Morgan State University Opposes New Ph.D. Program at Nearby Towson University https://www.jbhe.com/2023/07/morgan-state-university-opposes-new-ph-d-program-at-nearby-towson-university/ In a letter to state lawmakers. President Wilson said the new program duplicated a well-established program at Morgan State. The new program, he argues, would pull students who would have enrolled at Morgan State to Towson University. Mary Pat Seurkamp, chair of the Maryland Higher Education Commission, stated that “Towson’s proposed program is not unreasonably duplicative of Morgan’s Ph.D. in business administration generally or of the concentration in supply chain and logistics management. The majority found that while some elements of the programs were similar, ultimately the two programs have distinct differences in their curricula. We found that there was insufficient evidence of demonstrable harm to the existing program at Morgan.” Morgan State's program: https://www.morgan.edu/information-science-and-systems/academic-programs/graduate/business-administration Towson's program: https://www.towson.edu/cbe/departments/business-analytics-technology-management/grad/business-analytics-doctorate/ What do you think?
I think if another school starts a program and students choose that one instead of yours, your program deserves to die. Although this is an interesting artifact of there being six public universities in Baltimore City and County. And that's not counting community colleges, or private institutions like Johns Hopkins.
This reminds me of the defunct University of Tennessee at Nashville (UTN) and Tennessee State University (TSU). Clearly, there isn't legal racial segregation in education today (and it wasn't in 1977 when UTN and TSU's situation occurred). Hence, the situation may be a little different. However, there continue to be concerns in some states where state-funded PWIs receive more funding than their HBCU counterparts. Morgan State and Tennessee State are examples of this. Could Morgan State see this as the state positioning a PWI to compete unfairly with an HBCU? The Tennessee Case "When plans were announced to construct a freestanding building on Charlotte Avenue downtown to house an expanded UTN, concerns arose that the state was perpetuating a segregated system of higher education, since predominantly black Tennessee State University existed nearby. A decade of litigation ensued, ending in a court decision in 1977 which forced the merger of UTN into Tennessee State on July 1, 1979. The former UTN building was renamed TSU's Avon Williams campus." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Tennessee_at_Nashville
