You may, over the past year, followed the story of Stevens Point, a mid-sized (8000 student) regional campus in the University of Wisconsin system. I want to look at this story today, because I think it contains some important lessons about how universities actually make and spend their money.
Back in March 2018 the college, facing falling enrolment, announced it was going to kill thirteen humanities and social sciences programs – American studies, art (excluding graphic design), English (excluding English for teacher certification), French, geography, geoscience, German, history (excluding social science for teacher certification), music literature, philosophy, political science, sociology and Spanish – and actually lay off tenured staff. It was then going to use the funds saved to expand programs seen as more “promising” in terms of generating enrolment, such as chemical engineering, computer information systems, conservation law enforcement, finance, fire science, graphic design, management and marketing. This was obviously kind of a big deal, with the usual suspects lining up to denounce what was “obviously” a right-wing attack on the humanities.
About six months later, the university came up with a new plan which spared about half the units in question. Then about six weeks ago, the university came up with a third plan which said hey, you know what, it didn’t need to cut any programs at all. In part this was because of some creative re-imagining of the programs under consideration (history was given more social science content, geography was remodelled into somethings a little more geo-science-y, etc.), but in large part it was because a lot of people in the affected departments chose to leave the institution before the cuts happened – and, having left, helped the institution meet its budget targets without actually laying anyone off (this is sort of the academic equivalent of self-deportation).
Now, if we wanted, we could probably get carried away into the minutiae of the actual events: in particular whether the provost was brilliantly Machiavellian or criminally clumsy. But I think that would detract from the two big lessons to be learned from this event: namely, that programs are not cost centres per se, and that enrolment levels do matter.
Let’s start with that first one. There’s a really good reason that program closures are pretty rare in higher education. It’s not so much that faculty are powerful (though that is sometimes the case); rather, it’s that the existence of a program, in and of itself, is minimal. It is the individual courses that make up a program, and the faculty salary required to support teaching in those programs, that costs money. Whether you offer a couple of dozen English courses as a degree or the same number of courses as “service courses” to students in other degree courses, the cost of putting on the course is more or less the same, holding instructor costs constant. The difference is maybe a few thousand to pay someone a stipend to act as a program co-ordinator or maybe a bit more, if you go further and abandon the idea of English as a “department” and get rid of department chair pay as well. But that’s small beans. The real game on the cost side is playing with the proportions of professors who are engaged full-time (expensive, mainly because you are paying for research output) and part-time (cheap, because you are not). As Stevens Point shows, pretty much any program can be made cost-effective if you reduce the labour costs sufficiently, but as I showed back here in a financial analysis of a women’s/gender studies program at Mount Allison a few years ago, there does come a point where you have to ask yourself if a program is worth keeping if it isn’t generating enough revenue to support full-time instructors.
That bring us to the revenue issue. Fundamentally, classes need students who bring with them both tuition dollars and public subsidies. (The subsidies are explicit or implicit depending on whether the institution is in a province/state with a per-student funding formula or some sort of lump-sum funding). One of the weird things about the way the Stevens Point discussion was framed was as “humanities vs. everyone else” (see here and here for some examples) as opposed to “what students want to pay money to study vs. everything else”. Or, to put it another way, there seems to be an implicit assumption in some quarters that the duty of the university is to provide support to the disciplines no matter how low their crowd appeal. Which, to my mind, seems to put the interests of (certain) professors ahead of the interests of students.
To the extent that anyone outside Wisconsin should really care about Stevens Point and the fiasco, it seems to me that this was the debate we really should have had: when is it OK to close a program or downgrade a department from one offering degrees to one just offering service courses? I don’t think many people would argue that programs should never face an enrolment test, but then what should the threshold be?
Curious to hear your views.
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First, student demand isn’t just a given like the weather. What students wish to study is in large measure a product of the culture which surrounds them. At the moment, this culture emphasizes university as job training, so of course they’ll favour any major which shares its name with a job. Those who have emphasized the instrumental value of a degree — guidance counsellors, politicians, university PR offices, Maclean’s, even consultants — must share some responsibility for the decline in enrollments in some programs.
Similarly, what students wish to study in a particular institution is, at least to an extent, a product of what that institution chooses to emphasize, as expressed in advertising, in fundraising, but also in hiring. A department which never gets any new hires will gradually teach fewer courses, rendering its major less attractive, and thereby justifying the cutting of its program, after its slow destruction by malign neglect. Once its courses can’t serve a major, there’s even less reason to take them, until the discipline disappears altogether. Alternatively, the program might change its character, as in the example you gave of Stevens Point’s history program becoming a social science. The administration convincing people who’ve put their entire lives into history as humanities that they should just up stakes and take early retirement is part of the process of shutting down a discipline, not an alternative to it. In any case, programs become less attractive when they aren’t championed, and what to champion is an administrative decision.
As a related point, and to answer your question more directly, we should be chary of removing programs, but also of creating new ones, which might have to be shut down in turn when the wheel of fortune — which is to say, demand — turns again. The life of a discipline exists on the secular scale. Every faculty member has to dedicate a large part of her or his life to complete PhD training, maybe a postdoc, then struggle for tenure. Only a very long-term commitment to the discipline by the institution — and by the institutions in aggregate, by academia — can justify such a commitment on the part of faculty. Moreover, this assumes that one’s supervisors were actually available, and therefore that they had themselves been able to build a career and to earn a PhD under somebody else, in turn.
Building a university is not like building a business — which should tack to the winds of customer expectations, though it’s worth noting that many businesses treat their customers with ill-disguised contempt. Rather, it’s like building a cathedral, a task for the ages. Indeed, before the University of Paris came into being, students met to study at Notre Dame.
Finally, it’s worth noting that shutting a program actually does come at the expense of whatever students are left in it, who will have fewer choices of courses, assuming that they are able to complete their degrees at all. Even alumni will find their degrees less valuable, since the granting institution has only a fading reputation in the field.
That’s not to say that every program should continue forever, but it is to say that we cannot make a valid decision using the reasoning that is endemic within the discourse of post-secondary education policy. The decline of certain disciplines is not an invitation to meet changing customer demand, but a summons to consider what universities are for, and to recommit to their highest ideals.