Hi Steve, I live close to you in Atascadero after escaping life in the Oakland hills for 33 years. We needed a new furnace and today, 4 strong cute guys came to install it - all were 20-23 years old - and so polite and so capable. I think maybe that's our future? I could not get a crew like this in Oakland. I asked them about college and they said they're having more fun, making more money, and learning more skills than they would in college. True!
It's turtles all the way down. Stop teaching phonics in elementary school, have no consequences for disruptive behavior in middle school and give everybody an "A" in inner city high schools, and pretty soon you have a population of mushminds that can't read, can't do any kind of independent research, and probably cannot translate that "7 out of 10" stat above into a percentage. AG
It’s fashionable today to talk about this demographic cliff. It’s the last thing to blame to keep from looking in the mirror. It seems more likely that yr decline in enrollment is a direct result of the schools charging more than anyone can afford to produce a worthless product. More and more people are figuring out what those four young men discovered. X is full of posts by college graduates with huge debt and no jobs. 90% of the kids going to college shouldn’t.
My own estimate is that 75% of kids going to college shouldn't. Either way, there are way, way too many kids going to college and most of them would be way better off to avoid it.
Those kids who took on so much debt for useless degrees should have been informed by either the lending institution (probably the govt.) or the school about the average first-year salary and employment prospects for their chosen degree. I think most kids, especially minorities, bought into the oft-repeated claim that college graduates make $1M over the course of their careers.
That's an unbelievable number at Syracuse. Can you imagine a business that supported product lines for a decade that had not one person buying the product?
That's pretty grim, and really sad. Wanted to type "saddening" there. Sad in the sense of wasted intellectual resources, literally digging holes in the ground and filling them back in, busy but hugely and massively unproductive.
All that waste has cost all of us. We can ask about the opportunity cost of funding these programs but I know that'll confuse 99% of the faculty that no longer have jobs.
The mere title of some of those fields doesn't explain much. What exactly is "ceramics"? Is it ceramics technology, used in semiconductor manufacturing and rocket motors? Or is it part of an "arts" department?
Syracuse is offering buyouts to 175 faculty. Yes. Now, what if they say, “No”? You can lead a horse to water…. Iowa, Iowa State, and Texas A&M are or are considering shutting down women’s and gender studies programs. What becomes of the affiliated faculty? What you should be aiming for is a general reduction of faculty that focuses on those disciplines most corrupted. That demographic cliff, an 17% reduction in college-aged cohorts over the next 15 years - an enrollment apocalypse - will necessitate cuts in general revenue allocations to departments and programs, so make it count. But how do you make the horses drink the water when its offered?
Faculty in STEM programs, for example, won’t fuss when the blade falls on the neck of some poor gender studies colleague, knowing that there but for the grace of God, and better scholarship, go I. Trust me, I know. Administrators fear the blade too, perhaps most of all. No, there needs to be a reckoning with the corruption noted by Deresiewicz. Lousy scholarship needs to be called out and highlighted, individually, better still collectively, to embarrass into action administrators and faculty who until now have blessed it, but also to motivate state legislators, most of whom have little idea what to make of it, to put a metaphorical gun to the heads of those embarrased faculty and administrators to concentrate their minds and stiffen their spines. Much is possible, even with respect to the tenured faculty, when financial exigencies call for it.
What if the faculty doesn't accept the buyout? Then Syracuse can just lay them off. I suspect that this is a Hobson's choice -- take it or leave it. This is like offering a severance package when a person is fired from a corporate job; they can "accept" the offer or not, but either way they're still getting the axe.
Tenure usually doesn't shield faculty against these sorts of cuts. It's hard to fire a tenured professor for cause, and the barriers are high. But administrators can just eliminate the position, and there's no protection for that. Better yet, just wipe out the whole department, which is what Syracuse seems to be doing.
"But administrators can just eliminate the position, and there's no protection for that."
It's not as simple as that. To single out a position (i.e. tenured faculty member) in the absence of general financial exigency and a general restructuring that calls for it would trigger a lawsuit that focused on targeting in the absence of cause.
