More on the End of Public Higher Ed
by zunguzungu
In the wake of SUNY Albany’s decision to ax their French, Italian, Classics, Russian and Theater departments (because of state budget cuts), Stanley Fish declared in the NYT that
…if your criteria are productivity, efficiency and consumer satisfaction, it makes perfect sense to withdraw funds and material support from the humanities [since] it won’t do, in the age of entrepreneurial academics, zero-based budgeting and “every tub on its own bottom,” to ask computer science or biology or the medical school to fork over some of their funds so that the revenue-poor classics department can be sustained.
As Chris Newfield points out, though (via), however common it’s become to regard the humanities as sponging off the real departments, Fish doesn’t appear to be burdened by familiarity with university fiscal structures:
Universities are held together by “cross-subsidies,” and the general rule, as explained to UC officials last fall by Jane Wellman, executive director of the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability, is that cheap programs subsidize expensive ones. Cheap programs include English and sociology. Expensive ones include medicine. This means that in the real world of higher education funding, English and sociology make money on their enrollments, spend almost nothing on their largely self-funded research, and then, in the cases I have reviewed, actually have some of their “profits” from instruction transferred to help fund more expensive fields. Without these cross-subsidies, plus the everincreasing clinical labors of its own overworked faculty, medical research would be losing money, as the research enterprise always does.
And as he goes on to note, my own dear President Yudof is, as usual, a giant flaming “Dumb or Evil?” conundrum:
…when [UC president] Yudof went on the PBS News Hour in November to explain the need for fee hikes, he remarked, “Many of our, if I can put it this way, businesses are in good shape. We’re doing very well there. Our hospitals are full, our medical business, our medical research, the patient care. So, we have this core problem: Who is going to pay the salary of the English department? We have to have it. Who’s going to pay it in sociology, in the humanities? And that’s where we’re running into trouble.”
In one short statement, Yudof foregrounded the university as a business, claimed that much of it is making money, singled out medicine as especially lucrative, identified two of the high-enrollment fields in the humanities and social sciences as needing subsidy, and described public money as subsidizing these money losers. He thus confirmed citizen fears that university leaders focus more on revenues than on education. He confirmed faculty fears that these leaders see cultural and social fields as a burden, even though they normally have the large majority of undergraduate enrollments. A viewer would reasonably conclude that the university could support both research and teaching by spending the profits it makes on its own knowledge industries, without asking the public for additional help.
As Bob Samuels reminds us, here, spending the money which students pay for instruction and which the state pays for instruction on, you know, instructors, is not really the scandal Yudof makes it out to be:
I analyzed the university’s own salary data from 2009, and I found that less than 9% of its total compensation is spent on undergraduate instructional positions. In other words, if we take the total UC payroll of over $9.8 billion dollars, and we subtract the pay of the administrators, staff, coaches, researchers, and professional school faculty (Law, Medicine, and Graduate), we find that the university spent $960 million on undergraduate instruction. If we now divide the total instructional salary costs by the number of undergraduate students, 170,000, we find that each student’s instructional costs was $5,647 in 2009.
It is important to stress that the UC receives, on average, $10,000 from each undergrad student in fees and tuition, and the university claims that a third of this amount goes to financial aid, so the university brings in a net of $6,700 from each student. However, the state also funded each undergrad in 2009 to the tune of $14,500. This means that the university made an instructional profit on each student of $15,553 for a total of $2.6 billion. In other words, teaching undergrads is a highly profitable business, and these students actually subsidize everything else universities do.
Of course administrators, will argue that we cannot exclude the cost of administration, staffing, buildings, research, libraries, and facilities; however, my point is that we cannot blame the instructional salaries for the budget problems of universities.
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Update 10-13, via Moacir’s comment, Robert Watson at UCLA also crunches numbers:
President Mark G. Yudof probably meant no disrespect when he identified us as the “core problem” of the university’s budget crisis, and maybe I’m mistaken to hear more resignation than enthusiasm in the assertion that an English department is “trouble” that you nonetheless “have to have.” But he is mistaken about the economics—and you probably are, too. As Jane Wellman, executive director of the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability, said in a New York Times article last fall, English students usually generate a profit. “They’re paying for the chemistry major and the music major. … The little ugly facts about cross-subsidies are inflammatory, so they get papered over.”
