Big news in Alberta the other day: the University of Alberta has decided to cut fourteen (14!) programs, in the humanities. That’s on top of a programs cull just two years ago in which seventeen programs – mostly in Arts – were also axed! Oh my God! War on the humanities, etc, etc.
Or at least that’s the way it sounds, until you read the fine print around the announcement and realise that these fourteen programs, collectively, have 30 students enrolled in them. The puzzle here, it seems, is not so much “why are these programs being cancelled” as “why on earth were they ever approved in the first place”?
For the record, here are the programs being axed: Majors programs in Latin American studies, Scandinavian studies, honours programs in classical languages, creative writing, history/classics (combined) religious studies, women and gender studies, comparative literature, French, math (that is, a BA Hon in math – which is completely separate from the BSc in Math, which is going nowhere), and also Scandinavian studies (again). And technically, they are not being axed, but rather “suspending admissions”, which means that current students will be able to finish their degrees.
Two takeaways from this:
The first is that the term “programs” is a very odd and sometimes misunderstood one. Universities can get rid of programs without affecting a single job, without even reducing a single course offerings. In the smorgasboard world of North American universities, all programs are essentially virtual. The infrastructure of a university is essentially the panoply of courses offered by departments. Academic entrepreneurs can then choose to bundle certain configurations of courses into “programs” (with the approval of a lot of committees and Senate of course). Of course, programs need co-ordinators and a co-ordinators get stipends and more importantly a small bump in prestige. But overall, programs are very close to costless because departments are absorbing all the costs of delivering the actual courses. (The real costs are actually the ludicrous amount of programming time involved in getting registrarial software to recognize all these different degree pathway requirements).
It doesn’t actually have to be this way. Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Science only has about fifty degree programs; pretty much every mid-size Canadian university has twice that. And there’s no obvious benefit to students in this degree of specialization. What’s the advantage of this? Why, apart from inertia and a desire not to rock the boat, do we put up with this?
A second point, though. Readers may well ask “why do these kinds of program cuts always affect the humanities more than any other faculty”. This is a good question. And the answer is: because no other faculty hacks itself into ever-tinier pieces the way humanities does. Seriously. This isn’t a question of specialization – every field has that – it’s a question of whether or not to create academic structures and bureaucracies to parallel every specialization.
Imagine, for instance, what biology would look like if it were run like humanities. You’d probably have separate degrees and program co-ordinators for epigenetics, ichnology, bioclimatology, cryobiology, limnology, morphology – the potential list goes on and on. But of course biology doesn’t do that, because biology is not ridiculous. Humanities, on the other hand…
There are lots of good histories of the humanities out there (I recommend Rens Bod’s A New History of the Humanities and James Turner’s Philology: the Origins of the Modern Humanities), but as far as I know no one has ever really looked in a historical way as to why humanities, alone among branches of the academy, chose to Balkanize itself administratively in such an odd way. For a set of disciplines which constantly worries about being under attack, you’d think that grouping together in larger units would be an obvious defence posture. Why not just have big programs in philosophy, languages and literature and philology/history and be done with it?
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Among Harvard’s program offerings, even if we ignore environmental areas or bioengineering or chemical biology, there are departments or units on Human Evolutionary Biology, Molecular and Cell Biology, Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, and there are non-departmental programs in Chemical and Physical Biology, and Neurobiology. How puzzling is that?
I fear that Universities and Colleges are offering more programs because they believe it will increase enrollment. Each student can take a program designed exactly to their interests.
We approve new programs with reckless abandon but we are loathe to suspend or delete a program. This has also led to many more double diplomas at graduation. As the overlap between programs increases the effort required to qualify for two decreases.
