The mission of flagships is commonly described as research, teaching, and service.  Two themes are at work:  serving the people of the state through education and training, and excelling academically.  The problem arises when the costs of pursuing excellence begin to interfere with the possibility of providing education and training.  If Wisconsin families cannot afford to attend Madison, the university that consumes half of all the state’s appropriations to higher education, can we still justify the pursuit of excellence for its own sake?

 

Suppose we abandon the ideal of the public Ivy.  Suppose we limit the mission of flagship universities to teaching state residents and attracting economic investments.  Flagships like the University of Wisconsin at Madison eat up state funds, but they also compete with the richest private colleges for top faculty members and resources.  From the state’s perspective, money invested in a flagship is not necessarily lost; the federal money that flows in translates into jobs, investments and expenditures, and tax revenues.  In 2005, Madison employed 9,100 in university research; 218 companies had direct ties companies had direct ties to the university, and faculty members brought $764-million in research-and-development spending to Wisconsin.

 

But those direct economic benefits accrue from a specific set of research areas, primarily in the natural sciences.  In those areas, there is obviously no economic argument for reconceiving the institutional mission.  What would be the consequences of treating research as secondary to teaching in other areas?  Such a reconceived mission would mean paying faculty members less, insisting that they teach more, making promotion depend on teaching and service as much as on research and publication, and perhaps weakening tenure to enable institutions to get rid of high paid but unproductive faculty members.  Above all, it would mean getting out of ruinous bidding wars for “star” faculty members, unless their presence is expected to generate enough revenue to justify the expense of hiring them.

 

Lowering the competitive standards of programs that do not produce significant amounts of nontuition revenue would free up revenue.  But then states would be getting out of the business of supporting top-level liberal arts scholarship.  The best students in the social sciences and humanities would, presumably, no longer want to attend flagship state institutions.  Professors – except, perhaps for eccentric idealists – would divide themselves even more quickly.  Many, if not most, marketable faculty members would probably migrate to private institutions or to more competitive public institutions in other states.  The differences among the educational tiers of American higher education would become even more sharply defined than they are now.

 

 

 

Buried in the recent news about big endowment losses and the steps colleges are taking to weather the economic crisis is an emerging pattern:  Culture, it would seem, is expendable.  First came Brandeis University’s decision to close its art museum and sell off more than 6,000 works in its collection.  Then Miami University, in Ohio, and Texas Tech moved to sell or shutter their radio stations.  Now Utah State University may stop its academic press.  Even Bowdoin College, a longtime supporter of the arts, which completed a $20-million renovation of its art museum in 2007, recently said it may dump its big-band-jazz ensemble.

 

Some of that may just be skimming the fat.  But faced with increasing costs and shrinking government support, more institutions may do what was once unthinkable:  cut entire academic programs....  Mary Pat Seurkamp, president of the College of Notre Dame of Maryland, summed up the mood this way:  “Some people are saying, ‘We know our mission and we love the liberal arts.  But you don’t have to have all of them.”

 

The recession is intensifying administrators’ scrutiny of underperforming majors, leading to tough questions:  Are those majors helping to drive enrollment and revenue?  Do they have a vocal or wealthy constituency?  If not, maybe they should go.  “It’s a bad stew,” says Harriet Zuckerman, a senior vice president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, one of the biggest supporters of the arts and humanities on campuses.  “These are episodic symptoms of what is likely to become a more serious problem.”

 

...But it’s that kind of thinking that administrators probably won’t have much patience for in these times.  As one campus leader said last week, when asked about the tenuous status of the arts, “The solution is less whining and more integration.”

 

 

 

Most undergraduates don’t realize that there is a shrinking percentage of positions in the humanities that offer job security, benefits, and a livable salary (though it is generally much lower than salaries in other fields requiring as many years of training).  They don’t know that you probably will have to accept living almost anywhere, and that you must also go through a six-year probationary period at the end of which you may be fired for any number of reasons and find yourself exiled from the profession...

 

What almost no prospective graduate students can understand is the extent to which doctoral education in the humanities socializes idealistic, naive, and psychologically vulnerable people into a profession with a very clear set of values.  It teaches them that life outside of academe means failure, which explains the large numbers of graduates who labor for decades as adjuncts, just so they stay on the periphery of academe...

 

Just to be clear:  There is work for humanities doctorates (though perhaps not as many as are currently being produced), but there are fewer and fewer real jobs because of conscious policy decisions by colleges and universities...  When the recession ends, the hiring freezes will become permanent, since departments will have demonstrated that they can function with fewer tenured faculty members.  Nearly every humanities field was already desperately competitive, with hundreds of applications from qualified candidates for every tenure-track positions.  Now the situation is becoming desperate...  The majority of job seekers who emerge empty-handed this year will return next year, and for several years after that, and so the competition will snowball, with more and more people chasing fewer and fewer full-time positions.