Month: December 2015

(1)

A classic program closure was the 2010 decision of the administration at the State University of New York (SUNY), Albany, to “suspend all new admissions” to French, Italian, Russian, classics, and theater, leaving Spanish as the university’s sole language major. The decision was made “in recognition that there are comparatively fewer students enrolled in these degree programs” (“University”). Faculty members reacted with disbelief that the cuts to the state’s share of the campus budget, significant though they were, required program closure. They also noted the absence of prior notification, consultation, review, or “any hint” of “concern about the programs” (Jaschik).

In contrast, President George M. Philip’s prepared statement asserted that an “extensive consultative process with faculty” had in fact taken place, that the decision was not commentary on the quality of the faculty, and that the university remained committed to the humanities and the arts (“University”). The administration’s blanket denials of faculty accusations were accepted by the media and other outsiders who didn’t have the time or interest to sort through a “he said, she said” conflict. Some Albany faculty members analyzed and critiqued the basis of the closure decision after the closure was announced. Shared governance is not supposed to consist of ex post facto criticism but of joint deliberation leading up to a collaborative decision. Faculty groups, particularly the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), have been seeking “meaningful . . . participation in the budgetary process” for a hundred years—with limited success (Gerber 75–76, 160).

The Albany faculty outcry does seem to have generated a budgetary information meeting for the benefit of interested faculty members. This meeting occurred at a faculty forum two months after the departmental deactivations were announced and seven months after members of the university community began to request full disclosure of the university’s All Funds Budget. Brett Bowles, a French professor, noted that even after a Freedom of Information Law request, the university was disclosing only the state share of the budget, leaving 63% of the total budget in the dark. Bowles also observed that the overall budget had not decreased in step with the state cuts but had remained stable, that the alleged closure savings of somewhat more than $2 million a year were 0.46% of the overall campus budget, and that greater savings could have been obtained with cuts to nonacademic programs. He concluded that the cuts to the language and arts programs were cuts of choice and that senior managers were avoiding full budgetary disclosure because complete data would not have supported the president’s claim that deactivation was a “tragic yet inevitable fiscal necessity” (“Fuzzy Budget Math”).

Bowles was most likely right that these were cuts of choice—though in the continued absence of full financial data we don’t actually know. In another report, he listed a number of departments whose student-faculty ratios were similar enough to suggest the targeting of languages was discretionary (“Humanities Cuts”). It didn’t matter. The administration achieved some salary savings by turning an already consolidated, low-cost languages, literatures, and cultures unit into a service department attached to a small Spanish graduate program. The full professors are gone, and most instruction is delivered by lecturers, who are often the program’s remaining graduate students. Bowles sought and found a new job at Indiana University.

How did SUNY Albany find itself in this situation in which, in violation of well-established shared governance requirements of consultation and disclosure, a respectable research and teaching department was converted into a service unit? As particular programs become candidates for cuts, the faculty and staff members who represent those programs must be brought into the process well in advance of any decision. Yet faculty senates have too often accepted the administrative claim that budgetary data is the administration’s to own and that the administration reveals it at its sole discretion. In my opinion, faculty members have a professional duty to tend their academic program, a duty that is every bit as solemn as the fiduciary duty of a governing board: faculty members are responsible for the academic solvency of the university in the same way that the board is responsible for its fiscal solvency. Unfortunately most tenure-track faculty members do not share this opinion, despite book-length exposés of managerial ascendency over faculty professionals (Burgan; Ginsberg; Gerber) and despite the AAUP’s recent clarification of procedures for program closures that would enable faculty members to fulfill their obligation to maintain academic quality (Faculty Role 4–5, 11–12). Key elements such as a review committee elected by faculty members and that committee’s “access to detailed program, department, and administration-unit budgets” (12) will never be put into practice without case-by-case effort, which requires a broad faculty conviction that governance rights should be shared. I don’t believe this conviction exists in this country.

(2)

But let’s posit a case in which faculty members do insist on full participation and in which, in an unusual twist, a university administration not only accepts the faculty’s academic-fiduciary duty in theory but also implements it in practice. An elected faculty committee has been set up, and it has been told that it will have access to five years of whatever financial data it requests. In their first meeting, what data should the faculty committee request?

The AAUP report stipulates “detailed program, department, and administrative-unit budgets” that allow for “the determination of the financial position of the institution as a whole.” It specifies that these “must precede any discussion of program closures” (Faculty Role 11-12). My basic budget items are these:

1. The campus’s All Funds Budget, both revenues and expenditures
2. The same budget, disaggregated into academic divisions and departments
3. Comparisons of workload-based revenues and expenditures, department by department. This means data on departmental enrollments as well as on majors.

