers.

What unsettled professors most, though, was that they all know that there’s a ruthless fact behind not only the firings but the Regent scrutiny: The “enrollment cliff.”

It’s now the big, fat elephant in the room in many university planning meetings: Kansans tapered off in the making of babies in the past 20 years. This likely means far fewer students paying tuition and fees; which could mean much lower income for schools trying to keep computer screens lit and winter furnaces burning.

Worried about this, and about other challenges, the Regents have put some low-enrollment programs such as physics, philosophy and other degree programs under scrutiny. Natural science and philosophy, in one form or another, have been taught at least since Plato founded his academy in Athens in 387 BC.

Regents I spoke with say they will behave carefully. They will meet next month to decide things.

But the professors I spoke with regard them as villains. They say there is more to the story than what the Regents admit.

Some professors just don’t get it

“The professors aren’t going to like a lot of what I’ll have to say.” So said Chase Blasi, state senator from Wichita, native of Colwich, a Newman University grad.

I called Blasi in part because I spent years as a reporter covering Kansas colleges’ past, fraught relationship with legislators.

Nobody I spoke with for this story, including professors, said legislators are lashing out at them these days, except over their diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

But legislators in past years sometimes mocked and made fun of professors — said they didn’t understand about budget shortfalls; said professors like their sacred cows, said there’s more to serving Kansas taxpayers than the professors see.

Like those past critics, Blasi is Republican conservative, but one who openly admires our universities — for the most part. “Absolutely vital to our state.”

Past legislators might have been “bomb throwers,” about universities, he said. “But we’ve gotten past that. Most senators see the good they do.”

He’s a young, fresh face in the Capitol, but before he won his senate seat he was a state employee — chief of staff for two prominent Kansas senate conservatives: Senate President Susan Wagle, then her successor, Ty Masterson.

Blasi has conservative cred: He supports gun rights, opposes declaring the lesser prairie chicken a threatened species in Kansas, and supports U.S. energy independence.

“And right now, I’m opposed to all those DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) programs that the Regents and the universities are forcing on students and professors.”

He’s worried about universities’ futures. He’s studied education data. He said professors apparently don’t see the clouds that he sees forming on our horizons. And that storm churn comes now not from legislators who control state money but from the enrollment cliff.

“If you walk through this building (the state capitol) now, and ask any legislator what they think about the enrollment cliff, most will tell you they don’t know what it is. But that won’t last.”

Blasi (and all the professors I spoke with) all said that legislators had nothing to do with the Emporia State firings, or the suspension of tenure protections. Legislators are not pressuring the Regents to diminish or cut physics, philosophy or other programs.

But Blasi doesn’t think professors get it.

“The cliff isn’t some future cataclysm. It’s right now.” The Wichita school district, he pointed out, recently announced that six public schools will close because of falling enrollment in grades K-12.

“Imagine what it’ll be like for universities when that trend catches up with them. Universities have no choice but to consider cutting programs — or innovating.”

Some analysts say that unless universities look more attractive, enrollments could plunge 15% nationally.

Blasi sees value in the programs the professors worry about.

“It’s good to appreciate philosophy — to study and appreciate Socrates and others,” he said. “Those were great masters.

“But ask yourself: What young people today actually WANT to study philosophy?”

People of modest means

Like Blasi, Bill Simon grew up in Colwich — the son of a father who worked in a grain elevator. He did summer farm work; he baled hay. That background has been at the top of his mind lately, as he has taken both Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly and the Board of Regents to task.

Sun Nuclear, the company he co-founded from almost nothing, and later wholly owned, makes products worldwide that ensure the safety of radiation therapy for millions of people with cancer.

Simon is slightly built, white-haired, white-bearded, and so quiet of voice that it was hard to hear him over the clatter and din at Starbucks.

He earned a bachelor’s (1969), then a master’s (1971) in physics at WSU.

He knows of the enrollment cliff, knows the world has changed. “You can’t bale hay for a living. Nor would you want to.”

But putting physics under scrutiny is appalling, he said.

The Regents spent $355,000 in state money to hire RPK Consulting. It was their recommendations to the Regents, along with the enrollment cliff, which helped put 31 Kansas university degree programs, including physics and philosophy, under a microscope. RPK offered simple, clear new metrics for measuring degree program quality. The Regents adopted them.

Those metrics are shallow and misleading, Simon said.

Harmful, too, he added: They could keep people of modest means from an education in physics.

RPK never demands that any university cut any program; RPK made this clear to the Regents. But several university governing boards elsewhere adopted their suggestions about how to measure course quality. One key example of how RPK’s work got interpreted elsewhere has spooked WSU professors:

The West Virginia University board of governors last year cut dozens of degree programs and fired 145 faculty to help fix a $45 million budget shortfall. After he read about that, Simon wrote Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly and the Regents.

