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.
Clarkson is a slightly odd duck in terms of the majors it offers, because it started as a school with a fairly narrow tech focus, and then broadened out to a more general-purpose university. In a sense, this could maybe be cast as a return to their roots.
This is a Thing that happened a lot over the last few decades-- the SUNY system used to have clear specializations among its flagship schools, for example, but some years back they decided to make each a free-standing full-service university, which led to weird things like Binghamton tripling the size of their science departments over about the length of a tenure-review cycle. Stony Brook may or may not have gone on a corresponding arts-and-letters hiring binge; I don't know as much about what they did. It'll be interesting to see if this starts to get walked back as the demographic cliff approaches, or if that just knocks out the lower-prestige schools in the system.
I agree that there's a bit of a ratchet effect with administrative hiring, but that's largely just parallel to the same logic in faculty lines. That is, most departments are staffed to meet their highest historical enrollment levels, and in many cases those tenure lines are regarded as theirs by right even when the enrollment patterns have shifted not necessarily to their advantage. There's a presumption among many faculty that allocating appropriate resources to programs with growing enrollments should ONLY be done by creating new tenure lines, keeping the number elsewhere on campus constant. In both cases, you can always find something for the otherwise superfluous individuals to do-- non-majors courses for faculty, new initiatives for administrators-- that justify their continued employment.
On compliance, I would love it if our society were less litigious, or our lawyers less chickenshit as a class, but I've become resigned to it. And again, I would say that faculty are not entirely blameless here, in that a lot of the expansive legal interpretations are rooted in academic analyses that have redefined relatively mundane interactions as fraught with political significance. Everybody involved could stand to take a deep breath and chill out a bit, but I'm not holding out much hope for that.
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.
In the time since this was posted, I spoke to a Clarkson-alumnus colleague who had more information about the situation, and according to him, it's much less of a Big Deal than the initial reporting suggested. It's apparently more of an administrative reorganization-- they're keeping the faculty and majors, but folding them into other colleges within the university. What's being eliminated is the administrative unit that housed them-- a separate college-- and the staff who ran it. According to his report on the message that went out to alumni of the school, anyway; I haven't looked into it more myself.
I suspect those are a place where the "as majors" qualifier is doing a lot of work. They're very likely going to continue to have faculty in those areas to teach Gen Ed kinds of courses to students in more technical majors, but not offer either subject as a major in its own right. I'm just guessing, though; I don't have any more information than is in that news story.
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.
Clarkson is a slightly odd duck in terms of the majors it offers, because it started as a school with a fairly narrow tech focus, and then broadened out to a more general-purpose university. In a sense, this could maybe be cast as a return to their roots.
This is a Thing that happened a lot over the last few decades-- the SUNY system used to have clear specializations among its flagship schools, for example, but some years back they decided to make each a free-standing full-service university, which led to weird things like Binghamton tripling the size of their science departments over about the length of a tenure-review cycle. Stony Brook may or may not have gone on a corresponding arts-and-letters hiring binge; I don't know as much about what they did. It'll be interesting to see if this starts to get walked back as the demographic cliff approaches, or if that just knocks out the lower-prestige schools in the system.
I agree that there's a bit of a ratchet effect with administrative hiring, but that's largely just parallel to the same logic in faculty lines. That is, most departments are staffed to meet their highest historical enrollment levels, and in many cases those tenure lines are regarded as theirs by right even when the enrollment patterns have shifted not necessarily to their advantage. There's a presumption among many faculty that allocating appropriate resources to programs with growing enrollments should ONLY be done by creating new tenure lines, keeping the number elsewhere on campus constant. In both cases, you can always find something for the otherwise superfluous individuals to do-- non-majors courses for faculty, new initiatives for administrators-- that justify their continued employment.
On compliance, I would love it if our society were less litigious, or our lawyers less chickenshit as a class, but I've become resigned to it. And again, I would say that faculty are not entirely blameless here, in that a lot of the expansive legal interpretations are rooted in academic analyses that have redefined relatively mundane interactions as fraught with political significance. Everybody involved could stand to take a deep breath and chill out a bit, but I'm not holding out much hope for that.
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.
In the time since this was posted, I spoke to a Clarkson-alumnus colleague who had more information about the situation, and according to him, it's much less of a Big Deal than the initial reporting suggested. It's apparently more of an administrative reorganization-- they're keeping the faculty and majors, but folding them into other colleges within the university. What's being eliminated is the administrative unit that housed them-- a separate college-- and the staff who ran it. According to his report on the message that went out to alumni of the school, anyway; I haven't looked into it more myself.
What ghastly messaging from the outset, then. But if they are slimming down the administrative infrastructure, maybe that's a positive outcome.
History and political science seem surprising
I suspect those are a place where the "as majors" qualifier is doing a lot of work. They're very likely going to continue to have faculty in those areas to teach Gen Ed kinds of courses to students in more technical majors, but not offer either subject as a major in its own right. I'm just guessing, though; I don't have any more information than is in that news story.