This report on UW-Stevens Point from WaPo is definitely disturbing:
The University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point has proposed dropping 13 majors in the humanities and social sciences — including English, philosophy, history, sociology and Spanish — while adding programs with “clear career pathways” as a way to address declining enrollment and a multimillion-dollar deficit.
Students and faculty members have reacted with surprise and concern to the news, which is being portrayed by the school’s administration as a path to regain enrollment and provide new opportunities to students. Critics see something else: a waning commitment to liberal arts education and a chance to lay off faculty under new rules that weakened tenure.
Students are planning a sit-in at the campus administration building on Wednesday in a demonstration called Save Our Majors. The Stevens Point Journal said students will then deliver a list of demands and requests to school officials. The school is one of 11 comprehensive campuses in the University of Wisconsin system.
Perhaps the “University” should just admit it wants to be a lowly vocational school and be done with it. Of course, they think they can whitewash their subversion of this branch of UW with this remarkably capitulatory remark:
To fund this future investment, resources would be shifted from programs with lower enrollment, primarily in the traditional humanities and social sciences. Although some majors are proposed to be eliminated, courses would continue to be taught in these fields, and minors or certificates will be offered.
Remove the major, then remove the professors, and the quality of the education goes right into the crapper. But the real problem is the remark about lower enrollment. Are these guys coming out of the private sector and trying to optimize for cash flow by blowing off the “underperformers”? At an educational institution?
Look, when I went to school, I had little interest in a liberal education – although I thought the philosophy courses were sort of fun and even had an offer from a history prof to write a letter of recommendation – but that was my naivete coming through. And let’s be honest, you can paste the label “adult” on someone, but it doesn’t give them the wisdom of knowing what they need to learn.
It’s the responsibility of our society to educate as well as we can. That means maintaining departments which may not attract hordes of students, but enough to continue teaching those courses vital to the well-rounded education of our young adults. Trying to run a University like a business is simply lunatic and will end in slow failure. Better to rename it Stevens Point Vocational and be done with it.
If they really want to search for the truth (a mission of UW which Governor Walker tried to remove from the UW mission statement secretly, according to WaPo), perhaps they should open a class on how the use of the processes of one sector of society are highly suspect when applied to another.
I’d support that!
