As colleges navigate enrollment declines and financial stress, many of them are turning to a familiar strategy: cutting less-popular majors, often in the liberal arts and, in particular, the humanities.
Lasell University announced last week that it will eliminate five liberal-arts majors including English and history, which would lead to the layoffs of four faculty and 12 staff positions. Undergraduate enrollment at the small campus outside Boston fell 15 percent over a decade.
Administrators at West Virginia University are deciding this summer whether to keep or eliminate all three of its fine-arts schools and eight departments in the College of Arts and Science, including English, philosophy, world languages, and women’s studies.
Such efforts are often accompanied by fears of faculty job losses. When Emporia State University, in Kansas, announced last fall that it was cutting majors, including debate, history, and journalism, it also planned to lay off 33 faculty members. Shortly afterward, the university announced 12 new hires to bolster nursing, computer science, music, and art programs. Now, 11 of the dismissed faculty members, mostly in the humanities, are suing for wrongful termination.
This approach to belt-tightening is not new, but, if recent history is any guide, its results can be inconsistent. The employment prospects for humanities faculty have been difficult for the most recent five-year period studied by the Humanities Indicators project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. According to the project’s analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the number of faculty positions in the humanities nationally decreased by 12 percent between 2015 and 2020, the greatest decrease of any subject area it examined. The drop followed a brief plateau that interrupted a period of steady increase from 2000 to 2013, leaving the total number of humanities faculty at 169,330 in 2020.
Faculty members who have managed to hang on at institutions that cut their programs describe feelings of pessimism as they teach dwindling numbers of students. Other professors say their role in teaching general-education courses helped preserve their jobs, while still others say administrative turnover ushered in a reprioritization of their disciplines.
A look at a few high-profile cases from four or five years ago shows the diverging paths that can follow the attention-grabbing announcements of program cuts.
‘What Are We Here For?’
In places where proposed cuts to humanities programs did take place, the affected faculty say they’re not optimistic about the future.
At Hiram College, a small liberal-arts college near Cleveland, the religious-studies major and minor were eliminated in a wave of restructuring in 2018 to create a curriculum focused on experiential learning. Four fine-arts majors and a handful of others in the humanities, including modern languages and philosophy, also took a hit, and six professors, four of whom were tenured or on the tenure track, were laid off.
Then-president Lori E. Varlotta termed the college’s rebrand “the New Liberal Arts,” which it trademarked. Majors like marketing and sports management replaced the demoted humanities majors. New graduation requirements were adopted, including an internship, study-away program, or research project.
Ella W. Kirk, one of the two remaining faculty members teaching modern languages, said that when Hiram removed its foreign-language requirement as part of the new academic strategy, her class enrollment suffered. There are now only two students with French minors, and two with Spanish minors.
“It has had a really dramatic effect on my morale and the morale of my colleagues, because what are we here for?” Kirk said. “We don’t have a program. We don’t really contribute to the general education of our students because there’s no requirement.”
Varlotta left Hiram for California Lutheran University in 2020. David P. Haney, who retired as Hiram’s interim president at the end of June, spoke little about the New Liberal Arts while in office, and faculty members say they don’t hear much discussion of it these days. (Robert Bohrer II, who became vice president for academic affairs and dean of the college at Hiram in mid-June, was named interim president.)
Willard P. Greenwood, a professor in the English department, which lost only one faculty position, said he and his colleagues credit gen-ed courses for their salvation. There were only five English degrees conferred in 2021, down from seven in 2019 and 10 in 2014.
Greenwood said that, despite the declining number of English graduates, literature classes are still full because they fulfill gen-ed requirements for all students. To continue demonstrating their value to the college, English faculty members teach many of the courses in the first-year writing program, which is designed to help students find a major and get acclimated to college. The English department has, in the past 20 years, contributed more and more to these interdisciplinary programs.
“I have really dedicated colleagues who have stayed current with teaching and scholarship and are really good with service to the college,” he said. “So my hope is that we’ve weathered the curriculum change and Covid and hopefully the pendulum is swinging back a little bit.”
The search for a new president is not yet underway, and Kirk said she’s hopeful that a newcomer could reinvest in the humanities. But she tempers her expectations, she said, because she’s been “disappointed so many times.”
Kirk also teaches classes in the English department and general-education courses, but she’s approaching retirement, and she said she doesn’t anticipate that her position as a French professor will be filled when she leaves.
“I’m not even going to dream about it,” she said, “because I don’t think it’s going to happen.”
The Saving Grace of Gen Ed
At the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point, gen-ed courses were a life raft. Thirteen liberal-arts and humanities majors — including modern languages, English, and political science — were proposed for elimination in 2018. They were to be replaced by 13 technical-degree programs in an initiative called “Point Forward,” an attempt to eliminate underenrolled majors to offset a budget deficit. Students and faculty members marched on campus and took to social media to protest the plan, which quickly gained national media attention.
But a year later, it became clear that the cuts would not take place as planned. A statement from then-Chancellor Bernie L. Patterson in April 2019 suggested that retirements and resignations across campus would allow the majors on the chopping block to be retained, with some consolidation of programs like geography and geoscience.
