Continuing this developing story, the dailytarheel.com reports that 46 degree-granting programs within the University of North Carolina system are being discontinued:
Thursday morning, the Board of Governors educational planning committee voted to discontinue 46 degree programs across the UNC-System, including one at UNC-Chapel Hill: human biology. Some of the programs will be reformatted as concentrations or consolidated into other majors. The entire Board voted Friday to adopt the recommendations voted on by the committee Thursday.
Other schools saw more programs discontinued than UNC-CH. East Carolina University and UNC-Greensboro saw eight programs discontinued each. …
[Board member Steven] Long said he didn’t think the programs addressed by the report necessarily needed more scrutiny.
“We’re capitalists, and we have to look at what the demand is, and we have to respond to the demand.”
The report is relatively emotion free; the comments attached to the report are vitriolic. Up until that last line about being capitalists, the report could be evaluated as simply some hard decisions being made by school administrators; however, Universities are not, or should not be run by capitalists. Capitalists favor running corporations as the method for managing production. While capitalists can run non-profits, most run for-profits.
Education is not an institution centered on the idea of profit, but rather an institute for equipping citizens for their participation in society. Not all skills lead to directly to profit, and yet it is important to society that a fair proportion of the citizenry have those skills. Attempting to run a full-blown university system based on the needs of the capitalist corporations that surround you – and, in some cases, no doubt having a poor understanding – or, to be blunt, letting your ideological sensibilities lead you off into the wilderness – is beneficial neither to society nor even those corporations you think you’re serving.
Equally as importantly, the research universities must support the researchers who are out in the intellectual wilderness, scouting for new knowledge, new ways of thinking – sometimes striking out, sometimes succeeding. That’s the glory of the research university, but it’s not going to be directly profitable, and attempting to shape such research towards immediately profitable ends is a fool’s errand. The businessman wants to know how much profit he’ll make in the next financial quarter; the researcher may pursue a plan that’ll last 20 years and perhaps fail in the end. Who’s more important?
The researcher.
Some damage is easy to repair, but restarting degree-granting programs is probably a challenge. Poor North Carolina.
