Rolling higher education into the shitbin thread

Descended from Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

Distinct from Help, I'm trapped in an ivory tower! Or "what the fuck am i getting myself into with this academia stuff" because about institutional collapse more generally not so much the lived experience of being inside collapsing institutions

Or to quote amateurist, "this seems too broad..."

as a progressive empathetic person, I know I should think these adjuncts etc. are being exploited, but as someone who has spent the last 20 years doing jobs that the "academic class" wouldn't deign to stoop to, I feel like they have a sense of entitlement based on a glowing past, perhaps when they were students, and aren't really looking at how shitty other people have it economically.

prior art

generation limbo: 20-somethings today, debt, unemployment, the questionable value of a college education

one thing i've been thinking about is that this (the mismatch between phd's generated/jobs available) is generally presented as a humanities problem (and in english / philosophy / history in particular -- or that's what i know most about at least)

otoh i know plenty of people that can attest that this is a problem for "pure" mathematics as well, and i've seen some really amazing people doing work that is pretty clearly important and worthwhile bounce out of academia or to the adjunct grind, and not just in the states.

i do suspect that the "applied" end of STEM certainly is in more of a growth period, and e.g. if you want to make it onto tenure track in computer science that seems not an impossible dream still, but that's really an outlier in terms of growth.

i'd be curious to see a good breakdown between fields/departments that actually takes account of the pure/applied split.

as a progressive empathetic person, I know I should think these adjuncts etc. are being exploited, but as someone who has spent the last 20 years doing jobs that the "academic class" wouldn't deign to stoop to, I feel like they have a sense of entitlement based on a glowing past, perhaps when they were students, and aren't really looking at how shitty other people have it economically.

What sorts of jobs? What is this perception of the 'academic class' based on? When I was a sessional, I did plenty of other jobs as well, as did many of my colleagues. I had actually started growing reasonably comfortable with the gig economy. Still, what would you consider fair and appropriate compensation/conditions?

trailing indicators:

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2016/05/the-three-highest-paid-people-at-or-by-the-university-of-notre-dame-in-fy2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/nyregion/dreams-stall-as-cuny-citys-engine-of-mobility-sputters.html

otoh i know plenty of people that can attest that this is a problem for "pure" mathematics as well, and i've seen some really amazing people doing work that is pretty clearly important and worthwhile bounce out of academia or to the adjunct grind, and not just in the states.

yes you can find articles on the postdoc crisis as well. an old girlfriend of mine is now a research biologist working at a major u and it's apparently impossible to get ahead / stable in the face of all the performance-metric bullshit, funding dances, professional hierarchies

In Florida adjuncts can now be up to 70% of a school's teaching staff. There is no and can be no meaningful oversight of the quality of a liberal arts education in the post-MBAification of higher ed, and accreditation bodies are in practice virtually indifferent to the idea of quality academics and instruction anyway. Some of the issues relating to the quality of instruction aren't even new. Many states have long allowed instructors to teach anywhere from 15 to 23 credit hours per semester, and this workload has historically been approved by staff because picking up extra hours meant being able to eat or buy their kids clothes.

My old school's most recent academic growth plan included changing the school's name for the third time in 10 years, building a basketball stadium when the school had no league to play in, renting out for a season a pro baseball field several miles away, and chartering greyhound buses for the purpose of taking students to said baseball field as spectators. Meanwhile its library has shrunk in every five year period since I left, and the school's new president, coauthor of the the academic growth plan, is said to be even worse than its previous president, who didn't understand, for his entire interminable tenure up to the moment of his deferred retirement, when he was practically on death's bed, that his quixotic goals for the school flew in the face of what was statutorily allowable in the state of Florida.

The other school in the region was built on graft and straight up illegality. They needed surveys and tests and permits to build over wetlands and the school's reaction was fuck you, fine us. Three out of five members of the board who voted on the location the board ultimately chose worked for the company that owned the site and the land around site.

80% of the people getting a liberal arts education deserve free or cheap occupational/vocational training. The US workforce is heavily over-credentialed.

If I were king, I would socialize 80% of the private schools.

accreditation bodies are in practice virtually indifferent to the idea of quality academics

SACSCOC is responsible for accrediting more degree awarding institutions than all the universities in the UK, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, Spain and Australia combined, I believe. idk how they are meant to be able to do it properly.