Most people don't know how tenure (i.e. a continuing appointment without limit in time) is treated by most university systems: as a right in *property*. Kind of like a house. When my university system offered a "once-in-a-generation" buyout in 2019 (1.5 x AY salary) to qualifying tenured faculty the signed documents referred to the buyout as a "purchase" by the university of the tenure granted and *possessed* by the faculty member. So, nothing so cavalier as you suggest regarding a single faculty member is going to pass legal muster by university counsel and there is nothing that university administration hates as much as faculty lawsuits. Eliminating a department may allow blanket layoffs but it has to be part of a credible financial emergency that precludes remedial measures like consolidation of departments and programs that would forego faculty layoffs otherwise billable hours are guaranteed on both sides.
I understand that a university can't just single out one position for elimination, and it was sloppy of me to suggest that. But as you yourself point out, "Eliminating a department may allow blanket layoffs . . ." That's exactly what's going on at Syracuse! They really are wiping out whole departments, and a lot of them, so it's not possible to claim that one specific person is being targeted. They also have very strong financial data to support this (e.g. many departments do not have any declared majors). So this seems to be the sort of general restructuring that you agree allows for laying people off, even tenured faculty.
My only point is that when the people at Syracuse are "offered" a buyout, they don't really have a choice in the matter. At your university, it seems the buyout was optional, and faculty could choose not to accept it and continue with their position. But at Syracuse, they're going to lose their job no matter what, so the "buyout" isn't a genuine choice -- it's just a severance package, and there doesn't seem to be much in the way of an alternative.
By the way, that buyout in 2019 was capped at $200K and a significant number cashed out at or very close to the cap. Checking out on the cusp of the COVID years that began the following Spring term was truly a golden parachute.
I'm writing this as an academic outsider (thank God). Tenure at one time may have made sense, but to me I see no value other than to maintain your position regardless of your results in teaching and helping students think for themselves. Tenure appears to enable professors to do little and maintain their leftist attitude with no worries. I'm open to correction if I'm wrong.
Closing down majors in classical studies, German and Italian [unclear from the punctuation if that is the languages or studies], Middle Eastern studies, modern Jewish history is not an advance. These are more nails in the coffin of classic liberal arts education. Think about it: most Western folks know practically nothing of the history of the Middle East and its Islamification over the last 1400 centuries, which is why not even the Trump administration understands what it is dealing with in Iran right now.
There is a saying about this. Post a note when all of the universities have abolished the other "studies", the ones of nothing but pretense and opinion.
If we were talking about the classical studies and language departments of the mid-twentieth century, I would agree with you. But these departments are all highly politicized by the Left.
If these departments are shut down, perhaps classical studies can rise again from the ashes, but the current faculty needs to be sent packing.
Unfortunately, this is a case where the customer is always right. Sure, I agree, classical studies are a central discipline in liberal arts education. But if modern students don't have any interest in this, and don't sign up for courses or major in the field, then it will inevitably get axed. If you were an administrator, you'd make the same decision, perhaps later rather than sooner, but you wouldn't have much choice in the matter.
He turned out to be a great polemicist and historian. But he attended UCSC 50 years ago. I got one of my 3 degrees for Georgetown University well over 50 years ago and I believe I turned out OK. But today I doubt GU would even let me enroll, being a white Southerner, from George Wallace's Alabama at that time.
Good for you. Everybody who comments on this website turned out all right. Just ask Susan and Joe Vass. That is of no consequence. Folks like you and me and Susan and Joe and Prof. Steve are not winning converts from their post on conservative websites. We need to try something else. I look to the Communists for guidance on how to convert the sheeple. They are experts at it. CF: Saul Alinski. But doing that will require folks with guts willing to give up everything, as our Founding Fathers were. Don't see anybody like that in American politics today. CF: The Turtle,Thune, Tillis, Graham, Cruz, Cornyn, Grassley, Collins, Murkowski: hell, nearly all of them. Cowards or grifters, all of them. St. Patrick's parents saw what was coming. We don't because we are a stupid non-serious race of people now and keep importing more of the same, so the Democrats will be able to rule here in perpetuity to "Save Our Democracy!". CF: Ca and VA.
If "gender studies" promoted the idea that there are two sexes, men and women, and it is biologically impossible for a man to become a woman , and they could have influence in making this clear to their school of journalism , then this would be something they could be proud of as their legacy.
I grew up close to Northwestern University. Even in the mid-sixties, the anti-American miasma fairly oozed out of the campus as you'd ride by.
