This past summer saw yet more announcements of universities gutting the humanities—a now familiar news genre, alas. One of these, Seattle Pacific University, earned further reflection this past weekend from historian Chris Gehrz:
Seven years ago, I enjoyed my experience as faculty retreat speaker at Seattle Pacific University. But this year’s speaker at that event, sociologist John Hawthorne, reported that SPU has announced sweeping program eliminations (touching Chemistry, History, Philosophy, Physics, and Theology, among others) after its enrollment plunged from a 2018 peak of over 2,900 undergraduates to less than 1,800 this fall.
(I couldn’t bring myself to write a full post on that sad story. But let me just reiterate what I wrote here in 2022: you can’t really be a liberal arts institution if you don’t have robust programs in the arts, humanities, and sciences.)
The reason Chris has been writing about this since well before 2022 is, alas, because such cuts to the humanities are ubiquitous these days at institutions large and small, Christian and secular, public and private. Really, only a few liberal arts colleges and the Ivy Leagues seem immune to these cuts. And it’s not just the humanities that are on the chopping block. When I taught at a state university in Georgia, the University System of Georgia had a list of protected majors—majors that could not be cut, no matter how low the enrollment was. The list included Math, Physics, History, and English.
For other majors (the unprotected ones), each institution in the USG had to graduate a minimum number of students per year—pre-pandemic, 10 BA students in that major per year, and 5 MA students from a program per year to be in good standing. Programs not meeting minimum thresholds could be placed on probation and eventually eliminated. By the way, the minimum threshold was identical for all state universities, from Georgia State (enrollment of 50,000+ as of Fall 2023) and others with an enrollment a fraction of that.
Since the pandemic, the USG has increased its minimum requirements for majors to be in good standing AND has eliminated the protected list. No prophets needed to translate the writing on those walls.
And so, someone this weekend asked a good question: “Could accrediting agencies or state governments help?” How, on a related note, can a university exist without majors in such basic fields in which it must offer classes for the core, at the absolute minimum?
These are good questions. My answer to the first question: no, this is not what accrediting agencies are for. Yes, they do have minimum requirements for degrees (and types of degrees) and staffing of programs, but it is largely within the purview of a college or university to decide what sort of institution it wants to be and, therefore, what degrees it does or does not want to offer. I’ve known of several colleges and universities that have lost their accreditation at one point or another, and in every single case that I know of (granted, an anecdotal sample and a small sample size!), the reason was financial mismanagement. Never academic cuts.
In fact, in the case of humanities cuts, it is the state systems and accreditation boards who may be cheering those on the loudest, because of perception of uselessness and general concerns over costs–Cassandra Nelson and Peter Wood’s essays in response to Boston University’s decision to pause admission into humanities PhD programs offer a case in point.
To answer the second question–about how a university can exist without majors in math, history, English, etc.–it is essential to understand that when a university cuts a major field or a department, they’re eliminating degrees in that subject. But the teaching of that subject in the core will remain—meaning, freshmen at Seattle Pacific, just like everywhere else, will still have to take freshman English composition, for instance, even without an English department on campus. Student experience in these classes will not be the same, however.
Typically, whenever universities cut entire majors or programs, this condition allows them to eliminate all faculty lines in those programs, including tenured faculty. Tenure does not protect faculty jobs in those conditions. So what happens next? Often, an institution might keep some of the tenured faculty in that field, but it might not. Instead, the most common outcome is to hire adjuncts or lecturers to staff the core offerings in that field. This option is significantly cheaper: not only does an institution not have to pay adjuncts a salary but only a low per-course rate, but it also doesn’t have to cover their benefits, which are a significant expense for the institution otherwise.
In places like the USG, there is an additional solution, if an institution eliminates a field in which there are core classes. The USG has an eCore consortium—an online version of the required core classes that are taught on a per-course fee basis by various faculty from across the university system. Students who would like to take the core online can easily and cheaply take core Math or English and other classes through eCore, bypassing their own home campus.
These are solutions that would not jeopardize the institution’s accreditation because these options would allow students to get through their core in a timely manner. But lest anyone think that we might as well just accept these solutions, a reminder: It is duplicitous to an extreme degree to pretend that an online class taught by an adjunct across the state whom the students will never meet is in any way providing the same educational experience in that subject area as an experienced professor in the physical classroom, and (this is key) one fully invested in the institution in question.
Cash-strapped institutions too often choose solutions that turn them into the living dead. At some point, though, the question worth asking has nothing to do with accreditation (which allows both for adjunctification and the elimination of the humanities beyond the core), but everything to do with offering an education that is truly good. Is the institution offering something to students that is genuinely good? What, by contrast, is the purpose of offering to students something that is not good—or true or beautiful? Is it not selling students a lie to offer them something inadequate—and with full awareness of the inadequacies of the offering?
Institutions that will continue to grow and thrive are ones that believe in education as something greater—and infinitely more transcendent—than just boxes to check and minimum thresholds to meet. As CCCU president Shirley Hoogstra wrote this fall in a joint op-ed with Clark G. Gilbert for Deseret News, some “Faith-based universities are growing for a reason.”