Michael - Given the title of the linked piece -- "The Humanities as Service Departments: Facing the Budget Logic" -- the author never got to the point I was expecting. What I was looking for was a reconciliation of two facts. On the one side, the author's table showing that A&H generated large amounts of tuition revenue at little expense. On the other, the administration's assertion that A&H departments had relatively few students in their degree programs. He put the conclusion right there in the title, but apparently couldn't bring himself to say it.
I think that what you are noting here is a product of the venue. It's published on the MLA site, so the readers (mostly language and literature faculty) are already oriented towards that conclusion and mostly reading for the findings. Newfield unpacks more of his conclusions when writing for the general public. It seems to me that A&H faculty should (a) have recognized that they were turning into service departments and (b) have been proactive on the question of how to be better service departments (while retaining their historical roles). The goal ought to be that when someone proposes A&H cuts, the non-A&H faculty scream.
Was more true a decade ago than today. Generative AI is convincing a segment of non-A&H faculty that a lot of the service that A&H provide for them can be handled by tech rather than teachers, because they have been using Gen AI to make their own work more readable. The same is true of coding and calculation. The high-ROI STEM fields use AI to parse the code they write to crunch their data, and they use MATLAB to do their calculations...
...relying, of course, on the judgment and understanding they developed while having to learn to write, code, and calculate the old-fashioned way. The high school graduates that come through those service classes are not going to go through that struggle, and therefore not develop that judgment themselves.
Whatever the case, the non-A&H faculty have a lot less solidarity with the A&H faculty than they used to, thanks to two decades of austerity budgets, and especially now as their research grants are being stripped away.
It's a bad scene all around. And the biggest casualties in all this are the teaching mission of the universities and the economic futures of the students who are being forced into ever increasing debt and being given a much degraded version of an education thanks to all of this.
Our lecturer's union is fighting against this trend (being wholly dedicated to the educational mission and having the majority of its members teaching in service departments). Our working conditions are our students' learning conditions. But the regents and the professional management class at the university system level are entirely isolated from the teaching mission side of things and think that this level of precarity gives them more flexibility when dealing with state budget austerity. They don't care about the quality of the student education, only that the quality of that education relative to their rival institutions (you know, the US News rankings, and admissions numbers) remain high enough to hold place or move up.
It's quite sad - moreso when you are in the middle of it and care more about the educational mission than about all of the rest.
The only thing that seems to budge the statewide people is when they start to worry about bad publicity damaging the institutional reputation. But that sort of media attention is also hard to come by. It takes a combination of really bad circumstances and massive coordination efforts to get media attention, and it's really hard to keep that attention for more than a blink with so much shit flooding the zone every single day.
2025-08-18 01:27:10
Two quick websites for getting a sense of the geography of income inequality in major US cities: https://inequality.stanford.edu/income-segregation-maps
These show increases in concentration of rich and poor over time, but the levels of concentration vary by city. https://inequality.media.mit.edu/#
This one looks not just at neighborhood median income, but tracks the places that people of varying economic backgrounds visit in several cities to show the geography of daily association.
Hard to say if these patterns persist outside of major metropolitan areas. I imagine that smaller data sets lead to greater uncertainty of results.
2025-08-17 20:09:40
novakant - No need to correct ME. I've always pronounced it HANnah.
2025-08-17 15:12:43
GftNC - the analysis of how the humanities and social sciences actually end up subsidizing STEM are not in the review synopsis that I linked, but rather in the book being reviewed, so here's another link that gets at those details some more (esp. in section 2): https://profession.mla.org/the-humanities-as-service-departments-facing-the-budget-logic/
There's a lot more analysis like this in The Great Mistake.
Tony P. - I find it tragic that Newsom has opted to put redistricting up to a vote, but I fully understand and accept the necessity of it, and will vote in support of it when it comes to that. This all could have been avoided had the Roberts Court done the right thing and allowed the Wisconsin gerrymandered districting to be struck down. It's fully on Roberts' shoulders that partisan redistricting is considered to be allowed under the constitution. Likewise, their systematic erosion of voter protections under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has allowed the GOP to attempt this latest scheme to disenfranchise opposition voters by wasting their votes on non-competitive districts and empowering their own voters in competitive districts.
I'd gladly vote to go back to non-partisan redistricting after the fact if this GOP power grab is unsuccessful. I don't want to disenfranchise Republican voters, but neither am I going to get caught up on principle while the other side cheats to win.
I don't know if it will be enough to break the fall, but taking the high road is conceding the contest, and that cannot happen.
2025-08-17 02:43:54
If anyone is looking for a really thought provoking analysis of what has happened to higher education in the US with a focused look at California and the UC system in particular, I'm currently reading Christopher Newfield's book The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them. Rather than try to summarize his points myself, I'll link to a review published by the American Academy of University Professors that has a fairly complete synopsis to give you an idea of where Newfield is coming from: https://www.aaup.org/academe/issues/103-4/failure-privatization
Yes, Prop 13 has had a damaging effect on education funding in California, but that was all made much worse when Schwarzenegger instituted austerity measures, and then compounded by both Brown and Newsom continuing the policy of allowing the burden of university funding to be covered by tuition increases rather than public funding increases.
There are some other interesting bits of analysis that come out of his research that fly in the face of the public discussion as well - the biggest to my mind being that the Humanities actually subsidize STEM, rather than the other way around.
Well worth the read.