Chris Diehm, a professor of philosophy there since 2005, was the interim chair when the cuts were proposed. He said the philosophy major, which would have been affected by the original proposal, was retained because the faculty teaching it are necessary to provide general-education courses to the rest of the 7,500-student campus.
“What saved us is the fact that we have done a really good job of integrating our courses into other programs,” said Diehm. For example, he said, a 300-level philosophy course called “Environmental Ethics” is required for roughly 30 major programs outside of philosophy.
Diehm said the philosophy and religion department was “whittled down” in the years leading up to 2018, so even before the proposed cuts were abandoned, his department’s faculty felt like there was little left to cut. Even so, the number of majors was following a worrying trend: The number of philosophy graduates from the program was just three in 2021, down from 16 in 2018. Still, he said, at times, the five faculty members in the department have been teaching roughly the same number of students as their equivalent department at UW’s flagship campus in Madison, which has 22 faculty members.
Part of the problem, he said, is the way a major’s value is calculated when assessing what to keep and what to trim.
“The administration tends to focus on a pretty narrow range of variables as to how they measure your value to the university,” Diehm said. One of those variables, he said, is the number of students who enter the university planning to major in a certain program. (The university did not respond to a request for comment on the metrics it uses to evaluate academic programs.)
But Diehm knows that philosophy, like some other humanities majors, is one that students often become interested in during college, not before. He said less than 1 percent of students say they expect to be philosophy majors when they enter UWSP.
“Kids don’t go to college to major in philosophy,” he said.
Helped by Leadership Transition
In another case, a presidential transition did bring about a renewed emphasis on the humanities. At the University of Tulsa, a 2019 proposal aimed to reduce degree programs by 40 percent and restructure departments into four broadly-titled divisions: University Studies, Arts & Sciences Interdisciplinary Studies, Professional Programs, and Engineering and Natural Sciences. It also cut a range of graduate programs, including Ph.D.s in anthropology, chemistry, and physics, and master’s degrees in fine arts, history, gender studies, and education.
The proposal, which was titled “True Commitment,” did not call for faculty layoffs. Nonetheless, it sparked outrage from professors on social media and student protests on campus, including a “funeral” for the liberal arts, held outside the president’s office. Those protesting decried the goal to turn Tulsa into a different kind of university. The faculty voted no-confidence in the president, Gerard Clancy, who resigned shortly afterward, and in the provost, Janet K. Levit, who replaced Clancy as interim president and remains as a professor in the law school.
“They were trying to rebuild the university, an institution that has existed for more than a thousand years and rebuild it as something ugly and sterile,” said Jon Arnold, an associate professor of history, who helped coordinate the liberal-arts funeral.
But four years later, many of the proposed cuts did not play out at all or have since been reversed. Michael Futch, an associate professor of philosophy, said that Brad Carson, who became president in 2021, “promised to maintain, or rather re-establish, the university’s commitment to a strong liberal-arts education.”
The undergraduate majors in philosophy and religion were cut as part of True Commitment. But last September, Carson brought a joint major in philosophy and religion in front of the university’s trustees, who approved it. The restored major came with two new tenured faculty positions and three contract faculty members. Futch pointed to Carson’s enthusiasm for the humanities as a reason for the reversal, rather than a changing cultural attitude about the humanities since True Commitment or a major financial upswing.
“It’s the fortuitous circumstance of having Brad Carson come to you in 2021,” said Futch.
Other humanities departments are cautiously optimistic. The classical-studies certificate, one of only two programs of its kind in Oklahoma, was preserved during the cuts, although there were fears that Latin and Greek courses would be discontinued. Latin and Greek are still being taught, though, and Arnold, who directs the certificate, said he’s continuing to drum up interest in the program.
The history department is waiting for more faculty hires that have been promised for years. Arnold said that Carson’s administration is friendlier to the humanities than the previous presidents’, but that the restoration of programs and positions is still a source of concern for him.
“A lot of people are asking that question: Where is the money coming from?” he said.
For Arnold, the change in administration was helpful for the humanities, but Carson is “not necessarily championing the liberal arts over STEM.” Carson told The Chronicle his vision is to turn the university into a Research 1 institution, but Arnold noted that the elimination of many graduate programs during True Commitment may make that goal difficult to realize.
Carson restored the Ph.D.s in chemistry and physics after coming to Tulsa. He said he’s working to bring back the anthropology Ph.D. and expand the doctoral programs in psychology, English, engineering, and the natural sciences. As he focuses on turning up Tulsa’s volume as a research university, though, he doesn’t want to lose sight of the humanities.
The humanities are “as important and indicative for the university as the scientific research we’re doing,” Carson said.
The reinvestments made to the humanities have breathed some life into the departments that suffered cuts four years ago. But the fear that cuts will be made again still stalks the university’s halls. When a university seriously proposes such significant changes to the academic structure, Arnold said, it has a lasting effect on faculty.
“It’s hard to believe when you’ve gone through an experience like this where you really think you’re going to go from being a productive scholar to essentially teaching students how to read,” said Arnold. “Now suddenly that’s not the case, which is awesome. And it makes me want to go to work. But there is trauma associated with that.”