Of course, it's far worse today. The irony of those well-to-do students rejecting nearly everything that made their beautiful lives possible is beyond any understanding.
Back more than forty years ago, I was attending an event with my then-spouse, a middle manager in a large, affluent Chicago suburb. My adjacent seatmate was the deputy chief of police. In the course of very casual conversation about the then-current crop of hiring, he'd gotten unwary enough to say, "Give me someone who's never been to college and I can make a good police officer out of him." There was more, of course. Unfortunately, the village manager across the table overheard the discussion. He was not pleased.
Rot that is that old is probably too deep to ever repair. Especially when there's so much money involved.
FWIW, many years ago when my ex-wife was looking at completing her almost finished undergrad degree from the University of Iowa many years after first matriculating one of her options was an interdisciplinary studies major which at least appeared to be a way to salvage either a somewhat random accumulation of credits or credits that could have completed a specific major under an older catalog but no longer met current catalog requirements, and be able to graduate with minimum additional coursework. It's just a swag but that "interdisciplinary graduate studies" could have been somewhat similar. Its elimination will likely force someone looking to complete a masters degree after a long pause to take more classes in order to met current degree requirements.
"higher ed is reaching a crisis point, which may force change" - force is all that will change its course - whether through litigation or financial pressure. The children of wackademia will toss all their toys out of the pram, but it must be done. Being taught HOW to think is crucial, where too many programs are nothing but indoctrination in WHAT to think.
Hi Steve, I live close to you in Atascadero after escaping life in the Oakland hills for 33 years. We needed a new furnace and today, 4 strong cute guys came to install it - all were 20-23 years old - and so polite and so capable. I think maybe that's our future? I could not get a crew like this in Oakland. I asked them about college and they said they're having more fun, making more money, and learning more skills than they would in college. True!
You will know the worm has truly turned when Big Higher Ed starts cutting the political commissars from their bloated administrative staffs.
"but many faculty members have decried the decisions as politically motivated."
Too funny. As if the reverse isn't just as true. Universities are full of children who grew up to be children. Weh, weh, weh...
Subsidy corrupts; the river of tax dollars flowing to universities has corrupted them utterly. There is no honor in thieves or subsidized faculty.
It's turtles all the way down. Stop teaching phonics in elementary school, have no consequences for disruptive behavior in middle school and give everybody an "A" in inner city high schools, and pretty soon you have a population of mushminds that can't read, can't do any kind of independent research, and probably cannot translate that "7 out of 10" stat above into a percentage. AG
It’s fashionable today to talk about this demographic cliff. It’s the last thing to blame to keep from looking in the mirror. It seems more likely that yr decline in enrollment is a direct result of the schools charging more than anyone can afford to produce a worthless product. More and more people are figuring out what those four young men discovered. X is full of posts by college graduates with huge debt and no jobs. 90% of the kids going to college shouldn’t.
"90% of the kids going to college shouldn’t."
My own estimate is that 75% of kids going to college shouldn't. Either way, there are way, way too many kids going to college and most of them would be way better off to avoid it.
Those kids who took on so much debt for useless degrees should have been informed by either the lending institution (probably the govt.) or the school about the average first-year salary and employment prospects for their chosen degree. I think most kids, especially minorities, bought into the oft-repeated claim that college graduates make $1M over the course of their careers.
That's an unbelievable number at Syracuse. Can you imagine a business that supported product lines for a decade that had not one person buying the product?
That's pretty grim, and really sad. Wanted to type "saddening" there. Sad in the sense of wasted intellectual resources, literally digging holes in the ground and filling them back in, busy but hugely and massively unproductive.
All that waste has cost all of us. We can ask about the opportunity cost of funding these programs but I know that'll confuse 99% of the faculty that no longer have jobs.
The mere title of some of those fields doesn't explain much. What exactly is "ceramics"? Is it ceramics technology, used in semiconductor manufacturing and rocket motors? Or is it part of an "arts" department?
I assumed that the ceramics major was an arts thing; if it was really about rocket motors, it would be called something like "materials science".
