Stanley Fish, in yesterday's NYT:
And indeed, if your criteria are productivity, efficiency and consumer satisfaction, it makes perfect sense to withdraw funds and material support from the humanities — which do not earn their keep...
And 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.
Christopher Newfield, who actually knows something about university budgeting:
Universities are held together by “cross-subsidies,” and ... 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, ... actually have some of their “profits” from instruction transferred to help fund more expensive fields....
Opening the books on cross-subsidies would allow the public to understand exactly why universities cost as much as they do. It would allow universities to honor the financial as well as the intellectual contributions of their cultural and social disciplines. It would enable all the disciplines to interact peacefully and intelligently as the ensemble we call “the university,” this astonishing thing that cannot be replaced by government or business or churches or volunteers. Open-budget dialogue would head off the cold war looming over academia, the one now becoming increasingly likely as administrators lose their financial ability to buy temporary truces with new resources and departments sink into fighting over what is left....
The United States is on the verge of undermining a higher education system that has been a model for the world. It’s not too late to turn back, but the way forward lies through understanding and addressing the dire need for public funding for the university’s three major public missions: egalitarian access, advanced research, and transformative learning.
[UPDATE: the always insightful Michael Bérubé points to this excellent Newfield essay.]
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