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| You may keep Spanish, as I love me some taquitos. |
At my own middlin'-sized regional state school orders have recently been cast forth from On High for departments to identify their degree programs that are producing fewer than a dozen or so graduates a year, but being told that this in no way means that they are considering eliminating programs. Uh huh. So language and small humanities programs like art history and classics and foreign languages are skittering around like panicked squirrels but being admonished to stop being so paranoid. This news from SUNY will definitely serves as choice nightmare fodder.
-- Dr Lemurpants.
Thanks for the voice, Fab! Mmm. Taquitos.
ReplyDeleteWhat are you suggesting -- that one LIE as to number of students? That students be forced into languages they dont want?
ReplyDeleteMay I say that the admin. of SUNY Albany are yobanny v rote vyrodoki sukin syni amerikanski razyebi! When America is finally a broken dick dog and our female college grads will be walking the streets in Western or Eastern Europe, Italian and Russian will be VERY useful to them (and better than the Mad Max hellscape back home.)
ReplyDeleteDon't you lie to me, Dr. Lemurpants!
ReplyDelete1) I smell a rat if everyone has 100
2) I double-check numbers anyway
3) I might even ask for names
Reason? I'll get my *own* backend fried and served on toast if I produce faked numbers, mostly on account of me provoking the top guns when I find them lying to me with fake numbers (usually resulting in me getting less money or TT positions or curtains).
Now move on and let me deal with these performance evaluations....
I think it would be easier for us if we just got rid of *all* the extraneous money-suck programs and really firmed up our remaining programs: Sports Kinesiology, Management, Recreation Administration, and Accounting. Then we'd have an fantastically streamlined and efficient "university".
ReplyDeleteNow excuse me while I skitter around nervously/ point and snicker at the Folklore and Antiquities profs who have it even worse than I do.
I think it would be easier for us if we just got rid of *all* the extraneous money-suck programs and really firmed up our remaining programs: Sports Kinesiology, Management, Recreation Administration, and Accounting. Then we'd have an fantastically streamlined and efficient "university".
ReplyDeleteDr. Lemurpants
That's no longer a university; in fact it's less than 1/16th of a community college. Gallows humor aside, once SUNY Al. cans those language programs it will be impossible to get them back without importing instructors from abroad because the US grads will take those skills and apply them to other ends: translation work, tutoring, instruction in other states, teaching English in Europe.
My alma mater cut German, Theater, and Sports Management last year. A big stink caused them to save just one of those...
ReplyDeleteSports Management.
What the fuck is sports management?
Mathsquatch out.
Let's just cut to the chase and ax everything but repiratory tech programs. Oh, yeah, and Mandarin. Cuz, we're gonna like need it and stuff.
ReplyDeleteMathsquatch asked:
ReplyDelete"What the fuck is sports management?"
That is the "real" degree program "student"/athletes can enroll in so when they find out that only 25% of them go pro or they blow out a knee during a drunken night of clubbing, they then can begin an alternate career skimming 10% off the actual athlete's salary by being what used to be (quaintly) called a "talent agent."
A few years ago the school where I got my BS & MA cut their program for a Certificate in Appalachian Studies (could be added to an English, Anthropology, or Social Sciences degree) because . . . there weren't enough people graduating with that as their major. Even a reasoned, logical explanation that of COURSE they didn't have any graduates because it's a CERTIFICATE, not a MAJOR didn't help.
ReplyDeleteI'm so glad I got out of that school when I did.
"What the fuck is Sports Management?"
ReplyDelete- Mathsquatch
In the Soviet Union [circa 1935] it would be considered "wrecking" (i.e. damaging the Soviet economy) and be punishable by 20 years hard labor or death by pistol.
In modern America it's a program so the future wrecked fatasses that make up the football team can get jobs in the NFL as equipment managers, office monkies, and other candy ass jobs. In Harvard this would be known as a "gut" program. In my America these assholes would be digging ditches and doing heavy gruntwork in augmented worksuits on the dark side of the Moon because those automated observatories and radio telescopes don't build themselves.
Essentially what they've cut is the Theater and the Languages and Literatures departments (except Spanish, which they're keeping). This is not likely to be saving them the money they think it will save them. I read through the SUNY Albany president's remarks (which you can find here: http://www.cbs6albany.com/news/university-1278894-programs-suny.html ) and it does sound as if they're over a barrel - their budget has been cut by $32 million over the last three years. The first two they managed by not replacing retirements or filling open positions, and they've also been firing a lot of staff; 74% of the cuts are being done in staff and maintenance.
ReplyDeleteWhat I think is going on here is grandstanding, actually (I hope). If they had whittled one position here, there and somewhere else the cuts might go unnoticed by the general population. Axing two whole departments is a very public statement that they cannot continue to run a university this way.
This happened in the country I live in during our last "economic downturn"--language departments closed left and right. Some of them were "just" merged into each other, though, and those seem to have survived.