It’s all well and good to refer to Harvard, but please acknowledge that, among their streamlined programs, is the “Special Concentrations” option. It strikes me that this gets at the same reality: that some students increasingly want (and should be allowed) to pursue specific research questions in their degrees. Perhaps Harvard’s “by-petition” system is a better way to approach those demands, but let’s not pretend that Harvard is somehow above “Balkanization” (a phrase whose troubled history might better be illuminated by an undergraduate pursuing one of the customized degree programs you rail against.)
http://handbook.fas.harvard.edu/book/special-concentrations
There are lots of opportunity costs to slicing Humanities too thin — recruitment, advising, marketing, managing. Students are still interested in the humanities, but I agree with Alex that it would be better to have bigger buckets, if you will, which would still allow students to strike off in a number of related directions. When this story hit the Edmonton Journal, I had people from the community say — if students aren’t attracted to a program, surely the sensible thing would be to rethink the program, which is exactly what we are doing.
Arts at the UofA is doing the right thing. Part of the problem is that too many faculty members want to have programmes that reflect only their expertise. They seem to treat students like mini-me’s, but most students do not become academics, nor should they.
As for the piece above, I do find it rather odd that in all of these programme suspensions, departments that saw the lights and went from, let’s say four programmes to just one, are never mentioned…. Do take a look at the vibrant Department of East Asian Studies there.
Just to be clear for Lesley, my intervention is not a critique of Alberta’s decision making. In 2000, an undergraduate student in Humanities at McMaster could take a combined honours in three modern languages (German, Italian and Spanish), women’s studies, and comparative literature. All were phased out — we expanded our Linguistics program and introduced the Cognitive Science of Language — (I might add that a Dean was prevented from phasing out another program by a vote in our University Senate — by faculty members outside the Faculty who thought no self-respecting university could do without a program in x, no matter how small). We also recently closed our Cultural Studies and Critical Theory program, not because it had tiny numbers but because it was stretching the resources of an English Department that already was well known for its expertise in cultural studies and critical theory. In the 1990s, we combined four small programs into a single unit, and in the 2000s, another two programs into a single unit. In the 2000s, we restructured staff so that we have administrative coordinators who are in charge of more than one “department”. So what I object to is the narrative that sees Humanities as stubbornly resistant to change, in contrast to everyone else. I dare say that I have observed far more change in my Faculty in my over 25 years at McMaster than in many others.
Good point Ken. I agree — Our East Asian Studies program has merged their many programs into one and is growing by leaps and bounds. And our Modern Languages and Cultural Studies department is on its way to a new, streamlined degree program. It can happen.
My lived experience was what happened at the University of Calgary where Greek and Roman Studies, Religious Studies, and several other departments (all of which have been recognized academic disciplines since the 19th century, and all of which were already ‘big tents’) were strongly encouraged to merge. GRST had the students, and the courses for students in STEM departments (“Greek and Latin for anatomy” and “the ancient city for people in architecture and urban planning” and that sort of thing), but at the meetings I attended it did not seem to be about evidence and money.
It’s an interesting point, though I think the “market” for students, and the way that market operates is a significant driver of the ways in which humanities (and social sciences) organise their curricula and programme offerings. If high / secondary school exit awards are organised into disciplinary categories (English literature, history, specific modern and foreign languages etc) then it is inevitable perhaps that the universities into which they progress reflect that. A student who wishes to study in greater depth a specific subject (such as history) is perhaps less likely to be attracted to a programme in the Humanities than one that explicitly affirms the disciplinary boundary. The biology example that Alex uses is a good example of this. There is an A level in Biology – not in epigenetics, so it is no wonder that students apply for a subject called Biology, or that this is the dgree programme offered (with later specialisation), Of course, this is not to say that a broader humnaities and / or social sciences degree offer is not intellectually defensible or desriable, and with effective marketing could be very successful; but the reason lies largely, I think, with the organisation of school curricula.
I tend to think that one reason for this sort of program bloat is that we’re all recognized and rewarded for innovation, including curriculum innovation. Nobody gets a merit award for teaching in conventional ways the same Chaucer class which has been on the books since the 1960s.
Curriculum bloat shouldn’t be seeing as a sign of “resisting change.” It should be seen as the consequence of having embraced change at an earlier time. Once upon a time, every one of those programs being cut seemed innovative.