True fact: UConn, a public university, offers a **Master's** degree in puppetry. High ROI value for that credential!
https://drama.uconn.edu/programs/puppet-arts/mamfa-puppetry/
Syracuse is offering buyouts to 175 faculty. Yes. Now, what if they say, “No”? You can lead a horse to water…. Iowa, Iowa State, and Texas A&M are or are considering shutting down women’s and gender studies programs. What becomes of the affiliated faculty? What you should be aiming for is a general reduction of faculty that focuses on those disciplines most corrupted. That demographic cliff, an 17% reduction in college-aged cohorts over the next 15 years - an enrollment apocalypse - will necessitate cuts in general revenue allocations to departments and programs, so make it count. But how do you make the horses drink the water when its offered?
Faculty in STEM programs, for example, won’t fuss when the blade falls on the neck of some poor gender studies colleague, knowing that there but for the grace of God, and better scholarship, go I. Trust me, I know. Administrators fear the blade too, perhaps most of all. No, there needs to be a reckoning with the corruption noted by Deresiewicz. Lousy scholarship needs to be called out and highlighted, individually, better still collectively, to embarrass into action administrators and faculty who until now have blessed it, but also to motivate state legislators, most of whom have little idea what to make of it, to put a metaphorical gun to the heads of those embarrased faculty and administrators to concentrate their minds and stiffen their spines. Much is possible, even with respect to the tenured faculty, when financial exigencies call for it.
What if the faculty doesn't accept the buyout? Then Syracuse can just lay them off. I suspect that this is a Hobson's choice -- take it or leave it. This is like offering a severance package when a person is fired from a corporate job; they can "accept" the offer or not, but either way they're still getting the axe.
Tenure usually doesn't shield faculty against these sorts of cuts. It's hard to fire a tenured professor for cause, and the barriers are high. But administrators can just eliminate the position, and there's no protection for that. Better yet, just wipe out the whole department, which is what Syracuse seems to be doing.
"But administrators can just eliminate the position, and there's no protection for that."
It's not as simple as that. To single out a position (i.e. tenured faculty member) in the absence of general financial exigency and a general restructuring that calls for it would trigger a lawsuit that focused on targeting in the absence of cause.
Most people don't know how tenure (i.e. a continuing appointment without limit in time) is treated by most university systems: as a right in *property*. Kind of like a house. When my university system offered a "once-in-a-generation" buyout in 2019 (1.5 x AY salary) to qualifying tenured faculty the signed documents referred to the buyout as a "purchase" by the university of the tenure granted and *possessed* by the faculty member. So, nothing so cavalier as you suggest regarding a single faculty member is going to pass legal muster by university counsel and there is nothing that university administration hates as much as faculty lawsuits. Eliminating a department may allow blanket layoffs but it has to be part of a credible financial emergency that precludes remedial measures like consolidation of departments and programs that would forego faculty layoffs otherwise billable hours are guaranteed on both sides.
Thank you for this very informative comment!
I understand that a university can't just single out one position for elimination, and it was sloppy of me to suggest that. But as you yourself point out, "Eliminating a department may allow blanket layoffs . . ." That's exactly what's going on at Syracuse! They really are wiping out whole departments, and a lot of them, so it's not possible to claim that one specific person is being targeted. They also have very strong financial data to support this (e.g. many departments do not have any declared majors). So this seems to be the sort of general restructuring that you agree allows for laying people off, even tenured faculty.
My only point is that when the people at Syracuse are "offered" a buyout, they don't really have a choice in the matter. At your university, it seems the buyout was optional, and faculty could choose not to accept it and continue with their position. But at Syracuse, they're going to lose their job no matter what, so the "buyout" isn't a genuine choice -- it's just a severance package, and there doesn't seem to be much in the way of an alternative.
By the way, that buyout in 2019 was capped at $200K and a significant number cashed out at or very close to the cap. Checking out on the cusp of the COVID years that began the following Spring term was truly a golden parachute.
I'm writing this as an academic outsider (thank God). Tenure at one time may have made sense, but to me I see no value other than to maintain your position regardless of your results in teaching and helping students think for themselves. Tenure appears to enable professors to do little and maintain their leftist attitude with no worries. I'm open to correction if I'm wrong.
Closing down majors in classical studies, German and Italian [unclear from the punctuation if that is the languages or studies], Middle Eastern studies, modern Jewish history is not an advance. These are more nails in the coffin of classic liberal arts education. Think about it: most Western folks know practically nothing of the history of the Middle East and its Islamification over the last 1400 centuries, which is why not even the Trump administration understands what it is dealing with in Iran right now.