The list focuses on getting complete budgets to faculty members so that the workload and revenue contributions of every type of professor can be seen and compared. The purpose of item 2 is to show income and expenditures on the departmental scale where shrinkage or closure is generally discussed. SUNY Albany’s administration used this kind of data to claim that ending all language majors except Spanish (plus Theater) would save over $2 million a year. But they did not disclose these data. In my experience, budget officials try to keep budgets as general or high-level as possible, such that departmental workload and resources cannot be compared.

The purpose of item 3 is to assess claims that a department runs a loss or does not pay for itself. The assessment requires instructional workload data and not just head counts. That is, it requires enrollment data. Debates about the value of various disciplines are overly focused on the number of majors, but the number of majors gives an incomplete picture of a department’s activity.

It’s easiest to explain through an illustration, and I reproduce a table from my book Unmaking the Public University that summarized this kind of data. For brevity’s sake I’ve limited the summary to divisions, since the main point here is the structure of the data.

As I pointed out in the book, headline statements about faculty productivity always focus on the right-hand half of the table. At research universities, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines have vastly greater research revenues than other types of disciplines (column 5): the science and engineering total is more than thirty times greater than the combined total of the arts, humanities, and social sciences (I think of them anagramically as SASH).

The left-hand side of the table calculates income earned through teaching. These revenue summaries were calculated by using nonpublic data on overall student enrollments for each department in the division in question. For example, a sociology department gets credit for teaching economics, history, and psychology majors who enroll in sociology courses. When all their taught students are combined, SASH disciplines generate twice the teaching revenue of the STEM disciplines.

Administrators often focus on column 7, which shows aggregated per-faculty revenue generation. It supports the stereotype that STEM faculty members carry the revenue load for SASH faculty members. SUNY Albany managers may well have used this kind of (incomplete) data to conclude that language majors should be closed in the name of fiscal discipline.

But faculty members need the full data set; it will allow them to calculate the revenues and expenditures tied to their actual activities. In the SASH disciplines, faculty members earn revenues mainly through instruction. At large public colleges and universities like the one represented in the table, these revenues can overshadow teaching revenues in the STEM disciplines. They derive from the tuition and state funding attached to the students a department teaches—not just the majors, the total enrollments.

Faculty members need to be able to compare the revenues a unit generates through its overall instructional workload with the funds it has on hand to expend. Whether enrollment money comes from the state, student tuition, university endowment interest, gifts, or some other source, it is distributed to a given department through the campus’s central administration. Central administrations collect enrollment money from many sources and then distribute varying proportions of it among departments. They do not, as a rule, give a department the same revenue that its workload earns. Some departments get more instructional revenue than what they earn through their teaching, and some get less.

This variation can be seen in the calculation in column 4—the “ratio of actual to earned revenues.” The engineering division received twice the instructional revenues that it earned through its teaching workload. Arts and humanities got somewhat less than half.

One major implication of this asymmetry is that the SASH disciplines are cross-subsidizing the STEM disciplines, in contrast to the usual stereotype of the soft subjects’ being unable to pay their way (Newfield, “Ending”). My point here is that faculty members cannot agree or disagree with administrative claims about departmental solvency without the data they need to compare revenues and expenditures.

It is possible that the SUNY Albany Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures could have used workload revenue and expenditures data to prove its fiscal solvency. If the department was running in the red, it could have used these data to come up with a plan to improve revenues or to justify its specific losses in terms of its larger service to the university. But the faculty members seem not to have had access to workload materials—only to numbers of majors, which are featured in Bowles’s analyses. Thus it would seem that because the administration preserved its monopoly on relevant financial information it won an argument that didn’t take place.

If workload information is withheld, faculty bodies should put the burden of proof on the administration that a department, particularly in the humanities, is losing money. I realize that there are many low-enrollment language departments, that some arts and humanities enrollments may have shifted to STEM fields since the table’s data was collected (majors have shifted), and that the case in my table is not necessarily representative. None of this affects the methodological point, which is that academic standards for the evidence required for a valid decision are far higher than those for politics, public relations, or, regrettably, much administration. Universities should use academic standards for evidence in their decision making about department closures.

However the workload details may vary, language and literature programs are very cheap. They are conducted by faculty members whose research is generally self-funded and therefore largely free to the university. Their teaching has been massified and adjuncted over several decades. Their students receive a fraction of the institutional investment received by STEM students, although both kinds of students pay the same or similar tuition. Leaving aside the longer-term struggle for budgetary equity that will need to be joined sooner rather than later, expanding shared governance to shared data would put humanities faculty members in a position to show that their departments are worth more even in financial terms than the limited investments their institutions have generally made in them.