What is this perception of the 'academic class' based on?

the hundred or so people i know IRL who are university faculty (most adjunct) and what they've mentioned in person or in facebook posts on the subject. Almost all are arts and humanities ppl.

So the majority of them are MFA's or MM's (or whatever the official U.S. Music Master's degree is called now) who pursued jobs in higher education partially in order to advance their careers as composers, artists, writers, etc.

one thing i've been thinking about is that this (the mismatch between phd's generated/jobs available) is generally presented as a humanities problem (and in english / philosophy / history in particular -- or that's what i know most about at least)

otoh i know plenty of people that can attest that this is a problem for "pure" mathematics as well, and i've seen some really amazing people doing work that is pretty clearly important and worthwhile bounce out of academia or to the adjunct grind, and not just in the states.

That's true of "some really amazing people," but only some -- in general it would be absurd to the point of offensiveness for Ph.D. students in pure math to compare their situation to that of their fellow students in English. The job situation in math is leagues better and has been for at least twenty years. That might change if universities decide calculus should be taught by machine, or not taught at all, but that hasn't happened yet.

english is another mainstay of service-curriculum needs in most institutions, so…?

It seems inevitable that the admin & sports creep pendulum has to swing back the other way at some point. Or else it's not a pendulum and in that case I don't see how in the world higher education survives in any state resembling my college experience from the late nineties, even.

full disclosure i have not yet read this but ppl i trust are sharing it approvingly on fb:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/elephant-seminar-room-phd-saved/

That's true of "some really amazing people," but only some -- in general it would be absurd to the point of offensiveness for Ph.D. students in pure math to compare their situation to that of their fellow students in English. The job situation in math is leagues better and has been for at least twenty years. That might change if universities decide calculus should be taught by machine, or not taught at all, but that hasn't happened yet.

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Sunday, May 29, 2016 9:47 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think j's point pertains here. there are slots to do undergrad adjuncting in remedial math, but seems to be precious little else. not sure how this is functionally different from introductory english courses. degreewise as a whole, the difference being i think that a math degree better suits you (in terms of how you will be judged) for employment prospects _outside_ of academia than many humanities degrees.

the analogy in that article with the AMA isn't quite right---the AMA restricts the # of MDs each year to help keep wages up, it's rent-seeking. I don't see how an organization could come in now and induce that kind of discipline among Ph.D.-granting departments now.

also ime grad student teaching doesn't add up to a lot of hours / "instructional units", relative to faculty. & sure they do some grading / sections but not *that* much. temp / adjunct teaching is a different story, but cutting a doctoral program wouldn't change radically the kinds of undergrad teaching that regular faculty too. losing the occasion grad course would be a drag, I guess, thoughI only got called up to the big leagues four years ago, & I was happy enough before that. the article *doesn't* mention the loss of institutional prestige in cutting a doctoral program, something admins care about since it can lead to $$$ by donations, both by pumping up occasional alums b/c of the subject area, b/c it contributes to staying within associations like the AAU, or b/c it offers the slim hope of having a faculty member win a big prize.

also ime grad student teaching doesn't add up to a lot of hours / "instructional units", relative to faculty. & sure they do some grading / sections but not *that* much.

― droit au butt (Euler), Monday, May 30, 2016 1:22 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think this deeply varies by field. Big intro courses are often taught in ways that are sort of unthinkable without an army of student support. Otoh, I know that often advanced undergrads are given opportunities to TA as well, and so i could imagine institutional shifts towards that as a way to compensate should grad resources be cut.

