Did I miss a thread on this? Apologies if so. Stanley Fish had a couple op/eds on this topic a couple weeks ago after the president of SUNY Albany cut French, Italian, Classics, and a few other departments. This open letter from a Chem prof at Brandeis just got posted to my faculty list serve. It's angry and raw and a bit snide, but it's also spot on, IMO. http://genomebiology.com/2010/11/10/138 "Dear President Philip, Probably the last thing you need at this moment is someone else from outside your university complaining about your decision. If you want to argue that I can't really understand all aspects of the situation, never having been associated with SUNY Albany, I wouldn't disagree. But I cannot let something like this go by without weighing in. I hope, when I'm through, you will at least understand why. Just 30 days ago, on October 1st, you announced that the departments of French, Italian, Classics, Russian and Theater Arts were being eliminated. You gave several reasons for your decision, including that 'there are comparatively fewer students enrolled in these degree programs.' Of course, your decision was also, perhaps chiefly, a cost-cutting measure - in fact, you stated that this decision might not have been necessary had the state legislature passed a bill that would have allowed your university to set its own tuition rates. Finally, you asserted that the humanities were a drain on the institution financially, as opposed to the sciences, which bring in money in the form of grants and contracts. Let's examine these and your other reasons in detail, because I think if one does, it becomes clear that the facts on which they are based have some important aspects that are not covered in your statement. First, the matter of enrollment. I'm sure that relatively few students take classes in these subjects nowadays, just as you say. There wouldn't have been many in my day, either, if universities hadn't required students to take a distribution of courses in many different parts of the academy: humanities, social sciences, the fine arts, the physical and natural sciences, and to attain minimal proficiency in at least one foreign language. You see, the reason that humanities classes have low enrollment is not because students these days are clamoring for more relevant courses; it's because administrators like you, and spineless faculty, have stopped setting distribution requirements and started allowing students to choose their own academic programs - something I feel is a complete abrogation of the duty of university faculty as teachers and mentors. You could fix the enrollment problem tomorrow by instituting a mandatory core curriculum that included a wide range of courses." ctd. at above link
The humanities departments need to tap into the Internet guys. Zuckerberg studied Classics at Harvard. The Groupon founder was a music major at Northwestern. A lot of Internet apps aren't business majors figuring out how to find a market niche, or techies doing tech stuff. They're humanities types playing around and inventing things that seem cool to them. The company I work at is basically fueled by humanities majors. The CFO has a graduate history degree and no MBA. Never took a finance course. If you're smart and have a good humanities education, you don't need somebody teaching you something to learn it. You know how to learn on your own. A lot of people don't understand that. Hey that's alright, makes it easier for the rest of us to snap up top employees.
Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed in Portland Oregon, but he stuck around for a year and a half sitting in on, of all things, calligraphy classes. As to the topic... I heard the story on NPR the not long after Albany made it's moves. I'm actually surprised it doesn't happen more often, given the anti-intellectual, bureaucratic mindset of most university administrators.
When I first read Petsko's letter awhile back, my first reaction was not that he wrote a compeling letter. Rather, I thought: how in the world does a guy working at a university have that much time to write the president of some other university about disciplines not his own? Then I realized: he has tenure.