In a popular culture seminar a few years back, a classmate of mine was feeling a bit exasperated with some of the theory that we were working our way through. He said something to the effect of “This stuff is completely unintelligible to the average person on the street.” Our professor, already frustrated with our general reluctance, responded by explaining that nobody would ever walk into a graduate level math class and complain that a novice would be lost, helplessly overwhelmed by specialized terminology. Why should what we do be held to these higher standards of instant outsider comprehension?
I was reminded of that exchange, and the validation it brought, while reading a recent New York Times Opinionator column by Stanley Fish, who we’ve of course published several times over the years. Sparked by the crushing decision by SUNY-Albany to disband its French, Italian, Russian, Classics, and Theatre departments, Fish has written two columns in as many weeks on the “Crisis of the Humanities.” Towards the end of the second column, in the course of proposing a new approach to justifying the continuing existence of the humanities, he says:
“Turn an accusation — you guys don’t deliver anything we can recognize — into a banner and hold it aloft.”
It’s an approach well worth considering.
For the most part, though, the columns are Fish being Fish. "An equal opportunity antagonist" is how we described him in the copy for The Trouble with Principle. Iconoclastic, a bit dismissive, and generally quite certain. Opinionated, like the column heading says. The bulk of the second piece is his response to the many, many comments generated by the first. The commenters who’d argued, against Fish, for the financial (rather than academic) value of the humanities cited a few articles repeatedly, he says. Two of them are the work of Christopher Newfield, author of Unmaking the Pubic University. To Newfield’s claim that “. . . English and Sociology make money on their enrollments, spend almost nothing on their largely self-funded research, and then . . . actually have some of their ‘profits’ from instruction transferred to help fund more expensive fields,” Fish responds: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
Newfield, on his blog, Remaking the University, defended his take:
In this climate, it is particularly urgent to get the numbers right, and for everyone affected to inform themselves about what the numbers actually are. America's most prominent English professor, the New York Times blogger Stanley Fish, got into the act last week by commenting that the SUNY-Albany cuts could be rejected on professional grounds but not on budgetary ones, since the humanities "do not earn their keep." Fish was roundly criticized for this, and takes up a couple of pieces of mine (the one he doesn't link is here) and by the UCLA English professor Robert N. Watson (UCLA Today version). The good news is that Fish describes the much more aggressive stance university leaders need to take in relation to political and business leaders. On the other hand, the post unhelpfully reiterates the common misconceptions about university funding that Prof. Watson, I, and others, working independently, have been trying to undo.
Fish continues to describe research funding as "soft money" that adds to university budgets. In reality, extramurally funded research loses large amounts of money, e.g., $720 million in losses on $3.5 billion in gross research revenues at the University of California. This means that extramural research funding is not actually available as soft money to "shore up" the humanities or anything else, but requires large infusions of internal cash flow to keep going. These infusions, aka "cross-subsidies," can only come in large amounts from a combination of state funds allocated for instruction and/or student tuition, also generally paid with instruction as a primary goal. UC President Mark Yudof himself has acknowledged in a response to Prof. Watson that this means that "the humanities indeed can be seen as cross-subsidizing science, engineering, and similar departments."
Fish also suggests that Watson, I, and others might be right about a "small private liberal arts college," but are wrong about the lower-fee public university. But publics generally have kept their expenditures lower in line with their lower incomes: our general argument that these universities need to use cheap fields to support expensive ones would remain the same. Bob Samuels has attempted some calculations for UCLA, and it's worth noting that UCLA has roughly $25,000 per student to spend in state funds plus tuition (minus financial aid). Poorer schools like SUNY-Albany don't have a different model: they are just more desperate to maximize returns on the model, as the Albany cuts indicate.
No doubt there are cases in which a humanities department with very low enrollments at a low-tuition public with low per-student public funding does lose money. SUNY-Albany should show the numbers they were working with: I would bet that if those five departments run in the red, their collective loss is small by comparison to the losses on the campus's sponsored research. In any case, we should assume these to be special cases rather than the general rule, and then get real numbers so we can have rational discussions about how to fund what, discussions that include humanities professors and students before their fields get whacked in the night.
The larger point is neither to separate teaching from research (students should help pay for research to a transparent and agreed-on extent), nor to cut science funding. The point is to fix funding shortfalls (see, e.g, Barnett and me on this point), and have an honest series of debates about the true costs of both research and teaching. It has served neither science nor the humanities disciplines to pretend that science costs much less than it really does. I recommend reading the actual analyses Fish references and helping to develop more open accounting standards at universities, which would be of great educational benefit.
As both Newfield and Fish would attest, this is a debate we should all get used to, and analyses with which we should all become familiar. For more, see this week’s Chronicle Review, which has a roundtable on “The Making of Corporate U.” that features Marvin Lazerson, Andrew Ross, and others. A paperback edition of Newfield’s Unmaking the Public University will be available this spring.