(3)

Faculty members must also recognize that the issue of a department’s institutional value now goes beyond the question of its profit and loss. This further evaluation applies to managers and faculty members alike, but for different reasons. Managers are looking not just for break-even points but also for comparative returns on investment. The upshot is that language and literature departments can avoid losses or even make money, and their administration can still want to shut them down.

One important example comes from England, where accounting management is more aggressive than it is in the United States: the closure of the Department of Philosophy at Middlesex University in London in 2010, which led to the group departure of the faculty to another university. This is an interesting case because the shuttered department was so prominent. Philosophy at Middlesex had a special national niche in Continental philosophy:

[It] was ranked a very impressive 14th out of all philosophy submissions, the highest of all post-1992 universities and, apparently, the highest ranking of any of Middlesex’s departments. It has a very large MA programme and previously received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a major research project. By any public standard it is a success story. (Wolff)

The department’s entrepreneurial strength was impressive. Seven philosophers generated £1 million in extramural humanities grants in six years. Why would a university shut its highest ranked department, a department that was ironically succeeding in terms of academic capitalism?

A member of the department, Peter Osborne, has written a blow-by-blow account of the negotiations that led to the shutdown (see Alliez and Osborne). In this account, the administration said the department was being shut for purely financial reasons. When the department members reviewed the administration’s sustainability spreadsheets, they found that they were not running a loss—though their profits were greatly reduced by one item, a mandatory contribution to central university expenses. This contribution was a tax or rent, and the university managers set it at 55% of departmental revenues. Philosophy was able to pay its rent. But the calculation meant that the department could not run in the black unless it could cover all its staff and teaching expenses on 45% of its actual revenues. Whether it was profitable or not in a particular year, its administrative rent branded it a low-income unit.

One could criticize the high level of administrative rent as an autocratic confiscation that defined the Philosophy Department as low-income in order to justify administrative bloat. Osborne does a good job of this in his paper:

What justifies the cost of “central services” at Middlesex University being 55% of its income? Nobody knows. De facto, it represents an ongoing expansion of administration, management and consultancy. The university accounts show that £3.5 million was spent on “consultants and external advisors” in 2008–09 alone. And whilst the number of academic staff has been falling for several years, that of “administrative” staff (which includes managers) has been increasing: in 2009, the ratio was 733 academic to 860 administrators; and the number of managerial staff earning in excess of £100,000 each year almost doubled. It is hard to avoid the impression of the takeover of the university by a self-serving managerial elite, dedicated primarily to its own enrichment as a “control-class.”

But during the closure negotiation, the Philosophy Department did not say these kinds of things. Instead its members showed that the unit was profitable and was in fact paying the assigned rent to its administration. Osborne recounts:

The university’s argument for unsustainability shifted to there being a “lack of balance” between the group’s component activities (in a group of less than 8 staff). The point being that, for the University, low-income activities could only be justified as necessary conditions of higher income activities.

This last phrase is the crucial one. Philosophy beat back its managers on the question of its explicit costs. It was covering those, even with the very high rent. But it lost out on implicit or opportunity cost. Management was asking, “What is the return on an investment (ROI) in philosophy compared with that of another program that we’re not funding in order to fund philosophy?” If we closed philosophy, management was asking, and gave its money to, for example, business economics, would we have a higher return on our investment? What is the opportunity cost of not investing philosophy’s money in business economics?

The same type of calculation may well have been made at Albany. For the reasons I suggested earlier, French and Italian probably were solvent on the basis of overall workload or student turnover. But just saying that explicit costs were covered doesn’t address the implicit opportunity costs of not giving $2,000,000 to, for example, the Center (now College) of Nanoscale Science and Engineering just because that money has always gone to languages. The prevailing theory in managerial circles is that ROI will be much higher in engineering than in French. In the era of financialized universities, technoscience ROI is both a desired revenue stream and a crucial political bona fides. What could humanities faculty members do in response to this argument? If administrations allocate resources according to their perception of potential investment returns, then faculty members must contest current perceptions of returns in the technosciences. This contesting will be harder and more conflictual than asking to maintain modest humanities base budgets, but I’m afraid the time has come to do it.

(4)

In the business world, high ROI comes from the pricing power tied to a completed product, generally based on a quasi-monopolistic or dominant market position. ROI is calculated on an all-costs basis, which requires that development costs and other long-term investments in the product to be deducted from the sales revenues themselves, in order to get an accurate estimate of the return.