“Over the past 12 years, I have contributed $250,000 to the WSU Physics student program,” he wrote. “I became alarmed about the potential harm that will/could result if the Board follows through on the RPK recommendations. Certainly, my contributions would stop.”

The Regents’ new metrics wildly miss the point — fail to see the larger story — about what those degree programs actually do, Simon said.

“These are sterile assessments of academic institutions of learning, where young people first encounter the world,” Simon wrote the governor and the Regents.

Part of what the Regents are looking at, Simon said, sounds “deceptively reasonable”: They’ve brought up why, during financial constraints, do Kansans need all six state universities teaching low-enrollment degree programs like physics or philosophy? Why not offer those programs at fewer universities?

But as he (and WSU physics professor Nick Solomey) also pointed out, some rural or small-town kids can’t afford to move to Lawrence or Wichita, from, say, western Kansas. But they can afford Fort Hays State out west.

This is personal in part because as a kid of modest means, he got excluded by certain university rules and expectations.

He started out at WSU studying engineering.

But he soon found that he could not afford the sheets of drawing paper that WSU’s engineering classes required.

He switched to mathematics, then gravitated to physics, and with that training made a kind of magnetic resonance imaging breakthrough: His company doesn’t make the machines but rather tests the complex delivery of radiation from them, making treatments safer and the machines ever more efficient.

He recently sold his company to Mirion Technologies; Simon won’t say for how much. He says only, with a slow grin, that “I am comfortable.”

He doesn’t think state officials understand the larger story about how successful businesses emerge. That a broad and widely available educational system, like Kansas has now, is designed not only to get people jobs but to make them think, which is the driver that creates innovation. The key is not “tech training,” or “practical training” or even “making money.”

“You should never start off a business with the goal of making money. You should instead start a business with a passion for doing what you actually want to do: When I started my business, I could provide a living for my family — but I did not start it to get rich. Do that — you fail. You start with passion instead.”

Teaching programs at a reduced number of universities might cut some kids off, he said – from curiosity, from learning, from passion.

“And from their dreams.”

Is there not another agenda?

Emporia State fired professor Max McCoy and those other 30-odd teachers with the backing of the Regents, after the school temporarily suspended tenure job protections.

The Regents noted that low enrollment, yawning financial deficits and the additional damage done by the pandemic made Emporia State’s decisions necessary.

McCoy, longtime author and longtime popular teacher of journalism, said the pandemic was just the school’s cover story, and that their goal was control.

The tenure suspension stunned teachers.

I spoke with seven educators at WSU; they spoke with fear and wonder about ESU.

The National American Association of University Professors denounced the school leadership. Emporia State and the Regents, the association wrote, “demonstrated through their actions an almost total disregard for the institution of tenure and the principle of academic freedom.”

Tenure — defined by the professors’ association — “provides conditions for faculty to pursue research and innovation and draw evidence-based conclusions free from corporate or political pressure.”

Just as Emporia State began what WSU’s Solomey called “that purge,” McCoy wrote a lively newspaper column denouncing what was happening. His opening sentence: “I may be fired for writing this.”

He was fired the next day. “I sat down with the two people taking away my job. I put an audio recorder on the table in front of them and turned it on.” McCoy and others sued.

What happened next, he said, should be considered a dramatic backfire — a come-uppance to the Regents. “If the Regents were trying to make Emporia State more financially sound, they failed.” After the firings, enrollment for the current school year dropped more than 13%, a huge hit that both McCoy (and Regents board chair Jon Rolph), linked to wide media coverage and bad publicity.

Rolph told me later that that same ongoing bad publicity might mean Emporia State takes another enrollment hit this fall.

But the more-to-that-story fact about what really happened, Rolph said, is that what Emporia state leaders are “a profile in courage.”

‘It’s not what they think’

Former Regent Shelly Kiblinger grew up a farm girl from near Sycamore. Her father raises pigs.

When she learned in February about what Solomey and other professors had said, about the Regents possibly diminishing physics and philosophy, a cruise ship had just landed her at Hilo, on the windward coast of the Big Island of Hawaii.

She and her husband would soon sail to Oahu, then Guam, Saipan, and eventually around the south cape of Africa, then to Miami. But she was so concerned about what she’d heard about worried professors that instead of exploring the 1,200-foot sheer cliff waterfalls and the jutting mountains around Hilo, she stayed rooted near the docks — to call me to try to alleviate concerns.

