Every once in a while, and it is a rare while, I check to see what’s being reported at The Chronicle of Higher Education. It was a publication that I not only read when I was employed but even subscribed to it until the university provided free access through its online catalog. My academic career was, interestingly enough, book-ended by my commentaries that were published in the Chronicle.
The headlines at the Chronicle tell me that everything in academia is simply more of the same. One headline in particular caught my attention: ‘The gutting of the liberal arts”. And, hence, the title of this post!
Even before I read the essay in full—and I hope you too will read it—I knew what the author would report about: Declining enrollment, budget shortfalls, decisions made in order to realign and restructure the university to serve the future, blah, blah, blah. Because that’s the template that is used everywhere. It is almost as if university presidents go to leadership seminars where they are trained with the latest buzzwords that are often borrowed from the business world.
This essay on the gutting of the liberal arts is written from the perspective of a member of the faculty at the State University of New York at Potsdam. The university:
recently fired seven tenured faculty members, at least one of whom had worked there for more than 35 years. The precise number of contract nonrenewals on top of this is a closely guarded secret. Eighteen programs have been discontinued, and more have been so depleted as not to have any full-time faculty members at all. This, it was recently announced, is just the first round of cuts.
The “realignment” plan at SUNY, Potsdam, employed the usual buzzwords, writes the professor.
The author writes:
What is clear about the new “sustainable” model of a “revisioned” university is that it will have less of the arts and humanities. The American public has become convinced that the only justifiable purpose for higher education is to get people jobs (though it isn’t), and they are convinced that one can’t get a good-paying job with a degree in philosophy, art history, French, sculpture, or dance (though one can).
And for those who tend to view this only through a “Damn Republicans!” lens, I love reminding them that their favorite President Obama was no exception either. As President, in 2014, Obama publicly mocked art history as an undergraduate major. Later, he sent a handwritten apology to a University of Texas art history professor regretting his glib remarks. But, the damage had been done.
Over the years, politicians of all political stripes have been virulently attacking various fields of inquiry that they deem wasteful. The harsh sound bites quickly reverberated among the public and through the political world that determines funding for public universities.
The SUNY, Potsdam, professor writes:
This attitude toward certain majors is no longer confined to the humanities — even traditional STEM disciplines like physics and chemistry and math meet the same fate as Spanish and theater. The risibly misguided question “What does one do with a degree in physics?” is now as resonant in the public mind as the equally misguided question “What does one do with a B.A. in philosophy?” has been for some time.
Years ago, actually it was decades ago, the decline in the number of students majoring in physics had overtaken the decline in liberal education majors like history. Physics was deemed worthless. Universities like my former employer have one physics professor because—this is my speculation—physics courses are one of the requirements for medical school admission! Not something that even the greatest intellects like Einstein and Oppenheimer and Feynman would have ever imagined!
Not far from SUNY, Potsdam, is the University of Connecticut. I am sure you heard a lot about UConn during the recent March Madness. It is a basketball powerhouse. But, ahem, would you have guessed that the university has serious budget problems?
Perhaps you now wonder how to square the university’s budget problems with its basketball success. It is a simple answer: The university chooses to spend more on athletics than on academics, as this piece points out in laying out an argument that “Connecticut taxpayers might consider questioning the priorities of UConn leadership”:
Despite the popular misconception, intercollegiate athletics does not provide revenue to the university; on the contrary, it drains campus coffers. UConn Athletics does not even come close to balancing its own budget. It spent more than double what it generated and was bailed out with $56 million comprising $49 million directly from campus funds.
But, of course, politicians of all stripes—including Barack Obama—love college sports, so do most taxpayers including the left-leaning faculty. Liberal arts is for losers!
All through my life in India, I didn't know that there was something out there called “liberal education,” but that's exactly what my heart had always been after. In India, we kids who were good in school were compelled to think only about two options—engineering or medicine. Rare was an academically talented kid who fought against the system in order to study literature or history. That’s how I ended up earning an undergraduate degree in electrical and electronic engineering, even though my heart was never, ever, in it.
My intellectual world opened up when I came to the US for graduate schooling. In 1987, I joined the urban planning program at the University of Southern California (USC) and, for the first time in my life, I had a formal and structured opportunity to study philosophy, political science, geography, and more. It was liberal education on steroids! I was in heaven. I immediately fell in love with liberal education and latched on to it pretty strongly.
Over the years, my employer ceased to be a public version of a liberal arts college. Programs that had the appearance of being professional and employable were increasingly favored over traditional disciplines. The writing on the wall became clearer with each academic term that it was a liability for me to be loudly associated with liberal education. But, I continued to champion it because that was—and is—the correct thing to do.
In my column in the local newspaper in September 2013, I wrote about liberal education and noted there:
Society needs scientists and engineers, and also plumbers and teachers and ditch-diggers and a whole array of personnel. The extreme fascination that we have with STEM is rapidly leading to a systematic gutting of the very idea of liberal education, and a misallocation of scarce budgetary resources. …
It is not more college-level STEM that we need in the US. Instead, we need basic scientific literacy among my fellow-citizens. It is simply bizarre that the richest and most powerful country that the world has ever known also has huge numbers of people who have very little understanding of natural selection and evolution, or global climate change, or even the four seasons.
Finally, as we look around at the world, the concerns and worries that we have are not always problems for science and technology to solve. We need a much broader understanding to keep up with, for instance, why there are protests in Egypt, or how it is possible for Robert Mugabe to continue to mess up what was once the breadbasket of southern Africa, or why tens of millions gather at Kumbh Melas in India.
As the SUNY, Potsdam, professor writes:
[Perhaps] these cuts will have the financial benefits the administrators, consultants, and legislators are gambling on. Maybe once the immediate outrage calms down, enrollments will rebound. But at what cost will that possibility of success come?