There is a saying about this. Post a note when all of the universities have abolished the other "studies", the ones of nothing but pretense and opinion.
If we were talking about the classical studies and language departments of the mid-twentieth century, I would agree with you. But these departments are all highly politicized by the Left.
If these departments are shut down, perhaps classical studies can rise again from the ashes, but the current faculty needs to be sent packing.
The Classics department at Princeton does not require students to master Greek or Latin. What is the point of the thing?
You are correct.
Unfortunately, this is a case where the customer is always right. Sure, I agree, classical studies are a central discipline in liberal arts education. But if modern students don't have any interest in this, and don't sign up for courses or major in the field, then it will inevitably get axed. If you were an administrator, you'd make the same decision, perhaps later rather than sooner, but you wouldn't have much choice in the matter.
Victor Davis Hanson got his degree in classics from UC Santa Cruz in 1975, and look how he turned out.
He turned out to be a great polemicist and historian. But he attended UCSC 50 years ago. I got one of my 3 degrees for Georgetown University well over 50 years ago and I believe I turned out OK. But today I doubt GU would even let me enroll, being a white Southerner, from George Wallace's Alabama at that time.
I also graduated from UCSC in 1975, but in physics. I also turned out all right.
Good for you. Everybody who comments on this website turned out all right. Just ask Susan and Joe Vass. That is of no consequence. Folks like you and me and Susan and Joe and Prof. Steve are not winning converts from their post on conservative websites. We need to try something else. I look to the Communists for guidance on how to convert the sheeple. They are experts at it. CF: Saul Alinski. But doing that will require folks with guts willing to give up everything, as our Founding Fathers were. Don't see anybody like that in American politics today. CF: The Turtle,Thune, Tillis, Graham, Cruz, Cornyn, Grassley, Collins, Murkowski: hell, nearly all of them. Cowards or grifters, all of them. St. Patrick's parents saw what was coming. We don't because we are a stupid non-serious race of people now and keep importing more of the same, so the Democrats will be able to rule here in perpetuity to "Save Our Democracy!". CF: Ca and VA.
Correction: 1400 years/14 centuries.
If "gender studies" promoted the idea that there are two sexes, men and women, and it is biologically impossible for a man to become a woman , and they could have influence in making this clear to their school of journalism , then this would be something they could be proud of as their legacy.
In my opinion, the short answer is "no".
I grew up close to Northwestern University. Even in the mid-sixties, the anti-American miasma fairly oozed out of the campus as you'd ride by.
Of course, it's far worse today. The irony of those well-to-do students rejecting nearly everything that made their beautiful lives possible is beyond any understanding.
Back more than forty years ago, I was attending an event with my then-spouse, a middle manager in a large, affluent Chicago suburb. My adjacent seatmate was the deputy chief of police. In the course of very casual conversation about the then-current crop of hiring, he'd gotten unwary enough to say, "Give me someone who's never been to college and I can make a good police officer out of him." There was more, of course. Unfortunately, the village manager across the table overheard the discussion. He was not pleased.
Rot that is that old is probably too deep to ever repair. Especially when there's so much money involved.
FWIW, many years ago when my ex-wife was looking at completing her almost finished undergrad degree from the University of Iowa many years after first matriculating one of her options was an interdisciplinary studies major which at least appeared to be a way to salvage either a somewhat random accumulation of credits or credits that could have completed a specific major under an older catalog but no longer met current catalog requirements, and be able to graduate with minimum additional coursework. It's just a swag but that "interdisciplinary graduate studies" could have been somewhat similar. Its elimination will likely force someone looking to complete a masters degree after a long pause to take more classes in order to met current degree requirements.
"higher ed is reaching a crisis point, which may force change" - force is all that will change its course - whether through litigation or financial pressure. The children of wackademia will toss all their toys out of the pram, but it must be done. Being taught HOW to think is crucial, where too many programs are nothing but indoctrination in WHAT to think.
"Universities have faced pressure to help address societal problems"
I think that's your problem right there. Universities should be educational organizations, not social welfare quasi-governmental organizations.
If universities continue to shut down women's and gender studies programs, where will the future batch of baristas come from? Oh, the humanity.