“It’s really hard to hear that faculty are this concerned about what we’ve done,” said Kiblinger, whose term as a Regent ended last summer. “It’s distressing. . . . We are NOT West Virginia.”

Kiblinger supported the Emporia State firings and tenure suspension.

She’s a former Kansas schools superintendent, now an educational consultant. She learned in those roles how to sift and study data. From that, she knew that everything done at Emporia State “was wise, given the circumstances.”

But it is also true that when RPK made its presentation to the Regents in December of 2022, suggesting the possible diminishing of some degree programs statewide, Kiblinger pushed back. You can hear her do so, and hear the whole RPK discussion, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAce6uVh-nI

Kiblinger said the Regents had pondered low enrollment programs – such as physics, philosophy, some women’s studies – many times in the past and concluded that those degree programs were essential. But she elaborated, when I reached her in February: She said the measuring metrics the Regents used at the time were not good enough anymore.

”Those (degree) programs (now under scrutiny) are cultural, they are what make students into well-rounded individuals. BUT. We had to review them. And we (the Regents) didn’t want to just keep reviewing those programs over and over again. It was starting to feel like we were hamsters on a wheel.”

The Regents concluded that they should improve how they review programs, with an eye to the evolution of today’s workforce. “After all, we don’t teach courses in typewriter repair anymore.”

The enrollment cliff was one motivator, but only one of several, she said. RPK suggested, and she and other Regents agreed, that better measuring metrics could also show which programs should get more money, based on fast-changing workforce trends. The new metrics could identify trends sooner rather than later: “What programs need more faculty. Which faculty do we need to retrain and redirect?”

But those changed metrics?

Faculty call them silly.

Boogeyman

One of those faculty calling them silly: WSU history professor George Dehner.

He knows about the enrollment cliff. “That’s their supposed big fear. And it is in fact a real thing. I understand their concern. But that’s also the Boogeyman they use to justify what they want to do — that we have to make ‘efficiencies’ and stuff. Right?

“But the way they’re going about it is ridiculous, right? One of their metrics is that with your program’s graduates, 51% of them have to be working at jobs in Kansas, right?

“Ridiculous.”

Professor Solomey’s basketball fable

Imagine if WSU was somehow, magically, one of America’s leading producers of NBA basketball players.

Worried about possible physics program cuts, WSU’s Nick Solomey, inventor of satellites, invented last fall a tongue-in-cheek thought experiment to mock that 51% metric. He presented it at a faculty senate meeting.

There are no NBA teams in Kansas. But in Solomey’s fable, WSU basketball graduates playing outside Kansas are dazzlers — getting teams to the playoffs year after year. “And who wouldn’t admire that?”

But now imagine, he said, that the Regents in their wisdom decree that henceforth the WSU basketball program will get the chop unless the school can prove that at least 51% of its graduated hoopsters are rattling rims and raining threes in Kansas.

In real life, WSU’s physics degree program has 50% of its graduates meeting that Regent post-graduation 51% metric in the workforce. And so Solomey’s program crept into the Regent’s crosshairs.

“One percent,” Solomey said. “That’s quite a slim line. At that faculty senate meeting, my basketball proposal got laughs.”

The metric is cookie-cutter logic, he said. It commits two other sins. One: It gives no credit to low-enrollment degree programs that nevertheless bring WSU millions of dollars in research grants, like SNAPPY’s $3.55 million from NASA. WSU also gets millions more in grants given to other programs.

And two: It doesn’t reflect “that I could name off the top of my head many of my WSU physics grads who have great jobs at NASA or elsewhere; some of them came to me when I was talking to NASA about our satellite, to remind me that they had taken my physics class. Another one of my students is making contributions to CERN, the supercollider in Europe.”

If physics programs diminish, WSU students might never help hatch another SNAPPY. “And future students might then never have a chance to get the education in physics that we give them here.”

Philosophy

Some professors I spoke with were so wary about boat-rocking that they wouldn’t talk on the record — or talked only guardedly.

Susan Castro, the chair of WSU’s department of philosophy, wouldn’t talk about the Regents, though she was WSU’s faculty senate president during much of their work regarding RPK, Emporia State and more. “We’re under scrutiny here,” she said.

But others spoke up, including to defend Castro’s philosophy programs.

Part of why people are sometimes woefully uninformed about what professors of philosophy or history or other disciplines actually do is because the professors do a poor job of publicly explaining themselves, Dehner said. “They all work well past 40 hours every week, and anyway, talking in public about what they do is not really what we do.”

So, he said, most people have no idea that philosophy departments, at WSU and at most other universities, do more than teach philosophy to philosophy majors. They work — a lot — across boundaries: They help teach philosophy to students in everything from law and business, though they often call it “ethics.”