If you count what patients pay for treatment as income earned by a medical center, but do not count what students pay for literature courses as income earned by the humanities department, the hospital will surely look like a much smarter business. You might therefore appoint those productive health-care administrators to a death panel (called a universitywide planning committee) on lost causes like the English major
But, according to spreadsheet calculations done at my request by Reem Hanna-Harwell, assistant dean of the humanities at the University of California at Los Angeles, based on the latest annual student-credit hours, fee levels, and total general-fund expenditures, the humanities there generate over $59 million in student fees, while spending only $53.5 million (unlike the physical sciences, which came up several million dollars short in that category). The entire teaching staff of Writing Programs, which is absolutely essential to UCLA’s educational mission, has been sent firing notices, even though the spreadsheet shows that program generating $4.3 million dollars in fee revenue, at a cost of only $2.4 million.
zunguzungu 
Michael Berube said something at his place which is worth repeating:
I devoted a good portion of my talk to the Maryland AAUP to arguing one of the real crises of the humanities is that so many humanists say so many stupid, wrongheaded, uninformed things about their fields, all of which take the form of “we know we’re ugly and pointless and nobody takes our classes and everybody is right to hate us.” That lament, having been disseminated steadily over the past two decades, is now responsible for the widespread attitude that when university programs and departments have to be eliminated, of course the humanities should go first, because they’re a bunch of boutique disciplines and also they lose money and have to be subsidized by other departments and also enrollments have declined precipitously since 1970 and also they have been ruined by trendy theorymongers and queer feminist theory deconstructionists and also there was the Sokal Hoax, Q.E.D.
Stanley Fish being one of the prime offenders, of course. I wish we were better advocates for our discipline. There’s not a shortage of data proving why the humanities are economically viable (since non-economic justifications simply don’t seem to matter anymore), but the narrative out there is that we aren’t viable, and I don’t see how we can change the narrative when the entire power structure is now based around eliminating the (perceived) unessential functions of social institutions.
Yes. And one of the things no one ever points out is that the economic value, even if you accept that metric, of teaching every college student x-amount of calculus (or insert your own “socially useful” discipline here) is often pretty minimal, and rarely subject to any kind of quantitative evidence. In life, everyone spends some time writing words. How many people actually put to use the skills that the classic high modernist state thought would bring about a developmental utopia? Have you “used” your semester of Biochem lately? I’m the last to say we *shouldn’t* be teaching those things, but the intuitiveness of the distinction between the “socially-useful disciplines” and the “froo-froo humanities” rests on a lot of begged assumptions about usefulness and a lot of lazy thinking. At UC Berkeley, for example, the admins — who set the standard for lazy thinking — definitely operate under the assumption that teaching the sciences is useful FOR EVERYONE whereas the humanities are sort of mildly amusing but not serious, exactly the same casually tossed off attitude Fish is displaying. But it’s an assumption that no one ever feels the need to actually substantiate, so powerfully does it operate at the ideological level.
Great start, Julie. An exciting aspcet of your new challenge next year is that there is nothing in place. This can be an incredible opportunity to put the disruptive learning into practice. Looking forward to discussions with you, both on-line and in person.
Surprisingly well-written and informative for a free online article.
[…] Log and zunguzungu have must-read critiques of Stanley Fish’s latest swan-song for the […]
Here at UNC, our Chancellor is big on “entrepreneurship” and “innovation,” whatever that means. There are plans to build an 85,000 square foot “Innovation Center” north of campus, a place which “will provide a unique set of resources to accelerate select technology-based business development opportunities based on research carried out at UNC-Chapel Hill.” I can think of nothing more asinine, especially considering our current budget crunch. (Luckily, the building is on hold for now, as the developers have realized there’s no money for it.) Transforming a public university into a research conduit for business entrepreneurship (and explicitly tech-based business entrepreneurship) is stupid and destructive, and will do no good for the humanities OR the sciences.
Similarly, a biologist friend of mine often complains about cancer researchers, because they suck up funding and attention for being so very, very relevant and heroic, whereas the work he does, evolutionary development, has to explicitly demonstrate in grant proposals how it will save mankind, even if such gestures are forced or far-fetched. Of course, a better understanding of Evo Devo will inevitably be invaluable to those cancer researchers, but if a utility-based conception of research dominates, only the cancer guys will get money, and their research will be harmed through the lack of the “non-useful” sciences. Things are no doubt worse for theoretical physicists and the like.
Mick education in and of iteslf might not help, but it is a good place to start! If Australian’s were more politically aware (i.e. educated) Howard would not have been able to get away with the things he did.
