Humanities are the heart of every college and university

Today was a long-anticipated day on my campus.

We've been told that cuts are coming, cuts are coming, cuts are coming. Over the past couple years, scores of administrators and staff positions were cut with layoffs, and a lot of vacant positions have sat unfilled. Until this moment, academic affairs had been relatively protected, but ultimately we've got to stop spending more money than we're taking in if we want to stay in business.

So they released the list of programs being considered for discontinuance.

We just learned that we're about to lose our undergraduate offerings in: Marketing, Chemistry, Clinical Science, and Criminal Justice. Oh wait no, I'm just kidding. Those programs get to stay! Instead, the ones actually on the chopping block include Art History and Philosophy. (I'm not joking now. Those are on the list.)

Philosophy is on the list.

Up until now, we have been doing our best to act like a serious university. Dear readers, is it possible we can be a serious university without a degree in Philosophy?

I might be a biologist, but I am also Doctor of Philosophy. Even the idea that we're possibly considering such a change breaks my heart. It makes me wonder what the heck I'm doing here, a doctor of philosophy in an edifice of higher education that is preparing to subtract philosophy from the menu.

Outrage and anger are wholly acceptable emotions at this point. I think they might be the most appropriate emotions. Even if you are enlightened with all of the facts and institutional history underlying our complicated and highly nuanced circumstances, it's perfectly fine to be mad. How can you not be mad when a university is preparing to excise degree programs straight from the heart of the liberal arts?

Once the anger subsides, let's figure out where to focus this anger. Who is to blame? Who might be able to fix this?

Oh. When you put it that way, it becomes a nigh intractable problem.

You don't have to look much around to notice that all kinds of institutions are trimming back on the arts and humanities. (Remember kids, science is a liberal art.) Why are institutions trimming back in these areas? It's a simple matter of supply and demand.

The people who run universities need to balance budget. While there some small institutions with catastrophically high endowments like Swarthmore and Harvard and Williams, the rest of us can't afford to maintain low enrollment programs. This is especially true for institutions with high social mobility rankings, which make the biggest difference in impacting the lives of our students, because we also tend to be the least resourced institutions.

Even though university faculty are broadly undercompensated, the vast bulk of the academic affairs budgets is salary. If budgetary trimming goes anything beyond a slight haircut, that means fewer people are working. Because all of our institutions have grown to rely on the contingent labor of non-tenure track faculty, then these are the folks bear the brunt of such cuts. Which is a particularly sore matter considering hese folks are undercompensated even worse than their peers with the fortune of being hired into tenure-track lines.

Fewer faculty means fewer course sections.

It doesn't take long to get into the math of academic budget balancing to come to the conclusion that courses with perennially low enrollment are expensive to run.

The next obvious logical step is to notice that low enrollment courses are concentrated in low-enrollment programs. Those programs are, in relative terms, extremely expensive to run. It doesn't matter if it's a biology course or a history course or an economics course or a philosophy course, what makes a course expensive is if there are few students enrolling.

That's because the mitochondria of the university are powered not by ATP (Adenosine Triphosphate), but by FTE (Full-Time Enrollment units), which some folks call "butts in seats." Getting students in the door pays the bills.

Which means that if you're trying to balance the budget, the worst thing you can do is cut the programs with high enrollment. Most folks do the opposite of the worst thing – they target the programs with low enrollment for cutting.

So, yes, the programs being targeted on our campus at the moment are ones that graduate a handful of majors. You can count them on your fingers, even if you've lost a few in a gardening accident.

When you look at it this way, it almost kinda sorta makes sense. We've got to balance the budget. That means that we have to teach fewer sections. There are all kinds of levers to pull to make that happen – by packing more students into classrooms, increasing the size of online offerings, reducing redundant offerings, offering courses in alternate years, engineering the curriculum so that low-enrollment courses are valuable for credit in a variety of programs, et cetera. But once you've yanked on all those levers and the books aren't balanced, then what institutions do is cut programs.

And time and again, we keep seeing that the arts and humanities bear the brunt of these cuts. (And Physics, once in a while.)

I understand why. It's supply and demand. Our problem is that the numbers of students choosing majors in these fields has declined.

When I say that it's our problem, it's not just a financial problem, it's our grander societal challenge. We need people majoring in philosophy and history and art now more than ever. And our communities that have the biggest challenges when it comes to the carceral state, labor exploitation, structural violence, environmental injustice, and more – the arts and the humanities are at the heart of these issues as well. We train leaders to address our problems by preparing and nourishing the whole person.

I understand why these core liberal arts might end up on the chopping block and I also understand that we've got to do a lot better at communicating the value of these fields of study. And when you're working with first-gen students who are looking at college as a means to a more secure livelihood, then we need to communicate the value of this work as it translates into the potential to have a secure income. I understand why folks are majoring in business or nursing or education or clinical science, because those appear to have clear(er) pathways towards steady work.

The choice to become a Philosophy major, for a first-gen student, can requires a certain leap of faith. While I am confident that majoring in the humanities is strong career preparation for many different fields, and I know that lots of employers feel the same way – are we operationalizing this in our curricula, are we connecting the dots, are we building those routes toward success? Are students able to see that this is a successful path to take?

I'm downright mad at the prospect of cutting a Philosophy major. Oh my gosh, my blood boils. And I also look at the numbers behind the problem, and, honestly, I'm still mad about it. We don't need to cut Philosophy, we need to reinvest in the humanities, we need to provide more tangible connections to the communities we serve, we need to make sure that on a day to day, we value this knowledge and how it informs our work in all areas.

This is easy to say. The hard part is forging a throughline between our values and those enrollment numbers. I believe this is not only possible, but it is essential in a vibrant university that fulfills its mission. In this sense, we are fighting for the future of our institution. Because if we can't uplift the arts and humanities high enough for our own community to see its value and vote with their feet, we really must do better about filling the gap between our mission and our day to day efforts. Maybe, just possibly, the threat of these cuts will compel us to take bold steps to invest in the liberal arts as a pillar of our community. I hope our leadership will have the courage to walk down that road with us.