Tenured faculty members could lose their jobs. The University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, Patterson explained in a memo, could “no longer be all things to all people.”

Patterson’s plan came as Stevens Point and many other public universities in rural America face a crisis.

Student enrollment has plummeted, money from states has dropped and demographic trends promise even worse days ahead.

Critics say that in trying to carve out a sustainable path for Stevens Point — and build a model for other struggling, regionally focused universities — administrators are risking the very essence of a four-year college experience.

“Part of the fear is, is this an attempt to really kind of radically change the identity of this institution?” asked Jennifer Collins, a political-science professor, who wondered aloud whether Stevens Point would become a “pre-professional, more polytechnic type of university.”

Kim Mueller, 21, a senior who hopes to become a history teacher at a Wisconsin high school, said her first reaction to the proposal was: “What is a university without a history major?”

In recent decades, young families left rural Wisconsin for Madison and Milwaukee, which had their own University of Wisconsin campuses. Fewer students graduated from high school in the area around Stevens Point, including a 14 percent drop in its home county from 2012 to 2016. And under former Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican whose term ended Monday, state funding declined and a mandatory tuition freeze made it hard for the college to make up the difference.

By last spring, the university, which has about 7,700 students, was looking at a two-year deficit of about $4.5 million. The state, which had provided half the university’s budget in the 1970s, was now covering only 17 percent of it.

“Sometimes, I liken it to climate change,” said Greg Summers, the provost, who helped come up with the plan to remake Stevens Point. “The higher-ed climate has changed profoundly and it’s not going back to the old normal.”