Platforms and Trade-offs

If you go back far enough in the history of higher education, universities consisted of a mix of the humanities and the professions, with the former largely a set of gateway courses to the latter. Then, roughly at the turn of the nineteenth century, something quite momentous happened. It came to the attention of universities that no one particularly liked them or saw their usefulness, and that they were in great danger of losing the support of governments with respect to their monopoly on degree-granting. Simply put, they realized that in the much more dangerous post-1789 world, they were seen as both irrelevant and superfluous. 

The solution that universities hit upon, essentially, was to invite scientific disciplines into the university (until that time, laboratories often existed privately, unrelated to teaching institutions). Over the long term, the marriage of universities and scientific disciplines had a few effects. The most salutary one was that universities rather than sciences specifically became associated with progress and modernity, which a casual observer in the mid-eighteenth century would have found quite surprising. Less salutary, perhaps, was that the humanities began to organize themselves in “disciplines” on the model of the sciences. In the sciences there was a relatively simple trade-off between specialization and world-changing research that seemed worth the trade. In the humanities, which produces much serious scholarship of which little can be described as “world-changing”, it basically just created silos where none were needed.

Now one of the conditions of scientific disciplines entering university was that the university should on no condition be allowed to dictate curriculum – that was the job of disciplines or, in their eventual administrative incarnations, “departments”. Again, this tended to work better where disciplines actually had some kind of unity around ends and definitions of quality, which sciences take for granted but humanities absolutely do not (see Michèle Johnson’s How Professors Think for more on this, and in particularly the disciplinary incoherence of “English”). Where such unity was lacking and professors couldn’t be bothered to do the thinking necessary to come up with a genuine curriculum, degree requirements tended to devolve more quickly into mere smorgasbord: not a defined set of knowledge skills and principles to master, but rather a random bucket of course-hours to complete, with modules designed more around the instructor’s interests rather than students’ (see especially Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas). 

Anyways, the point here is that from the point of view of curriculum and program the modern university is a platform, kind of like Amazon Marketplace. It exists to provide a space where individual disciplines can do sell their products. That’s the way the disciplines always wanted it. 

But here’s the thing. Amazon does not cross-subsidize products. Everyone sinks or swims on their own. If you can’t make your numbers, no one bails you out. This, to put it mildly, is not how disciplines expect universities to behave. Rather, they expect bail-outs. They expect that a benevolent university will tax other disciplines in order to save their own.  Or they expect the university to devote extra resources to recruiting more students for their discipline, presumably – to some extent, at least – at the expense of recruiting them in other disciplines.

 (It is a widespread belief among humanities professors that universities are to blame for their enrolment troubles on the grounds that “they don’t recruit hard enough for us”. This view seems to be based on the observation that universities compete for students in “hot” disciplines like Engineering, but it’s a mix-up of cause and effect. Admissions do not create “hot” disciplines by creating campaigns around those disciplines; they chase students in disciplines that are already “hot”.)  

The question is: should disciplines have it both ways? Should they expect simultaneously to have complete control over curriculum and offerings and staffing while at the same time expect cross-subsidies in the event that they can’t cover their costs (or to add resources to recruitment in disciplines where demand is weak?) When all disciplines are increasing enrolment, as they were in Canada for the first decade of this century, this is not an issue. But when disciplines start losing students without dropping a proportionate number of instructors, when their costs start to rise consistently above income, and where the institutions themselves are losing millions of dollars a year – that’s where maybe we need to start to re-think this bargain. 

(Stipulated, determining precise costs and revenues at a departmental or program level is tricky. But figuring out which programs are more and less financially efficient is not that tricky…when results are obvious, even bad methodologies can pick them up).

This isn’t an argument against using surpluses from one part of a university to cross-subsidize another. In my view, cross-subsidization is the whole reason you have universities rather than a series of disciplinary-based schools. It is, however, an argument about whether cross-subsidization should be indefinite, and about whether it should come with strings attached or not, and what kinds of strings are permissible.

At the moment, these kinds of questions are being posed specifically about the humanities, but the dilemma is the same no matter which disciplines are in trouble. If artificial intelligence comes especially for jobs in the IT industry, or if it causes huge disruptions to entry-level hiring in major corporations, the questions universities are posing now about the sustainability of humanities will also be posed about schools of computer science and business. The issue, fundamentally, is how to reconcile decentralized control of academic resources with a central budget which in the short-term at least is very definitely fixed. 

It’s a trade-off that every institution needs to make. There are multiple approaches to this question, and each institution may come to some different answer. The point, though, is to discuss it openly and rationally, and preferably without normative claims about whether such and such a discipline is “useful” or not or whether an institution can be considered a “real” institution in its absence. Just make rules, and stick to them.