Castro grinned when I brought this up, and decided to talk (just a bit) after all: Her department has for many years aggressively taught or advised about philosophy and ethics in many WSU degree programs other than philosophy, she said. She’s explaining this in writing to the Regents.

One metric that put crosshairs on her department, she said, was another new Regent metric that said a department gets reviewed if it has — on average over four years — fewer than 25 students majoring in philosophy.

“We have just under 25 majors,” she said. “But we teach thousands.”

Does this man wear a black hat?

Among university professors, if there is a black-hat villain in this story it’s not RPK or grouchy legislators. It’s the Board of Regents and its chairman, Jon Rolph.

He says he understands professors’ concerns: “If you see your degree program on a (scrutiny) list like that, it can make you nervous. I totally get it.”

A black hat role seems a bad fit for Rolph.

He grew up in Wichita. He’s president and CEO of Thrive Restaurant Group, which owns and operates more than 150 restaurants in 15 states, including Applebee’s, Carlos O’Kelly’s, HomeGrown, Modern Market and BakeSale. He and his family have supported charities for years, and he’s served on boards for the Wichita Children’s Home, the United Way of the Plains, the Wichita Chamber of Commerce, Visioneering Wichita, the Center for Combating Human Trafficking, the Wichita Metro YMCA. The full list of his service is longer. People who work with him also note that he coaches YMCA sports teams, in part to be with his children more; they play on those teams.

He was diagnosed with cancer last year and endured grueling treatments. He’s in remission now. “It wasn’t fun, but I’m fine.”

Some public officials push back if they get a black hat label. Rolph didn’t. When I told him, for example, about Solomey, Simon and Dehner calling the Regent metrics ridiculous, he said degree programs won’t be the only thing the Regents will soon evaluate: They will evaluate their new metrics. “And we will modify those metrics if they are found to be unfair.”

Like Kiblinger, he said the previous metrics weren’t doing anything at a time when universities survive by becoming more nimble.

The Regents put 31 total degree programs across the universities under scrutiny, one-tenth of all programs, he said. But: “We’re collaboratively trying to work with institutions to say: ‘What’s the plan here?’“ And so, Castro and all other program directors were given time to write plans addressing Regent scrutiny.

“Generally, these programs are low-enrollment,” Rolph said. “But they’re also important to the overall nature of the university, right?

“So, cutting a program like physics isn’t the only option. You just might not, any longer, have a chair of that department. Or the program may merge into another science.”

Emporia State’s cuts occurred, he said, after fresh university leadership dived deep into not only the numbers they had, but the numbers they knew would come. What they saw in that dive looked scary.

”And they could have decided ‘That’s somebody else’s problem, and we’ll be out of here before the big problem arrives in a few years.’ But they did not do that.

“I met with them, saw what they were looking at. And so I can say that people in leadership there are actually profiles in courage: For not kicking it all down the road, for doing what would create the best opportunity for the biggest number of people.”

“There’s no witch hunt with what we’re doing,” Rolph said. “There’s nothing going on other than that we’re trying to work collaboratively. I think we all understand the pressures.

“That enrollment cliff is very real for us.”

What we miss out on

During the years of the tens of millions of dollars in university cuts, when legislators sniped about “navel gazers” teaching piano and opera, Rodney Miller kept WSU’s Fine Arts college afloat and flourishing.

“Over two decades, we lost maybe a million or maybe a million and a half in the cuts,” said the now-retired WSU dean of fine arts. “It didn’t destroy us. We kept everything going. But what happened was what so often happens here in Wichita: Where other places aim higher, we aim lower. What we lost was what could have been.”

“There was a time, when I was young and perhaps naive, where in this country we all simply assumed that higher education was a necessity. What we did for the betterment of our society. And now, for whatever reason, with the level of political vitriol as toxic as it has ever been, higher education seems to be something we now have to defend.”

During the budget cutting years of Gov. Sam Brownback’s time (2011 to 2018), Miller sent up distress calls of his own, to defend his Fine Arts College programs: Art, digital art, piano, dance, singing, choir, theater and opera, to name a few. He tried back then to get me to come listen to him say that he agreed with legislators who said we should put more resources into tech schools, STEM courses, (science, technology, engineering, or mathematics).

But there was another story he wanted me to tell, about the fine arts courses he supervised and loved. Legislators back then (though not now) were questioning why universities still schedule those traditional courses, when the legislators thought the state should strain every nerve to prioritize tech.

I circled back to Miller for this story, months after he retired as Fine Arts dean.

“Of course, we should enhance tech courses. And of course practical jobs are important.”