2 of my math friends who did geo/topo and finished phds in the last year got jack shit. one of them is in nyc trying to get back into banking (which he left to do math), the other spent >a year unemployed and then got a job writing python on another continent :-/

math seems to have a weird job market though. when i asked them about it they didn't apply to that many places and said you needed to have connections so they just applied to places their supervisors told them to. i know in economics there's a central clearing house style job market where every candidate and dept coordinate in one city one weekend and get it over with and you can apply to hundreds of depts and interview for dozens. i can see why that doesn't work in math though, where everything's so specialized and it's hard to quickly get a feel for someone's research

xxp i think the faculty themselves can often care a lot about the prestige, too? from their peers, from having students to boss around, etc.

my graduate alma mater scrapped its upper-level writing requirements for u.g. degrees some time ago, end of the 90s i think, and moved to using a writing-intensive designation on courses across disciplines, rather than just requiring something from a range of junior/senior english/rpc courses. my department's offerings would surely change if there weren't grad students around to grade all those papers (in most undergrad courses below the senior level, often the junior level, the faculty grade exactly zero): the curriculum is overloaded with W-designated courses that are meant to lure as many students as possible into taking them for the writing credit.

"i know in economics there's a central clearing house style job market where every candidate and dept coordinate in one city one weekend and get it over with and you can apply to hundreds of depts and interview for dozens"

no this exists in math in the states, at the big MAA/AMS joint meeting each January

in my job in cornland we had a doctoral program & I got a grader for my early modern course, sophomore level, but not for my junior/senior courses. I wasn't used to that because in wheatland I did all my own grading, but my colleagues in cornland were...pretty used to having that grading.

faculty definitely care a lot about prestige. I did; I didn't want to stay in wheatland for a bunch of (obv) reasons but one was jumping to a dept with a doctoral program, for the sake of vanity and to teach more advanced material occasionally. but yeah vanity for sure.

here in cheeseland first and second year undergrad courses are split between something like lecture and something like sections, and the person doing the lecture does just a little bit of grading on the final; in the sections you give three exams and if you're teaching those you have to grade them yourself. I taught one of those sections this last term, but the others were either grad students or adjunct-like people.

i know in economics there's a central clearing house style job market where every candidate and dept coordinate in one city one weekend and get it over with

some of my housemates from college were discussing this on fb. one is now an econ/applied math professor and the others were bio and pure math people, and the others were envious at the efficiency of the economics faculty job system.

there are slots to do undergrad adjuncting in remedial math, but seems to be precious little else

Just don't think this is really true. To take a good but not top-10 department, University of Illinois, here's their recent job placement info:

http://www.math.illinois.edu/GraduateProgram/doctoral-graduates.html

Lots of these people are going to industry jobs in finance or data science, and lots are going to academic postdocs (which are not adjunct instructorships.) Now you could say maybe the postdoctoral system in math just means these folks are all dumped from the academy three years after Ph.D. instead of right after?

Just googling some of those grads from 2012, who would have been on the TT market this year or last, I see Avsec has a second postdoc at Texas A&M, Butterfield is tenure-track at U Victoria, Choi I can't find, Cummins is TT at West Point, Dixit is TT at IIT-Gandhinagar, Hu is TT at Georgia Southern...

So I just don't think it makes sense to say it's a pipe dream for math Ph.D.s that they're going to get a non-adjunct faculty job; a large proportion still do.

Times Higher Education is launching a new ranking system in September, having decided that the current systems for ranking US schools is 'not fit for purpose'.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/us-college-ranking-launched-by-times-higher-education

Is anyone at NAFSA this week? I'd intended to go this year but it got nixed. Seeing that David Brooks is giving the plenary speech might mean i dodged a bullet.

https://twitter.com/Limerick1914/status/737541019797848066

with leaders like this the future is bright

dear god

Queens has a good anthropology department, iirc. That doesn't necessarily mean that anyone wants to study it there. It looks like a gloss on market forces at work. Not unrelated:

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/tuition-fees-force-students-pick-degrees-salary-prospects

That goes double (or treble) for lucrative international students.

a few theoretical premises / hypotheticals, if i may ~

1. class inequality in the US has been dramatic for some time and continues to slide toward neo-feudalism

2. as in all other prestige professions, those born into privilege are the most "marketable" and thus over-represented in academia

3. to reflect 'the world as it is', why not dispense with the marxist pretenses of our humanities departments altogether, and award college admission and professorships at birth? AP classes and SAT tests would then only be taken by the "smart" comfortable / active / rich kids, to determine where they end up at school (although sooner or later, we might want to consider fine-tuning that, too, to accord with increasing feudalism)