Universities, in contrast, conduct mostly basic research, which loses money: research is a pure cost, which is why corporations in the era of shareholder dominance spend 80% of their R and D funds on product development (“Table 4-3”). Universities also conduct applied research, but that has a money-losing profile. Most R and D spending in the United States is actually product development, which has eventual returns that can be traced back to the development process. Only 8% of academic R and D is development, and universities do not retain these products and sales to use to calculate an ROI on their research investments (Chapter 5).

In the past few decades, research universities have come up with two main work-arounds for the problem that they aren’t profitable and never will be. One is to patent research results and count royalties as returns on research investment. This strategy doesn’t make a very good case for big ROI on STEM research: royalties are a small fraction of R and D contracts and grant revenues, and only a fraction of that money returns to the institution as profit. I calculated that mid-2000s net royalty returns on research expenditures were less than 1% for the top patenters among research universities (Unmaking 344–45). The argument for patenting ROI has enormous ideological and institutional inertia, as it symbolically places the university on the side of profitable free enterprise. It thus carries on despite the fact that you couldn’t run university research on its patent revenues for more than a few days a year.

The second strategy that universities use to exaggerate their ROI is to ignore their institutional subsidies for extramural research. Federal contracts and grants are counted as income rather than as taxpayer investments that would need to be returned with interest in a market enterprise system. (The battle to account for federal taxpayers as investors in R and D was fought and lost long ago.) STEM faculty members knock themselves out getting these grants—funding rates by most federal programs are at all-time lows—but the funding agencies do not cover the full costs of research. Universities must therefore make up the difference, which usually comes to about 20% of the grant total (Newfield,“How Can Public Universities”; COGR Costing Committee). Universities get that money from endowment or other fund interest or, in larger amounts, from state allocations and student tuition. This means that French majors at SUNY Albany (and at nearly all other research universities) are paying into institutional funds that go to STEM research rather than to SASH instruction or research. In the process, they are supplying the dark pool that artificially elevates STEM ROI.

The actual subsidy situation is different. Once the research of STEM fields has led, after much postuniversity effort, to a product, it may generate enormous positive revenues, but for a private firm rather than for the university. At the university, which performs basic and applied R and D, the ostensible moneymakers are busy losing money. Their annual deficits are in stark contrast to SASH fields, especially the social sciences and business components, which teach large numbers of students without much labor-intensive craft training. The senior managers at ASU, like everywhere else, keep the university solvent by taking the SASH surpluses on the right and using them to fill the STEM budget holes on the left.

The conclusion here is that STEM profits depend on SASH subsidies. Ignoring subsidies artificially elevates ROI.

This exaggerated or speculative future ROI should not be used to shift money out of SASH and into STEM—from French and classics to the Albany nanocenter, for example. My best guess, however, is that this shifting is exactly what happened in Albany. A high-powered, well-connected, and demanding technology unit joined with other leading departments and faculty members to convince a beleaguered administration that it would lose future ROI if it could not make a paradigm shift in its cost structure. Modest real and significant symbolic capital can be achieved by converting unspectacular humanities departments into service units. (The cautionary tale here, however, appeared when the nanocenter later dumped the Albany campus to become a campus on its own, with a direct line to state allocations [Mosher; Hitchcock]).

Symbolic capital is not to be sneezed at: the nanocenter helped put SUNY Albany on the political and corporate map. Subsidized and speculative STEM ROI connects campuses to powerful companies and executives, which has a long-term value. But these payoffs are not the actual revenues that are generally promised. More important, they are generated not by STEM in isolation but by the liberal arts university as a whole. Faculty members need to be in a position to show the intellectual and revenue contributions from the SASH disciplines and demonstrate that the work of the SASH disciplines is wrongly seen as low-income or an outright revenue drain.

We should fund the development of humanities research infrastructure through a multiyear rebalancing of today’s unsustainable and unjust cross-subsidies. (This rebalancing would also involve restructuring federal funding, which mostly goes to corporations rather than to universities.) But we aren’t ready for that step yet. Only a few faculty members are doing consistent work on this topic, and they are not generally supported by their senate leaderships or by their colleagues.

To begin, faculty bodies need to collect the budgetary data that will make visible the contributions that all disciplines are making to the university, with or without their consent. After some initial conflict, this process should unite rather than divide: while SASH faculty members are starved for both research and teaching resources, STEM faculty members are seeing declining real federal R and D funding, on the excuse that STEM research is lucrative and can therefore pay for itself. The budgetary secrecy and the ensuing fictions of the financialized university are hurting knowledge creation in every field. Tenure-track faculty members have generally consented to the adjuncting of most instruction. Perhaps as humanities tenured faculty members become de facto service teachers, we will draw the line.