“But what the critics have always overlooked is the rest of the story:

“You can learn computer science in a class. And you can learn about math in STEM courses.

“But when our students graduate, they then get jobs. And those jobs are in workplaces where they quickly encounter a number of problems not taught in tech schools or computer courses.

“Bad bosses — nobody teaches students in tech courses how to work with that challenge. Or how to navigate one of those workplaces with those few troubling employees, who sometimes create tough work environments.

“Nobody in a tech course learns in there how to deal with getting passed over for raises, or promotions, with no explanation.

“Those are common workplace situations that drive people crazy — and nobody teaches you how to deal with them in computer classes.

“But you DO learn how to deal with those challenges when you join the university band. Or work in a theater production, whether it’s as a carpenter or an actor or as a director, or even working with the lighting.

“In other words, you learn how to deal with the biggest challenge faced by anyone going into any workforce: How to deal with other human beings.

“You don’t learn workplace collaboration in a tech class. But you do learn it in band, which is why I have desperately said for years that they need a lot more of the arts in K-12 schools.

“Music for example, is incredibly practical in this way: Imagine a 7th grade clarinetist playing second-chair clarinet in her junior high band:

“She’s having to look at her page of music, look at the notes, play the right notes with the right fingering. She’s having to listen to the people who are sitting next to her — and in the rest of the orchestra.

“She has to play in tune, she has to play rhythmically. She has to watch the conductor. She’s having to determine if she’s playing too loud. She must play so that her articulation on the instrument is the same as everybody else.

“All these things happen in milliseconds, they’re all going on in her brain at the same time.

“Imagine the cognitive impact that that has on a developing brain.

“And all this involves collaboration.”

Always a deeper question

The theme that emerges from the different perspectives is that there’s always a deeper story to look for. So that we can better understand even those who oppose us.

Steve Hawley, when he rode rockets, learned long ago to advocate for the rest of the story about space.

He heard lots of criticism about the moon landings, which many people think is the most stunning thing humanity has ever done. But it cost – a lot – and critics asked: Why spend all those billions to collect a few rocks from the moon? Why spend billions on space stunts, where happy astronauts get to turn somersaults in the shuttle bay, paid for by us?

The rest of the story? “It’s not like we loaded up the nose cone with cash and shot it into space.”

“That money is not spent in space,” said his wife, Eileen. When she was director of NASA public affairs, Eileen had to answer about alleged wasteful NASA spending more than Steve did.

“That money is spent on the ground,” she said. “(Spent) In this country, to provide well-paying jobs all across the country. And it ties into that need to create that skilled workforce.”

The deeper story of space exploration, Dr. Stevie said, was not about “national prestige,” or moon rock collecting, or turning zero-G somersaults in a shuttle bay. There was a potentially deadly practicality about it.

“NASA started in the 1950s because the Russians had launched Sputnik, the first satellite, and everybody was worried that the Soviet Union would land on the moon first. And maybe turn it into a military base.

“Now, there’s a likelihood that China will land astronauts on the moon before we go back and do it again. There’s also a sentiment on (Capitol) Hill that they might turn it to military purposes.”

“In the last few years, I used to ask my astronomy students: ‘How do you think people will react if China lands astronauts on the moon before we do?’ I was always a little surprised with the answers.

“A lot of them didn’t seem to care. Yep. It wasn’t exactly a re-creation of the Sputnik moment. And that’s a serious and deeper question. Does anybody really think that the Chinese will go to the moon with only peaceful purposes?”

He never leaned on students to think like he does. But he did want them to think deeper.

How will the Regents decide things next month?

Blasi, the state senator who thinks some professors don’t see all the larger story, thinks Wichita State will come out of this okay. For one thing, he said, their enrollment increased substantially while enrollments at the other five universities have either declined or remained flat. “They’re doing a great job of positioning themselves for the future.”

Worried WSU professors have also taken to heart a promise made by their own leadership. They said that WSU’s president, Rick Muma, and his provost, Shirley Lefever, have told WSU faculty, in person, that they won’t let anything bad happen to physics or philosophy programs.

Lefever said the same thing when I spoke with her: In fact, she said we all might soon find ourselves anxiously embracing more philosophy programs, for this reason: The looming (and frightening) tech and social revolution caused by new artificial intelligence programs might create world-changing damage if employed by the wrong hands. Philosophy is one discipline that could directly address this.

And physics? Well, Wichita State just happens to be one of the better-known schools worldwide concerning the teaching of engineering. “And you can’t get an engineering degree here without taking physics.”

But she also said — and Rolph also said — that come April, it’ll be the Regents’ call.