4. the collective sigh of relief among the children of say, the bottom 66%, realizing they're not allowed to take AP classes or SATs like their "smart" comfortable counterparts, could very well release the engines of personal industry, and get this country moving again. first, they might get off their lazy butts and start working earlier. second, instead of taking out student loans upon high school graduation, the bottom two-thirds could take out small business loans. in any event, the money the government would save no longer subsidizing the advanced educations of people not born into comfortable circumstances could then be applied to further tax cuts on the job creators, which can only benefit the less industrious classes who'd be jobhunting at younger and younger ages, a virtuous circle

5. in the short term, this would mean shutting down a ton of schools, but you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. another drawback would be the shrinking of the NCAA, but perhaps it's time to have basketball and football minor leagues, anyways? the college music scene would likewise shrink, but hey, the obscurer the audience the better!

xxxpost
I wonder how much the econ job market system contributes to their culture of assholishness. They gossip and backstab to rival the cast of Mean Girls: http://www.econjobrumors.com/

But that doesn't mean it's not somehow "efficient"...

What could sociology, anthropology, and history possibly have to do with the analysis of society?

i love EJMR but i think the ass-holishness on display there is just typical conservative message board trolls and doesn't reflect irl. the fact that the polisci and sociology equivalents are just as toxic kinda proves that. all the econ grad students i know are nice people who are disturbed by the stuff written there anonymously by peers

the hundred or so people i know IRL who are university faculty (most adjunct) and what they've mentioned in person or in facebook posts on the subject. Almost all are arts and humanities ppl.

So the majority of them are MFA's or MM's (or whatever the official U.S. Music Master's degree is called now) who pursued jobs in higher education partially in order to advance their careers as composers, artists, writers, etc.

I dunno, the music sessionals I've known have generally either taught a tonne of courses or done other jobs as well (mostly music lessons or some kind of performance/conducting gig but I know people who have done manual labour). I did quite a bit of temping for a while until I was in a place where I could do well enough with other teaching work. I don't necessarily think there should be a really easy ride to tenure and a six-figure salary or anything but I think the labour situation could fairly be described as exploitative in a number of places. The fact that other people are also facing exploitative conditions does not change this.

i'm not quite sure how to work it so that 'area studies' get to be saved but lately i've been feelin the crazy idea that academics should start pushing back hard against usefulness in schools, anything that's not a traditional academic subject is to be axed, banished to the vocational schools

i guess this would solve nothing tho, since aside from STEM-related fields needed to get the engineers out the door it would mean universities' revenue streams would vanish

I worry that we'd end up with a lot of musicologists who can't play.

The jump in the number of students between 1980 and now, and particularly over the last ten years, has been extraordinary and I'd guess mostly driven by people who were the first in their families to go to college or the children of first generation immigrants. Usefulness isn't just built into the political agenda, it's in the agenda of millions of families where the risk of fronting up college fees needs to be tied to demonstrable increases in conventional employment prospects. Obviously there are questions over how demonstrable those prospects remain but I can't really see much of a way back from here. Business / marketing / finance are also absolutely crucial to the international student demographic, who'll be increasingly important in the the U.S. in the future.

actually i was partly thinking of uselessness as a proxy for (the freedom for) rigorousness and student motivation (perhaps again in the freedom from certain occluding motivations). in my adjuncting adventures i've kicked around to a pretty representative range of the levels of institution in my region, had traditionally/untraditionally good/bad students at all of them, but it seems like the most poisonous combination, pedagogically, has been the ones who are only at college because they (economically) have to be, pursuing a practical major (in that mid range of the ones housed in universities, never traditionally in vocational schools) which has no real or even speculative need for anything like scientific/systematic knowledge, and are fundamentally incurious. it seems as if the traditional disciplines, trying to play the administrative numbers games, just cannot win with those students, thus just cannot win with the administrators.

this is a serious question, but, like, what do marketing majors even study

Every marketing course I've ever seen has been a combination of business fundamentals (intro to business statistics, management theory, finance, business ethics, etc), psych modules and more specific content (retail marketing, digital marketing, etc). As an undergraduate course it does often look like it has been cobbled together but there is also a fairly serious academic discipline behind it that gets fleshed out more at post-grad level and does cross over with the more traditional ideas of applied social science research.