In response to the task force’s recommendation to reduce the overall number of general education credits required in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, the foreign language requirement was diluted from two semesters or its equivalent (determined by high-school course work or a passing score on a state-authorized proficiency exam) to one semester. The Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures (LLC) protested strongly against the change, which set UA’s requirement below that of Buffalo (three semesters) and of Stony Brook and Binghamton (both two semesters), but the protest came after the fact, because the department did not have any representation on the task force, which had been convened by invitation of the provost.

The general education reform and language deactivations were symptomatic of a shift in educational priorities and made possible by the vacuum of administrative leadership caused by the tragic death of Kermit Hall, UA’s dynamic president, in August 2006. In recognition of Hall’s career as a distinguished legal historian, President Clinton had requested his participation in the final vetting of the Warren Report on the Kennedy Assassination. Characteristically, during his first year in office, Hall gave back $100,000 of his salary to create an honors college at UA.

Immediately after Hall’s passing, the SUNY chancellor installed an interim president whose credentials included MA and JD degrees, as well as a long, successful tenure as manager of the New York State teachers’ pension fund, but the person had no experience at all in the administration of higher education, university teaching, or scholarly research. After two failed presidential searches, in 2009 the SUNY chancellor and UA Board of Trustees regularized his appointment, which ended with retirement only in 2013. The same circumstances applied to the appointment of both the dean, who took office on an interim basis in 2007, then secured permanent appointment the following year, and to the provost, who took office on an interim basis in 2008, then was confirmed in 2009. Unfortunately, in each case UA policies afforded faculty members only a consultative role in the hiring process.

Most of us did not take much notice, either because we were too focused on teaching and research or because we felt a detached cynicism for administration in general. Yet this installation of key policy makers essentially by default should have concerned us, for their endorsement of SUNY central’s strategic priorities and top-down model of governance constituted the framework for eliminating our degree programs.

At UA, foreign languages were housed in two administrative units: the LLC and the Department of East Asian Studies (EAS). LLC offered degrees in Spanish (BA, MA, PhD), French (BA, MA, PhD), Italian (BA), and Russian (BA), as well as a minor in Portuguese and courses in Arabic, Dutch, German, and Latin. At the time of the deactivations, 47 undergraduate majors and 80 minors were in French, with 8 full-time faculty members; 17 undergraduate majors and 37 minors were in Italian, with 2 full-time faculty members; 26 undergraduate majors and 18 minors were in Russian, with 3 full-time faculty members. Classics, an interdisciplinary program composed of courses offered by faculty members with appointments in a variety of departments, had 29 undergraduate majors and 28 minors, and the language component was supported by one full-time Latin instructor housed in LLC.

Though the number of majors and minors was stable overall, declining and increasing from year to year in small increments, overall full-time equivalencies (FTEs) in these languages had fallen in preceding years, primarily because of a strong migration toward Spanish at the introductory and intermediate levels. Even so, in October 2010 there was a total of just under 1,900 students—14% of UA’s undergraduate population—enrolled in courses offered by the language programs that became deactivated. In sum, we considered our programs not only on solid ground quantitatively but also integral to the curriculum of Arts and Sciences and the university as a whole.

For its part, EAS offered BA degrees in East Asian studies, Chinese studies, and Japanese studies, with minors in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Overall enrollments, as well as the number of majors and minors, were trending firmly upward. The generic EAS major enrolled 44 students, with another 38 in Chinese and 61 in Japanese, and minors totaled 82. EAS included 8 full-time faculty members, 4 in Chinese, 3 in Japanese, and 1 in Korean. The growth of EAS and its comparatively favorable enrollment vis-à-vis LLC were largely the result of savvy curricular planning. Whereas the LLC programs required students to do course work entirely in the target languages (one course in English was allowed for the minor), EAS required that only half their courses for their majors be in the target language; the other half was composed of courses taught in English and on culture, history, or literature. That structure allowed EAS to effectively recruit American students who might otherwise have chosen a European language; to enroll a significant number of heritage learners and native speakers from abroad; perhaps most important, to insulate their program against the impact of the university’s diluted language requirement and the quantitative metrics that were eventually used to justify the elimination of LLC programs.

In the months preceding the deactivation announcement, there were university-wide town-hall-style meetings that addressed in general terms the ongoing budget crisis and the necessity of making cuts across the university, in addition to regular meetings between Arts and Sciences department chairs and the dean. Though the principle of eliminating degree programs was never formally approved, at a meeting held on 28 April 2010 the dean asked chairs to submit, on a confidential basis, individual recommendations to this effect. Some refused out of principle, but many complied. The results of the poll were never made public, but after the deactivations were announced, the dean would cite that meeting as proof that deactivated faculty members were properly consulted and not denied due process.