That kind of thinking shows you’re an expert
ninety nine percent aaron November 22, 2011 I wrote what I did below excltay because I heard students and others calling for her to resign wtf is wrong with you people? You have Stockholm syndrome, you’re mental slaves! If you can’t see the truth and seriousness of what I wrote then you’re truly blind. Read the law. Learn what constitutes the various felonious assaults on the books. Learn what charges would apply when you hire or direct others to commit violent crimes. Learn what charges should apply if you are the authority figure at a state institution and you allow these things when you had foreknowledge.Learn what it means to commit violent crime for political purposes. Do you understand that concept? It’s similar to hate crime where an individual violent crime becomes something much larger when there is a terrorist intent. And when you are the state, you are the authorities charged with upholding the law and protecting the people and you betray that trust in every way and become a bigger law breaker than those you prosecute and jail and when the magnitude of your crimes, because you are the authority committing them with state power, is so great and destructive then you must be prosecuted, not merely lose your job. If break open a head on the street do you get to negotiate and say well I’ll just quit my job and then you the state won’t prosecute me criminally? Of course you don’t get that choice. Are we a nation of kings and lords above the law or having a different set of laws? A petty criminal goes to prison but a giant terrifying criminal using violence for intimidation, when you are supposed to be relied on and trusted by the public can get away with crimes against humanity with impunity?Please ask yourself whether it’s a greater crime to steal a car or to commit assault with intent to do great bodily harm and to induce fear and terror in order to prevent freedom of political speech as expressly forbidden for government to do in the constitution? The only choices are to release all prisoners because there is in fact no law, or to treat these crimes with proportionate seriousness compared to the crimes we already prosecute. So if the average sentence for a similar type of felonious assault of one person is 2 years, then assaulting a whole nation through violent suppression of democracy, a crime against 300 million people, must at the very least get a 300 million times greater sentence. In this case, at least 600 million years in prison if not death.If not then there is no law here other than the law of the jungle and therefore why should anyone follow any laws? Is that what you want?
I’m glad people are responding to the “Fish fell for the ‘humanities are loss-leaders’ trope hook, line, and sinker” aspect of his article. As I commented on Language Log, I stopped reading his NYT piece as soon as I hit that. Nothing below was going to be good if he got that crucial point exactly wrong.
[…] More on the End of Public Higher Ed […]
[…] in the wealthiest nation on Earth without entering debt peonage. That said, Aaron Brady has argued (here and here) the clear case the problem proposed is usually one of bad faith, that humanities tend to […]
It could be that the interview was heivaly edited. Knowing the New York Times, they likely took his long answers and figured they were distilling the essence of them. Unfortunately, when you’re talking about tough issues (including those outside the job description) to someone with the type of job no child fantasizes about growing up to be, short summaries are going to sound cold and out-of-touch. He doesn’t strike me as the type to respond to an out-of-context interview, but it would be interesting to see if he did. He might be just as bad in context, but context is the first thing I thought of when seeing this.As to the assertion from Anonymous that people come to the university to make money after graduation, there are many people who believe that the problem is precisely the opposite. People go to college not to learn a trade, but because “they should,” then spend the years taking whatever they feel like, without regard to whether the knowledge and skills will be useful past their last day of school. So we’ve got parents who spend tens or maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars for their children’s education, only to find out that the children haven’t learned anything of use and are just as financially dependent as they were as teenagers (something exacerbated by recessions such as the current one). Worse, they might not learn general critical thinking skills, but a certain type of thinking which is useful for succeeding in their department, but useless to harmful outside of academia. (Of course, I’m not talking about engineers here — hopefully! — but if a student has nothing but “love of academics,” he or she might wind up ill prepared for anything else.)
Many many quality points there.
I recall the April befroe I graduated. At the end of that March I had finally realized that academia was a dead end. I spent April: talking to an air force recruiter (somehow I figured learning Arabic was a way to use my degree in English and Philosophy lmao)looking up youtube videos on how to raise sheep, buying seeds, and fantasizing about being a self-sustaining peasant in the woodsrolling my eyes at my professor’s lecture on the Freudian elements of Frankenstein (Freudian elements of Frankenstein??? seriously??) then angering professor. She assigned surprise quiz as a result of my bad behavior. Got a zero on quiz as I had long ceased doing reading assignments by then.Watching anime at the computer lab for hours each evening to kill the last few weeks of time on campus. Living on fast foodPlanning with my fellow (jobless) philosophy major friends to buy land in the woods of Oregon and start an ecovillageIf I could give advice to someone in a similar position (dragging their feet through the last month of a college degree that has lost its value overnight,) I would say that college may not lead anywhere but it’s still a hell of an easy life to lead. So enjoy that last month and worry about learning the fundamentals of sheep husbandry and selling yourself to a different career AFTER you’ve left campus and you actually have a taste of what the outside is like.
That’s a smart way of looking at the world.
thank you