There clearly needs to be viable, respected alternative routes for people who fundamentally don't want to be at university but feel they have no other options though. Whether that is vocational study, apprenticeships or something else, I don't know. Germany is an interesting example of a country that is arguably more 'over credentialed' than even the U.S. but still retains a strong alternative path for less academic students.

it's mean the way vocational schools and the like are under-emphasized in secondary schools. kids who aren't great at school are made to feel like society has no use for them.

even though i agree about incurious marketing students i feel like explicitly railing against 'usefulness' backfires in practice

I dunno, the music sessionals I've known have generally either taught a tonne of courses or done other jobs as well (mostly music lessons or some kind of performance/conducting gig

uh, those are all perfectly respectable. Those aren't at all the types of "wouldn't stoop to x" jobs.

It's a supply and demand problem, as has been mentioned by others in the past dozen posts. Should "we" create more economic opportunities for all the MFAs etc or should there just be less of them? And what hasn't been discussed is education for education's sake. If someone wants a Master's in Music Composition or an MFA in visual art, because it will make them a more emotionally/intellectually fulfilled person, then why shouldn't they? Why should they have to reproduce the means of production by becoming a professor or a professional artist or musician?

This is definitely tied to socioeconomic class, but, this pressure to have a career in what you studied in college feels more pronounced now than when I was in college.

given the cost of college in america, degrees are either 'investments' or luxury goods and if you get a job in your field then you avoid feeling like you bought a luxury good.

Otm

what's wrong with luxury goods?

and "cost" is relative.

nothing's wrong with them, but unlike buying a sportscar a lot of people only find that their degrees were luxury goods after they made the purchase

yeah, it's as if they told everyone that a sports car was the ticket to a well paying job and a comfortable lifestyle and then when you got home they were just lol now you can pay this off for the next 20 years except w/ the sports car you resell it but no one will buy yr diploma even from a fancy college

anything that's not a traditional academic subject is to be axed, banished to the vocational schools

Coming back to this for a moment, i do think it's at least plausible that a substantial cohort of students might, in the future, decide that a traditional academic university environment isn't the best place to learn business skills. Given the option of studying a degree-level course at a mid-to-low level college / university with little to no 'brand recognition' or studying a vocationally-orientated degree course with a theoretical path to direct employment at IBM College or the Chevron School of Management, i think a lot of people would probably lean towards the latter.

Sumsung does this reasonably successfully in Germany, Canada and the UK, typically at a lower level and in partnership with traditional colleges, but it has the potential to take a much larger segment of the market. One FTSE 100 company in the UK has launched its own stand-alone degrees rubber stamped by a trad university and aims, in the future, to have degree-awarding powers of its own.

This inevitably means the "corporatisation of higher education" and has been resisted on those grounds, and also poses a potential revenue threat to traditional universities, but it could lead to refocusing of attention.

God that sucks — I’m sorry for everyone whose life this upended.

Holy crap Table I’m sorry you are involved in that, it’s made the news down here too.

And of course I feel terrible for the students left hanging too.

As someone whose 9-5 is spent bending over backwards to make sure a large contingent of students is on track with their degree progress and that nobody gets themselves into an academic bind they can't get out of, that is a legitimately crushing scenario to even contemplate. My sympathies, tables, to you and your colleagues and, ugh, those poor students.

thanks all. honestly one of my star students wrote an absolutely incandescent letter to the president and the board that is worth reading.

https://www.instagram.com/p/C7r1hEQPmoK/?igsh=MTJiMDIxd3p3ZXR3dA==

My dept chair posted a video of the offices and hallways and it was just so brutal, it made me cry

That letter is great - it should be nailed on the door of every administrator.

I'm so sorry table, that is so upsetting

I'm very sorry to hear that table! the numbers cited in that IG post are eye-watering

higher ed is in such bad shape right now, I'm p fearful for its future

there is an enrollment cliff but most of the problems are caused by mismanagement and profit-centered thinking at the hands of administrators. not surprising, but still infuriating.

damn sorry to hear, table, awful.