During the same period, the provost convened three ad hoc committees, known as budget advisory groups (BAGs) composed of faculty members already on various university governance committees and other individuals whose participation was personally solicited by the provost. No members of the deactivated language programs received invitations to participate in any of the BAGs. Of the 39 members who sat on the third BAG, the most influential of the groups, only 10 (26%) were from Arts and Sciences, which was by far the largest college of the university. Of those 10, only 3 were from humanities or arts departments (including 2 from East Asian Studies), and none were from the deactivated language programs. The four largest humanities departments (English, History, Philosophy, and LLC) had no representation at all. Even so, none of the BAGs recommended the elimination of specific degree programs or administrative units; they simply considered hypothetical situations in which the following year’s allocation from the state might necessitate such cuts (Budget Advisory Group).

Crucially, the power to eliminate academic programs, lying solely in the hands of the UA president, did not require any consultation with faculty members, much less formal approval through shared governance. Between the end of the spring 2010 semester and 1 October, there was no warning that our programs were to be eliminated and no consultation with the faculty members directly involved, either to find creative solutions or to provide simple notification of the decision already snaking its way through the SUNY bureaucracy at its imposing stone headquarters downtown.

After 1 October there was strong and sustained protest against the program eliminations, including several public rallies on campus covered by local television; hearings held by the faculty senate; numerous letters and op-ed pieces published in the local Albany Times-Union newspaper; national and international media attention in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Le monde, National Public Radio, and the British Broadcasting Corporation; an investigation by the American Association of University Professors; negotiations between UA administrators and representatives of the New York State Union of Teachers; group meetings between affected faculty members and the dean, provost, and president. There was also overwhelming extramural pressure to reverse the decision, as evidenced by an Internet petition signed by over 14,000 people from around the world and hand-delivered in print form to the SUNY chancellor.

However, the provost and president stuck to their position that eliminating the programs was an unfortunate but unavoidable fiscal necessity rather than “a Faustian bargain,” as Gregory Petsko, a genome researcher, put it in an especially scathing op-ed piece. The provost and president consistently claimed that the BAGs constituted “extensive, inclusive and ongoing” consultation with faculty members, while the dean justified her deactivation recommendations by citing “comparatively low enrollments” in the affected programs, her mandate to trim the college’s annual budget by $2 million (less than 1% of the university’s annual budget in 2010–11), and the need to shift resources to programs that were “more central” to the mission of the college and the university, despite the fact that the number of undergraduate majors or the ratio of faculty members to undergraduate majors was lower in eleven other college programs than those she identified for termination (Message).

The fiscal pretext was difficult to justify for two reasons. First was the recent proliferation of highly paid administrators across the university and the college—the college employed seven full-time assistant or associate deans making salaries substantially greater than the highest paid faculty member in the deactivated programs. Second, the French and Italian programs were already models of cost efficiency. To maximize enrollments, course work for the French MA and PhD programs was delivered almost entirely through shared resource courses that served upper-level undergraduates. Almost all the French MA students paid full tuition without the benefit of assistantships, since many of them were returning high school teachers complying with the state’s ongoing certification requirements. In addition, graduate students who had exhausted their funding as teaching assistants were regularly staffing introductory language courses at a paltry pay rate of $2,600 per course—exponentially less than the FTEs generated. In addition, the French and Italian programs offered coordinated credit-granting high school courses—known as “university in the high schools” and coordinated by an underpaid lecturer—that generated nearly a quarter of a million dollars of annual revenue for the university.

What, then, really motivated the dean’s decision? Certainly, the desire to comply with pressures coming from her superiors—but there were more important factors. In previous departmental meetings she had bluntly told us that the study of language was not a worthwhile end in its own right but rather a means to some other, practical end and that foreign language courses, because of their inherently low FTE value, were not an efficient investment of resources. Her personal bias was also likely compounded by a pragmatic calculation: that three senior faculty members in French and two in Russian, all drawing relatively high salaries by SUNY standards, could be prompted to retire through a blend of incentives and coercion. Summer 2011 provided support for that theory when the vice president for academic affairs began contacting senior faculty members individually with retirement incentives. On 19 July the provost sent a letter inviting the seven tenured French faculty members to apply, through submission of their CVs, for the two full-time positions (one tenured professorship, one full-time lecturer) that she anticipated would remain at end of the deactivation process.

In addition to underscoring the administration’s use of fear, coercion, and internal discord as tools of governance, urging us to compete with one another for our own jobs seemed to confirm UA’s willingness to fire faculty members, though firing them would have entailed significant legal complications with the union and our collective bargaining agreement. In the end, no faculty members were fired. Two senior Russian professors retired without a fuss; three senior colleagues in French accepted phased retirement for the sake of their colleagues; two others in French, myself included, took the provost’s advice that we pursue our careers elsewhere. Our students were allowed to finish their degrees, albeit under duress, and many left feeling that their credentials had been devalued.

