“…Humanities departments have withered over the past two decades: smaller classes, fewer majors, and a shrinking faculty. A debacle. In part, it is owed to students voting with their feet: they think the jobs are elsewhere, so they gravitate to majors in business and other “practical” fields. But it also reflects conscious decision-making by the universities, which behave like businesses in their own right. In a bracing article earlier this year, the University of Chicago classicist Clifford Ando showed how “revenue-centered management”–one of several practices borrowed from the corporate realm–spurred the university’s business and public policy schools to offer undergraduate majors, so that they could siphon off more tuition dollars. (Willie Sutton said he robbed banks because that’s where the money is; at universities, it’s in the undergrads.”
Jonathan Zimmerman, “Why College, or What Have We Done,” Liberties, Fall 2024, 129-130