That's really disturbing. It does feel like whatever foundations higher education rests on are increasingly fragile. But having the rug pulled out from under the whole university community like that has to be really jarring and, yes, infuriating.

https://hechingerreport.org/colleges-are-now-closing-at-a-pace-of-one-a-week-what-happens-to-the-students

I had read some news of the closing, sorry to hear you're caught up in it, table.

that is so terrible, table, I'm sorry.

What’s wild about the Hechinger report article is that UArts nor PAFA are not mentioned— these are the two art schools that have closed in Philly in the past year— but there are three other mergers or shutterings in the Philly area that are mentioned, namely the Salus-Drexel merger and the College of Sciences- SJU merger, as well as the Cabrini closure. These institutions are all within an hour drive of each other, so all told, five schools will have shuttered in the past two years in one metro area.

I teach at a small regional comprehensive state school in WI that has had its own enrollment and $ issues of late. There have been a few private collages in the area that have closed and/or are clearly faltering, to the point where I have heard other faculty and admins expressing hope that we will be the benefactor of their losses in terms of students having fewer choices. Seems macabre but that is how much everyone is suffering.

I'm so sorry, table. And I read that Hechinger report yesterday with a chill.

Really sorry about this, table. Kind of horrifying that the people in charge would fail to do the bare minimum to help students transition and keep faculty up to date.

The school I taught at for many years (that RIFed me and my entire department) is being absorbed into another school. I don’t miss the stress of constant worry but I’m still actively sad about what was and why could have been. Brutal landscape for higher ed in general.

Why = what whoops

I also hit the paper ceiling at the school where I’m teaching where apparently I’m a Forever Adjunct bc I am capped at 2 classes but that’s not enough to live on so I have another job where I can make money and not grade papers in my free time.

I learned this weekend that Northwestern “bought” Mills College in California or something? And now it’s a completely different school with no arts program?

They're buying a college in NYC now too.

Anyway table this is horrible, abject mismanagement, sorry you have to go through it

Northeastern, not Northwestern. And guess who arranged the buyout of Manhattan Marymount to Northeastern? The president of the school where I worked. Her name is Kerry Walk, and I hope she suffers

Went to campus for the last time today to grab a few things. The program chair had to sign me in because none of our cards work anymore. He told me that his Dean had requested for him to use ChatGPT to make his communications more professional. (We’re a creative writing department, and she, too, is ostensibly a writer). He said his first thought when he got the news was “I am glad I don’t have to deal with this horrible person anymore.”

Also ran into two former students, both of whom started crying when they saw me. Had to give them hugs. Just brutal, guys.

Terrible news — I saw the announcement of the closure on Twitter. Totally fucked.

Students who transfer lose an average of 43 percent of the credits they’ve already earned and paid for, the Government Accountability Office found in the most recent comprehensive study of this problem.

That's ridiculous. What a dumb obstacle to being able to transfer.

that’s why a proper teach-out with onboarding to schools that will transfer credits is so important, and why UArts failed its students so miserably.

Awful. Table, my sympathies. (Two of my college classmates are also - were also - on staff there so I’ve been hearing a lot about this.)

I was sad to hear that University of the Arts closed. Two years ago the art school right behind my house, the San Francisco Art Institute, which like University of the Arts dates back to the 1870s, also closed abruptly. SFAI had a towering history with many famous artists who were graduates and/or educators. A beautiful and famous Diego Rivera mural is left behind. The reason given has been that such a small school with high costs and a small endowment isn’t going to work in today’s environment

I also learned from watching Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up that it was filmed at the Oregon College of Art and Craft in Portland, by all accounts an amazing school that was over 100 years old, after it closed in 2019

Indiana University to discontinue more than 100 academic programs, with state institutions across Indiana slated to discontinue 249 academic programs altogether.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2025/07/01/indiana-university-to-discontinue-more-than-100-academic-programs/

Horrific.

Among the dozens of undergraduate degree programs at IU Bloomington that are being eliminated or suspended with plans either to eliminate or merge them were Art History, American Studies, Atmospheric Science, Cognitive Science, Comparative Literature, Dance, Earth Science, French, Geography, East Asian Studies, Gender Studies, German Studies, Italian, Music/Ballet, Religious Studies, Spanish, and Statistics.

More than 15 teacher education programs at both the undergraduate and graduate levels are being eliminated.