The long-term effects on UA remain to be seen, but in the first two years following the deactivations there was widespread paranoia among faculty members across the liberal arts and sciences, a higher than normal departure rate of untenured and tenured professors for jobs elsewhere, and a noticeable decline in applications from new graduate students, which prompted the dean to repeatedly contact graduate directors asking them to intensify their recruitment efforts. Today only undergraduate minors in the deactivated programs remain, and the disdain that UA has demonstrated for foreign languages stands in ironic contradiction to its branding campaign built around the image of a globe and the slogan “the world within reach.”

The UA debacle also underscores several curricular and administrative lessons for language programs, whose inherently low student-to-teacher ratios makes them easy administrative targets in times of fiscal crisis. In curricular terms, it is important to maximize FTEs by offering a certain number of larger-enrollment culture courses in English that can attract students from across the university, fulfill general education requirements, and recruit undergraduate majors and minors. Equally imperative are defending the foreign language requirement, where it already exists, as part of the national trend toward globalization and creating solid curricular links—including study-abroad programs, double-major degrees, or certificates—with professional schools in such areas as engineering, business, and public health. These initiatives require substantial faculty time and energy but are well worth the investment and benefit for all parties involved. It is not a matter of selling out or making languages into service units but of proving our practical relevance to students and administrators so that we maintain the freedom to teach linguistics, literature, and culture for their own sake as well. Two especially successful models worth consulting are at Penn State and Virginia Tech.

Administratively, the UA crisis exposed the destructive power that a small cadre of hostile or indifferent administrators can have if unchecked by strong shared governance structures that empower faculty members with not only consultative but also decision-making authority. Who has the power to eliminate degree programs and faculty positions? In many universities, as at UA, shared governance policies and procedures limit faculty members to a reactive role and entrust programmatic decisions to administrators, with no more than nominal recognition of the democratic process.

In the current climate of systemic underfunding and increasingly authoritarian administration that characterizes American higher education, it is not enough to demand proportional representation on existing governance bodies and ad hoc committees. We must collectively work to revise structures and procedures so that faculty members have the power to approve, reject, or initiate program reorganization and elimination by majority vote. Fortunately, most universities already have mechanisms in place to enact such revisions. The question is whether faculty members are willing to work proactively to secure an equal share in running their institutions and to ensure their own professional survival.

I started teaching as a TA in 1959 and have never encountered—even in the prereform 60s—such high-handed corporate behavior.

What Did We Do?

Given the demand for cuts and concomitant threats of closure, we made the decision to form the School of International Languages, Literatures, and Cultures (SILLC) from seven previously independent departments and programs. The largest language department, Spanish and Portuguese, remained separate from that school. All departments and programs retained their heads, their individual identities, and their budget lines after the cuts, whether they were included in SILLC or remained independent. Business and support staff functions for SILLC departments and programs were merged into a central team. A director for the school was hired. His tasks were to broaden the reach and collaborations of all units and work with the business team to advance collaborative initiatives and recruitment efforts. Under his excellent leadership and the unit heads’ collaborations and hard work, the number of majors in all units has grown substantially and in some cases quadrupled. Spanish and Portuguese, collaborating and making identical efforts, has continued to flourish and grow. Business and support functions of SILLC and Spanish and Portuguese are considered a model at our university, and the recruitment efforts for the college have become a model for many other universities.1

We moved from a place where our language and culture units, as separate and relatively small departments or programs, were giving the impression to those outside the college, especially in upper administration, that they “. . . were splintered, lacking a powerful unifying message or brand. [We were able to form and] articulate that larger brand, [so] we could go from defense to offense, changing and taking charge of the narrative on our campus [and beyond] by displaying why the humanities mattered” (Panza and Schur).

Spanish and Portuguese—Separate and Strong

We often receive, even six years after the reorganization, questions about the separate status of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. A brief history is in order here. In the 1970s and before, our university had a large Department of Romance Languages, consisting of French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese languages, literatures, and cultures. As interest and student numbers grew, it became an increasing challenge for the growing department to have a cohesive and unifying brand and message. There were also pockets of discontent among faculty members. The solution was reached in 1981 to divide the department in two: Spanish and Portuguese, French and Italian. The Department of Spanish and Portuguese today has, in Spanish, among the highest undergraduate enrollments in the country and ranks in the top ten universities in the number of PhD students in Spanish; in Portuguese enrollments it is among the top five nationally. The cohesion of the department is remarkable. Portuguese classes are required of undergraduate and graduate students with Spanish or Latin America majors. The two languages and cultures are more tightly yoked since Latin American studies became a strategic priority, because Title VI and NDE funding sources require that Portuguese be included in Latin American studies. For these historical and practical reasons, because of its sheer size in terms of faculty members and students, and because this department is under strong and forward-looking leadership, it was closely affiliated but retained independence when the other language, literature, and culture units were consolidated into the SILLC.

