Days before the start of the fall semester at the University of Houston, those of us on the flagship’s humanities faculty learned that the enrollment cap for classes had leaped from 20 to 35 seats. We also learned that our courses, which usually attract 15 or so students, were at risk of being canceled by the administration if enrollment fell short of 80-percent capacity, or 28 students. Previously the minimum was 50 percent, or 10 students.
The near doubling of the cap struck with the suddenness of an earthquake. And yet, the tectonic plates below our once-bucolic landscape have been shifting over the past few decades. The most recent tremors, during and after the pandemic, have left the liberal arts teetering. According to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators Project, the number of humanities majors has declined 17 percent, while history and English majors have dropped by nearly a third. Robert B. Townsend, the project’s co-director, stated the obvious: “The situation is troubling by almost any measure.”
Townsend’s observation is especially true when the measure is based on head counts. In part due to financial woes exacerbated by the pandemic, an increasing number of urban universities, especially those whose students come from low-income backgrounds, are requiring faculty members to teach more courses and more students in each of those classes.
This is happening at my university, where students are wildly diverse, wonderfully eager, and woefully unprepared in the critical reading and writing skills that corporations demand of their employees and, more important, a nation requires of its citizens. While the university insists that strengthening those skills is important, it acts as though strengthening our graduation rate is more important. UH’s experiment at humanities shock therapy is so unsettling because it exemplifies the creeping corporatization of higher education. Among the many unfortunate effects is an emphasis on U.S. News & World Report rankings, which increasingly reward colleges for giving students a degree, not for giving them a challenging experience.
When I asked about the new quota system, as unprecedented as it was sudden, an administrator replied that one of the university’s goals was to prune the catalog of courses that are “routinely half-full.” But that was no great loss, the official added, since they were mostly “boutique classes.”
It does not require a Ph.D. in critical theory to interpret those words, much less insist that words have consequences. Why should a university offer students fashionable accessories, such as smaller classes and close attention to reading, when the administration only wants them in graduation gowns? Why bother with “boutique” concerns like students’ intellectual development when faculty members could simply view them as customers, a clientele whose demands determine our supply?
Why should a university offer students smaller classes and close attention to reading when the administration only wants them in graduation gowns?
One of the classes I will be teaching next semester is “World Cinema.” That replaces the one I had proposed to teach, “French Facts and Fictions,” which I developed and first taught last year. The 20 or so students were fascinated not only by how French novelists had acquired the status of historians but also by the ties that bind fictional and historical narratives.
But as that class bordered on the boutique, I was asked to teach one of the department’s staples, many of which were film courses. Of course, I understand the cultural, historical, and political importance of film. I also understand, however, that I am not qualified to teach a film class. I have never studied film theory or film history, just as I cannot tell the difference between a tracking shot and a crack shot. My sole qualification for such a course is that I can microwave popcorn.
Rather than instructing me to do more with less — the usual situation when a business is cash-strapped — the administration encouraged me to do less with more. In other words, show movies to full classrooms. Has it really reached the point that we can say, “Bilk them and they will come”?
In our email exchange, the administrator warned that there are “more changes to come.” That should make us all pause, for a specter haunts the college campus. It is neither the specter of communism, of course, nor that of corporatization (which has already arrived on campus). Instead, it is the specter of what we might call, mouthful though it is, “consultization,” the morphing of college administrations into management-consulting firms, charged with improving the existing business model of higher education.
Management consultants exist to help corporations “create value” and, no less important, define those same values. As a rule, this definition entails increased revenue and decreased costs, more customers and fewer employees (though, paradoxically, more midlevel managers). Fifteen years ago, Andrew Delbanco was already warning about universities that “compete for ‘market share’ and ‘brand-name positioning,’ employ teams of consultants and lobbyists, and furnish their campuses with luxuries in order to attract paying ‘customers’ — a word increasingly used as a synonym for students.”
From a grounding in the liberal arts, value is now a matter of Saturday-afternoon football. In pursuit of national relevance, my university has forked over $170 million since 2018 to a flailing football program that plays to our half-empty home stadium. (Not to worry, though: We have just hired a new coach, whose five-year contract will pay him an annual salary of $4.5 million.) Value is now defined by large stakeholders, especially the megadonors who prefer to endow sports programs — not humanities programs.
College administrations have morphed into management-consulting firms.
Finally, our administration is focusing more sharply on our graduation rate, a key factor in the annual circus known as the U.S. News & World Report rankings. Clearly, this is a critically important aspect to every university’s mandate. No less clearly, though, it threatens to sideline every other aspect of the educational mission. That danger has been sharpened by the most recent U.S. News rankings. Thanks to what the magazine called the “most significant methodological change” in its history, dozens of universities, including UH, which had been languishing at the back of the line, suddenly jumped from No. 91 to No. 70. President Renu Khator hailed the new ranking, declaring that “progress is not just about numbers; it’s about the positive, lasting impact we have on our students and the broader community. Our students deserve the best education, and our city and state deserve a top-notch public university.”
But U.S. News executed what other universities considered a statistical sleight-of-hand by purging other factors it had previously included in its methodology. Those now-eliminated elements are crucial for true academic excellence: the percentage of faculty members with the highest degrees, the percentage of students in the top 10 percent of their high-school graduating class, and, yes, the average size of college classes.
I have yet to decide on what to show in my film class next semester. But to better frame why I am teaching the course, I am considering Schooled: The Price of College Sports, based on The Cartel, Taylor Branch’s eye-popping investigation of university athletic programs, along with Andrew Rossi’s Ivory Tower, on the cancer of corporatization in higher education. And if only for the home crowd, I might add Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.
Pass the popcorn.