Several master’s and doctoral programs will also be discontinued. Notable examples included MA programs in African Studies, Comparative Literature, Communications and Culture, Journalism, Latin American Studies, Statistics, Theatre and Drama and several foreign languages.

Included among the Ph.D. programs slated for eventual phaseouts were African American and African Diaspora Studies, American Studies, Art History, Astrophysics, Chemical Physics, Classical Studies, Comparative Literature, Astrophysics, French, Japanese, Gender Studies, Italian, Public Policy, and Theatre and Drama.

Amidst all the awfulness of this, note especially the rhetorical sleight of hand between the actual criterion used for targeting programs (number of graduates per year) and ostensible goal (career prospects for grads). I thought the conservative storyline was that too many students were enrolled in supposedly pie-in-the-sky humanities fields, not too few. I don't think an Art History department pumping out fifty undergrads a year would necessarily be serving those students' employment chances better than one that produces ten.

Eliminating degree programs will, of course, have knock-on effects in terms of who gets hired as professors retire, and therefore what kinds of classes are offered even for non-degree students. This is transparently a mechanism to forcibly narrow universities' mission down to a handful of approved technical/managerial fields, and not incidentally, to systematically purge all the "woke leftist" disciplines. And I guess Classics, Statistics, Astrophysics and languages, while they're at it.

I say all this as someone who went to another big state university, and double-majored in what is now a Gender Studies program there. I was one of maybe three or five B.A.'s that year, so the program would not have survived these standards. Sure, some of the classes would have - they were largely housed in other departments - but how many of them would I have taken if I hadn't decided on the major? How might that have impoverished my thinking, or my critical outlook on the world? When I went on to get a masters, two of those professors wrote letters of recommendation for me - would I have had the rest of my career without that? Would those professors have even been hired to those posts without the knowledge that part of their teaching load would serve this other degree program? God, this is maddening.

Might as well put the aftermath of the coup at the University of Virginia here:

https://www.29news.com/2025/07/01/former-uva-president-calls-ryans-resignation-watershed-moment/

The damage done by all this will be a permanent legacy of the current administration— a total decimation of higher education, with some institutions happily acquiescing to fascist demands, thus evidencing the utter lack of ethics that is pervasive throughout the sector.

I am torn because some part of me wants the University to burn, because it was rotting even before Trump’s first term began. It has been rotting for decades!

But another part of me, the more level and strong side, is simply aghast and wants these institutions to do better, and to be small part of forcing them to do better.

Viva the small liberal arts college!

the admin class has infected every kind of university afaict

everyone working at every school needs to join/organize their local branch of AFT/AAUP imo. organizing (AFT-WI Local 3535 whaaaat) has been the only thing that keeps me sane

Teamsters Local 2010 here:

https://teamsters2010.org/

Ah right I should not neglect our Teamster and UE and other sibs ✊

Quite so!

ASTROPHYSICS. Statistics! I mean Public Policy I get because it churns out people who go on to become directors of non-profits and on one wants that. But astrophysics?!

I am a member of our union, which is under the umbrella of AFT. I no longer harbor negative feelings toward the union, as they finally stood up and got significant raises for adjuncts— I went from $1650 per credit hour to $2350, for example— as well as assurances of year-long appointments, which means I already have my classes for fall and next spring.

(Next spring, I am teaching an honors section of Dissent in America. Let me tell you I am going to go *hard* in that class).

Good shit table

as soon as I open my big mouth about being proud to organize with my colleagues and AFT, the leadership goes and does this:

https://www.aft.org/press-release/aft-launch-national-academy-ai-instruction-microsoft-openai-anthropic-and-united

unfuckingbelievable. the only reason I have not cancelled my membership this morning is to organize to vote these fuckers out

yeah, truly incomprehensible

love 2 invite the wolf at the door inside for tea

my alma mater, Indiana University, has just been gutted

https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/07/07/editorial-indiana-university-academic-programs-eliminated-mike-braun/

I opened up a ProQuest ebook the other day and the screen was half covered up by a window asking if I wanted to have the chapter summarized for me by AI. Contacted our IT/digital learning team and they determined it was a beta rollout that shouldn't have been on by default, and got it turned off, but... Criminy.