“Whenever you have a 'southern' or a 'northern' or an 'eastern' or a 'western' before an institution's name, you know it will be wildly underfunded." –Richard Russo
On March nineteenth the Chancellor of the University of Maine System, as well as the President, and select members of the Board of Trustees gathered in front of a crowd of students, faculty and staff in the Hannaford Lecture Hall, a spacious and new lecture hall (more often rented out than used for classes) to unveil the University of Southern Maine's new vision as a “Metropolitan University.” Two days later, on the twenty-first, twelve members of the faculty from such programs as economics, theater, and sociology met with the provost of the University to be "retrenched." Both of these events followed the proposal to eliminate four programs (American and New England Studies, Geosciences, Recreation and Leisure Studies, and Arts and Humanities at the Lewiston Auburn Campus) the week before. It was a strange and tumultuous week, and one that I fear offers a frightening glimpse of a future of higher public education in the US.
All of these events, the rebranding and the cuts, were in a response to a system wide budget shortfall of $35 million, of which USM is slated to absorb $14 million in cuts. Claims of poverty on the part of public universities need to be contextualized against the massive decrease in state allocations, on the one hand, and the increasing connection between the university and financial services, on the other (on this point in general see Edward Kazarian’s post) in which bond ratings matter more than educational mission. With respect to the former the University of Maine system has followed the national trend of divestment in higher education. In 1999 appropriations accounted for 63 percent of the university’s budget while tuition and fees made up 37 percent, by 2014 this was reversed to 62 percent from tuition and 38 from allocation. During this period Maine went through the largest tax cut in its history, cutting taxes on inheritance and otherwise making it easier for the wealthiest to keep their money. A tuition freeze instituted in 2012 followed closely on the heels of this cut. (The latter is a perfect example of faux-populism, taking measures to supposedly cut college costs while failing to address the real cause of those costs.) During this same period USM added several new buildings, such as the lecture hall noted above. As enrollment dropped by six percent from 2008-2012 the combination of reduced appropriations, fixed tuition, and decreased enrollment led to a perfect storm of budget problems.
What interests me is less the economics of this decision (others have criticized it better than I could) than they way in which corporate rebranding and austerity budget cuts reveal a particular hollowness at the heart of the public university, an inability to articulate a clear purpose outside of advertising type and a rationale other than minimum public cost for maximum private gain. The combination of rebranding and excessive cuts seems to constitute another perfect storm, one of ideas (or lack thereof) rather than finances. The meeting on Wednesday was less an exercise in shared governance in which the president proposed changes for the faculty, staff, and students to weigh in on and approve, than an exercise in pitching a product. Words like “metropolitan,” “innovative,” and “nimble” passed from the president of the university and the chancellor of the system to the members of the board of trustees, all from banking, corporate law, and the business sector, constituting a dismal display of the current corporate common sense. One member of the board of trustees even went so far as to compare the university to broadcast television suggesting that the “metropolitan university” adopt the business model of Netflix, delivering content quickly and conveniently. The recasting of the university as corporation that must “adapt or die” was coupled with disparaging remarks about shared governance, union contracts, and public debates over the fate of a public university. The entire presentation was a lesson in the contradiction between public good and private interest.
Such a display of vacuous corporate new speak would be distressing enough, but the rebranding event was preceded by and followed by a series of cuts. The rationale for the cuts had little to do with some failure to be “metropolitan” than with the departments with low numbers of majors. Cutting of faculty followed a calculation of majors, not of actual courses and enrollment. This is less a matter of a rationale or a vision than it is a simple matter of accounting, and a narrow one at that; the focus on majors not only overlooks contributions to general education, to the ideal of liberal education, but also the way in which many of the majors serve other departments, required economics courses for business majors and so on. The ultimate irony of converting majors to “stakeholders” investing in their field of study at this point is that the university recently adopted (in 2011) a nationally recognized comprehensive change to general education, which not only requires interdisciplinary designed courses but also encourages students to add a minor to their course of study.
Things get even more tenuous once we move from the departments selected for cuts, Art, Economics, English, Music, Philosophy, Sociology, Political Science, Theater, and the Muskie School for Public Policy, to consider the individuals retrenched. The university claimed that they were merely following the policy of “last hired, first fired” as mandated by the AFUM contract. However, these cuts were coupled with retirement incentives in which senior faculty were encouraged to retire to save not only the careers of their colleagues but their departments. That three faculty agreed to this deal, retiring earlier than planned, only reveals something of a commitment to higher education on the part of faculty. They did so not just to save the jobs of fellow faculty, but also to save departments that have been subjected to cuts and hiring freezes year after year. Without new faculty the future of these departments are very much in question. Nonetheless, the effect of this policy was divisive, pitting new faculty against senior faculty. Things get worse when you look at who was cut. Ten of the retrenched faculty are women; overall the loss of new faculty, faculty hired in the last ten years, substantially reduces the diversity of USM's faculty. It is difficult to even say what is the worst aspect of the retrenchment of tenured faculty, the loss of new faculty (who bring with them much needed new ideas and engagement with the community), the huge step backwards in the diversity of USM faculty, or the undermining of the very idea of tenure. Many of the faculty retrenched only received tenure in the past few years, after dedicating years of their lives to USM and the community of southern Maine.
We could ask what kind of metropolis this is supposed to represent, a city devoid of diversity, of even place and location, but that would be to give this idea too much credit. It is not an idea at all but an image. What is most striking about these events is that they present a university that has a “metropolitan,” public face, which, upon examination, is nothing more than a marketing image, and a core that is nothing more than a cost benefit analysis. Between branding and accounting there does not seem to be the slightest thought of what the university has historically been and what a public university ought to be for its community and citizens. The only place this ideal seems to exist, however, is on the placards wielded by the students protesting these cuts and in their impassioned speeches. Since the cuts were announced hundreds of students have organized and protested to save their professors, their programs, and the idea of the university.
What is perhaps surprising about this whole series of events is how quickly all these ideals and traditions, public education, tenure, etc., came apart, jettisoned in favor of a new brand identity and austerity calculations. It could be seen as surprising, but should not be surprising at all. These ideals have been eroded year after year as costs have shifted from the public to individual students and their families. This collapse in the material support of the public university has been matched at the level of ideas with a collapse of the very idea of a public university, of the university as a public good, chipped away by years of reframing the goal of the university as nothing more than individual job training. If USM is harbinger of things to come, if the nation is to follow in Maine’s footsteps, it is because these conditions are unfortunately not unique to Maine. As the epigraph from Richard Russo above indicates, regional public universities like USM are perhaps the canary in the coal mine that is public education, a coal mine that is going to collapse under the weight of austerity and debt. If this is the case then I only hope that the rest of the nation has students as dedicated and committed to the ideal of public education as those at USM. One can only hope that it is their voices, and not those of marketing or short cited accounting, that are echoed across the country.
Recent Comments