Michael - Given the title of the linked piece -- "The Humanities as Service Departments: Facing the Budget Logic" -- the author never got to the point I was expecting. What I was looking for was a reconciliation of two facts. On the one side, the author's table showing that A&H generated large amounts of tuition revenue at little expense. On the other, the administration's assertion that A&H departments had relatively few students in their degree programs. He put the conclusion right there in the title, but apparently couldn't bring himself to say it.
I think that what you are noting here is a product of the venue. It's published on the MLA site, so the readers (mostly language and literature faculty) are already oriented towards that conclusion and mostly reading for the findings. Newfield unpacks more of his conclusions when writing for the general public.
It seems to me that A&H faculty should (a) have recognized that they were turning into service departments and (b) have been proactive on the question of how to be better service departments (while retaining their historical roles). The goal ought to be that when someone proposes A&H cuts, the non-A&H faculty scream.
Was more true a decade ago than today. Generative AI is convincing a segment of non-A&H faculty that a lot of the service that A&H provide for them can be handled by tech rather than teachers, because they have been using Gen AI to make their own work more readable. The same is true of coding and calculation. The high-ROI STEM fields use AI to parse the code they write to crunch their data, and they use MATLAB to do their calculations...
...relying, of course, on the judgment and understanding they developed while having to learn to write, code, and calculate the old-fashioned way. The high school graduates that come through those service classes are not going to go through that struggle, and therefore not develop that judgment themselves.
Whatever the case, the non-A&H faculty have a lot less solidarity with the A&H faculty than they used to, thanks to two decades of austerity budgets, and especially now as their research grants are being stripped away.
It's a bad scene all around. And the biggest casualties in all this are the teaching mission of the universities and the economic futures of the students who are being forced into ever increasing debt and being given a much degraded version of an education thanks to all of this.
Our lecturer's union is fighting against this trend (being wholly dedicated to the educational mission and having the majority of its members teaching in service departments). Our working conditions are our students' learning conditions. But the regents and the professional management class at the university system level are entirely isolated from the teaching mission side of things and think that this level of precarity gives them more flexibility when dealing with state budget austerity. They don't care about the quality of the student education, only that the quality of that education relative to their rival institutions (you know, the US News rankings, and admissions numbers) remain high enough to hold place or move up.
It's quite sad - moreso when you are in the middle of it and care more about the educational mission than about all of the rest.
The only thing that seems to budge the statewide people is when they start to worry about bad publicity damaging the institutional reputation. But that sort of media attention is also hard to come by. It takes a combination of really bad circumstances and massive coordination efforts to get media attention, and it's really hard to keep that attention for more than a blink with so much shit flooding the zone every single day.
Two quick websites for getting a sense of the geography of income inequality in major US cities:
https://inequality.stanford.edu/income-segregation-maps
These show increases in concentration of rich and poor over time, but the levels of concentration vary by city.
https://inequality.media.mit.edu/#
This one looks not just at neighborhood median income, but tracks the places that people of varying economic backgrounds visit in several cities to show the geography of daily association.
Hard to say if these patterns persist outside of major metropolitan areas. I imagine that smaller data sets lead to greater uncertainty of results.
novakant - No need to correct ME. I've always pronounced it HANnah.
GftNC - the analysis of how the humanities and social sciences actually end up subsidizing STEM are not in the review synopsis that I linked, but rather in the book being reviewed, so here's another link that gets at those details some more (esp. in section 2):
https://profession.mla.org/the-humanities-as-service-departments-facing-the-budget-logic/
There's a lot more analysis like this in The Great Mistake.
Tony P. - I find it tragic that Newsom has opted to put redistricting up to a vote, but I fully understand and accept the necessity of it, and will vote in support of it when it comes to that. This all could have been avoided had the Roberts Court done the right thing and allowed the Wisconsin gerrymandered districting to be struck down. It's fully on Roberts' shoulders that partisan redistricting is considered to be allowed under the constitution. Likewise, their systematic erosion of voter protections under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has allowed the GOP to attempt this latest scheme to disenfranchise opposition voters by wasting their votes on non-competitive districts and empowering their own voters in competitive districts.
I'd gladly vote to go back to non-partisan redistricting after the fact if this GOP power grab is unsuccessful. I don't want to disenfranchise Republican voters, but neither am I going to get caught up on principle while the other side cheats to win.
I don't know if it will be enough to break the fall, but taking the high road is conceding the contest, and that cannot happen.
If anyone is looking for a really thought provoking analysis of what has happened to higher education in the US with a focused look at California and the UC system in particular, I'm currently reading Christopher Newfield's book The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them. Rather than try to summarize his points myself, I'll link to a review published by the American Academy of University Professors that has a fairly complete synopsis to give you an idea of where Newfield is coming from:
https://www.aaup.org/academe/issues/103-4/failure-privatization
Yes, Prop 13 has had a damaging effect on education funding in California, but that was all made much worse when Schwarzenegger instituted austerity measures, and then compounded by both Brown and Newsom continuing the policy of allowing the burden of university funding to be covered by tuition increases rather than public funding increases.
There are some other interesting bits of analysis that come out of his research that fly in the face of the public discussion as well - the biggest to my mind being that the Humanities actually subsidize STEM, rather than the other way around.
Well worth the read.
TACO - Trump Always Conciliates Oligarchs.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/16/russia-jubilant-putin-alaska-summit-trump-ukraine
'Cos flattery gets you everywhere with Orange Chicken.