The Angst of Low Demand
A very familiar pain
While we were off at my parents’ for Christmas, the story broke that Clarkson University, just up the road from us, is eliminating nine majors from its school of arts and sciences. This is close enough to Union both geographically and in market terms (they actually bought our teacher education program some years back after we foolishly spun it off, but that’s a long and stupid story) to be more personally concerning than your run-of-the-mill “random college phases out programs” story. It’s depressing to see yet another college reducing the options available to students, and I say that as a semi-professional STEM booster.
At the same time, though, there’s this:
The nine majors being phased out — social documentation, history, literature, sociology, film, political science, digital arts and sciences, communications and media, and interdisciplinary liberal studies and humanities — represent less than 2% of students.
That’s a bit of a grab-bag— at least one of those sounds like what you get when a Dean and the Registrar cobble together credits to push a 5th-year-senior out the door in a way that doesn’t drag down the graduation rate. It’s also a small enough number to be a genuine resource problem— if 49 out of 50 Clarkson grads are majoring in not-these-subjects, I don’t think it’s outrageous to question whether maintaining these as majors is a good use of time and money and tenure lines.
This is not an argument I feel enthusiastic about making. I am, for my sins, currently the chair (for the second time) of a department that in a good year accounts for a single-digit percentage of Union graduates. I am very familiar with the angst of the low-demand major: canceling majors courses for lack of students, or begging permission to run a low-enrollment course because one student needs it to graduate, and other such fun activities.
We can, at least, fall back on our service role— most of our teaching time is devoted to courses required for engineering majors, life-science majors, and general education science. Counting those three areas, we probably teach close to half of each graduating class in at least one course. But I am acutely aware that being able to offer service courses is an entirely different matter than being able to offer upper-level majors courses. I would find it a whole lot less fun to be a college physics professor without ever having the chance to teach a majors-level course in my area, but at the same time, I know that a whole lot of people at other schools do exactly that.
So, as I said, I am very much in an “I feel your pain…” position, here. At the same time, though, I can’t honestly say that it’s not a legitimate question to ask whether low-demand majors can or should be maintained. I would personally answer that in the affirmative, at least for selective private schools— we are, after all, in the business of selling what is essentially a luxury item, it should be luxurious— but I don’t think it’s outrageous to ask, or trivial to answer.
(To head off an obvious response, I think it’s much too glib to talk about “administrative bloat” as the Real Problem here, and say that everything could be fixed by eliminating some large fraction of administrators. Like every other professor, I firmly believe there are some superfluous positions in most colleges, but I suspect there’s little to no consensus among faculty as to which positions are the useless ones. Some of what consensus can be reached is also just wrong— a distressing number of my colleagues will point to the development office as an example of “bloat,” but if those people are even minimally competent, they’re paying for themselves. There are also a lot of administrative positions that are doing necessary work that would otherwise devolve upon the faculty who would 1) haaaaaaaaaate that even more than they hate the idea of an Assistant Dean of Counting Beans, and 2) do an absolute shit job of it.)
So, yeah, this is the latest in a long line of Things That Suck Very Much, and will be no means be the last in said line. The answer, at least on an individual-institutional basis, is to find ways to increase the demand for what you’re offering, but that’s also a Very Hard Problem that we’ve been wrestling with for more than the 23 years I’ve been on the faculty. I don’t think there’s a permanent solution in easy reach, for any of us.
So, you know, merry friggin’ Christmas, and a happy new year to all the academics out there. If you would like more of this sunny outlook, here’s a button:
And if you want to tell me exactly which administrators are the useless ones, the comments will be open:
At the least, a couple of those aren't majors that I think fit a small liberal arts college very well--social documentation only belongs in a university that has a large, well-established film and media program with a big production component, for example. They feel conceptually inconsistent--very much as you say, an attempt to awkwardly stitch on some professional degrees chosen for imagined market value, at least in the way they're named. An institution has got to have some vision of what it's particularly good at or wants to achieve that goes beyond "let's throw a bunch of named degrees at the wall and see what sticks", if for no other reason than winding down a bunch of degrees at once sends a bad signal to future prospective students--it's not a cost-free solution to a financial problem.
I think the service role should be the one that matters most in a SLAC, really--I think the only time we should ever be talking about a program that needs to be merged is when there's no majors, no minors AND low enrollments. When you've got enrollments and relatively low majors, you're doing something really important still.
Administrative bloat is something I used to dismiss but I have become sensitive to the reality of it over time. There's two issues, really: 1) people working from austerity never seem to evaluate administrative growth the same way they look at faculty positions, which suggests to me that it's roughly the same thing as C-suite growth in a corporation--people at VP ranks in companies never audit their own positions for cost-effectiveness, just the people below them. So a lot of 'bloat' happens when hierarchies lengthen and you get more positions in the highest tier of an academic administration. (As you make more tiers and the administration gets 'taller', you also tend to have each tier get wider, because each tier now needs its own support staff so that people in charge aren't too busy also doing the bean-counting.) 2) Liability and compliance logics present themselves as so unchallengeable that they metastasize all over the institution, often based on interpretations of legal requirements that go well beyond what the law actually mandates or based on risk aversion so extreme that it becomes considerably more expensive than the risk the institution is trying to avoid.
We can quibble about some of those majors, but a college or university that jettisons history, literature, and political science is an unserious shit-hole.