ReplyDeleteWhat's the alternative, when a program is costing far more than it is taking in? Has anyone ever managed to revive a program when the faculty outnumbers the enrolled students in the program? Would increasing the marketing budget lead to boosting the enrollment of Russian majors? Sports management may not be as worthy a pursuit as existential theatre, but if it brings in a boatload of money, can the universities be blamed for keeping that program and axing the programs that are financial sinkholes? I am *NOT* expressing support for SUNY's actions, just curious as to how other universities manage to save such programs. I see things a bit differently because I'm a staff member and not faculty. The staff are disgruntled when salaries are frozen for years to sustain declining programs that cost significantly more to maintain than they return. Of course the faculty's salaries will also be frozen but I don't talk money with the faculty so I don't know if they are equally disgruntled. When enrollments are down across the board, there is grumbling about salary freezes but everyone knows it's a sad necessity. But when it's a single program that is a huge sinkhole, there is widespread resentment, no matter how worthy that program might be. Those programs eventually end up axed as there are only so many years that the staff and faculty can be expected to bolster them by foregoing the meager cost-of-living salary increases.
ReplyDeleteMy question is not whether or not it's bad that programs are axed and employees fired (it's not just faculty, but also staff who run these programs). Of course it's bad when people lose their jobs. My question is how to save under-enrolled programs so they become financially viable again. Rob from Peter (sports management) to pay Paul (existential theatre)?
What should SUNY Albany have done instead?
Lemme try and answer that last question there..... I teach at SUNY Albany ("UAlbany" as our press folks keep trying to get us to call it, because our actual name is the odd sounding University at Albany.)
ReplyDeleteTo begin, bit of background: Over the past year, the SUNY Central administrators (overseeing all 64 campuses) tried to ram through the legislature a "reform" package that would have made major steps toward privatizing the schools. It would have let each campus set its own tuition, forced them to compete against each other, wrecked the collective strength of our unions, and neglected to force the government to guarantee even a basic level of monetary support. It was put forward by a new Chancellor and backed by the weakest governor in memory. It was dead on arrival and a sign to many that SUNY Central was out of step with the political process (as fucked up as it is in NY State).
The response by SUNY Albany's administration is a form of revenge and unilateral action by upper management in the wake of the "reform" package's failure. For the past year, committees have been formed at the University that have been guided to reach a conclusion that was decided upon at the outset. In short, the fix was in. 4 of the 5 programs slated for termination are "underperforming" in terms of the numbers of majors only—not in terms of how many students they serve nor in terms of the role they play in the graduate programs in other Departments. Graduate students in English and History are required to learn foreign languages but now will have nowhere to go within the University. German was eliminated years ago.
To answer the question as to what should have happened? A) there should have been a fair process at the outset, where all standards of evaluation could have been employed. B) Much better retirement packages could have been offered (they were paltry and unattractive to older faculty who saw their 401Ks take a beating in recent years. C) Cuts could have spread evenly across departments, forcing everyone to teach slightly larger classes. D) Departments with faculty who have very cushy teaching loads, (such as older staff who have finagled 1-1 or 1-2 teaching loads and who don't publish at all) could have been made to take on greater obligations. E) Calls could have gone out to see how much faculty would have been willing to sacrifice—pay-wise—to save those Departments. I've spoken to many colleagues and all of us would give up some of our wages to save those jobs.
UAlbany is going to be a laughingstock. The President set the tone for this at the recent meeting when he announced this decision. For a couple of years, the school's motto has been "The World Within Reach." When it was pointed out to him that he was consigning us to reaching only the English-speaking world, he told us that what the slogan *actually* meant was that the "world of opportunity was within reach". The double-speak has begun.
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ReplyDeleteAh yes. Administrators respond to our students' need to be able to compete in a global economic marketplace by cutting foreign languages. I have a feeling that this will be used as an amusing anecdote in the histories of the fall of the American empire that scholars will be busy writing thirty years from now.
ReplyDeleteGlad to get the inside 411 from "SUNY." It's too bad they didn't ask the faculty council about cutbacks they could live with. At my brother's job (completely unrelated to academe), the entire office agreed to take 10% pay cuts to avoid laying off hundreds of people. They were not obligated to do so, but by and large they were a decent lot and didn't want to see the most recently-hired people get laid off. Perhaps the faculty of SUNY Albany would have been willing to make sacrifices to save those programs.
ReplyDeleteI wonder why they opted to offer only Spanish? Is it because Spanish is generally regarded as easier than French, German, Mandarin, etc.? Or is it because if you live many areas of the US, Spanish is probably the most useful second language to learn, in terms of the number of people who speak it?
A point of [remote] interest...my pops attended SUNY and my mom got her teaching certification through them. These two hard-working individuals produced me. I took SUNY classes before college. Thanks, State of NY, for preparing to screw your working-class population out of an education.
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