What Was the Most Difficult?

One aspect of the challenges (read “enormous pressures”) we faced was that several programs were on a preliminary plan for elimination by the provost of the university in 2008–09. Forming SILLC was one response, both for recruitment, which has been so successful, and for the protection of the smaller units. Another strategy was to have straightforward discussions with leadership and senior faculty members of those programs that were identified as endangered. With one exception, all the programs responded by outlining strategies and tactical approaches to raise their profile and numbers and to do the infamous “more with less.” The exception was a group whose PhD program had been languishing for several years and whose numbers of graduates were consistently below our Board of Regents’ minimum for viable programs. This group unfortunately was not able to help me protect them: they did not offer creative suggestions for ways to change the PhD, its potential graduation rate, or the pool of candidates. At several meetings they said that they did not feel that there was anything wrong, that the university, upper administration, and dean should simply leave them alone and recognize their value as a traditional PhD program. Because that recognition was ungrounded, I closed the PhD program. No positions were lost or eliminated, though some hiring was delayed for several years. There are still hard feelings among some faculty members for these steps—understandably so. However, the MA and undergraduate programs have grown substantially, and creative new emphases are now being developed. Those innovations promise to maintain and expand the strengths of the remaining programs in the department. Some colleagues still long for the good old days and the good old PhD program, but most in the unit have changed their way of thinking and now work together and in harmony with the larger goals of the college and the university.

We celebrate this change of thinking, the willingness to join forces and to accept the learning curve it has taken to grow strong. Strategic planning, public relations, and even branding and marketing, we now understand, are not detrimental to the humanities or to language, literature, and culture departments in these times. Siege, calamity, and crisis are no longer part of our communal vocabularies, in any of our languages. Rather, we know and remind ourselves of the opportunities we continue to create, confident that our languages, literatures, and culture units—in scholarship, teaching, and community engagement—are at the heart of what matters.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s 6 February 2015 proposal to replace the following principle in the University of Wisconsin mission statement, “Basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth,” with language that defines the purpose as that of supplying “the state’s workforce needs,” is worrisome at best, not to mention the proposed removal as well of the goals “to educate people and improve the human condition” and “serve and stimulate society” (Strauss). Suffice it to say that what Walker sought to cut is the humanities language that has defined the purpose of universities in mission statements from coast to coast. Despite his subsequent backpedaling, his proposed statements conflating a university with a trade school should give us all pause. We need to wonder why teachers are given such short shrift in these workforce discussions. Is the goal to also trim language and literature from high schools? Such questions would have sounded far-fetched twenty-five years ago, but today, with the inexorable cutting and reductions that are taking place in languages and literature programs and their inevitable impact on the future of teachers in those disciplines, they are pressing.

We hope that the readership of Profession will take from these essays a sense of the need to be aware of the many iterations of change affecting our discipline, the knowledge required to address them in the best way possible, and an understanding that budget decisions cutting, shrinking, or merging programs are curricular matters that demand faculty engagement.

Can we nonetheless imagine a scenario that has not yet occurred in which the numbers of closings and mergers that dilute programs would escalate? Could there be a really damaging shakedown that would spread across hundreds of institutions? Such a cataclysm seems far less likely to me than a rather more common phenomenon, less dramatic than outright program closings and also far more widespread and harder to study than the shuttering of programs. The likelier scenario is shrinkage by attrition and reorganization, where mergers—the folding of small departments or academic units into larger ones—would be a major device but perhaps not as significant as the downsizing that occurs when faculty members retire and their positions are either eliminated or moved to another area of the academic enterprise. That process of resource reallocation is one that can occur with little fanfare. It is the natural result of the principle that allows the intra-institutional market, defined through the lenses of enrollment patterns and student demand, to dictate the ongoing reshaping of the academic structure or enterprise. My guess, which stems from a sense of the history and structure of the system but which the data worshippers in our world would say, correctly, is not yet well supported is that the cost of this subtle, incremental diminution of support for language and literature, for the liberal arts and humanities, for education as a broad intellectual project is far greater than the cost of the visible closings and mergers we have witnessed up to now.1 It is important for us to be talking about how we can recognize and combat that larger and more nebulous trend even as we try to draw the appropriate lessons from the closings and mergers that have occurred.