Perhaps it, and others, don't need to be Universities, but can become colleges (once again).
Read between the lines and this article is about the problem of bloated administrative/bureaucracy costs of the system taking resources that should be spend on the student experience/education.
8
I'd like to know the pay scale of the top administrators, to see if they are richly profiting from paring back the faculty. Also, how many adjuncts are being paid slave wages already?
32
Once upon a time, corporations trained graduates who demonstrated good learning and decision-making skills.
The result was prosperity for many.
Now corporations want students to pay for their own training .
The result has been prosperity for a few.
18
Even when I was studying history in the 1980s, professors were already moving away from essay and short answer/fill in the blank type exams to true/false and multiple choice even in non-introductory/survey courses.
There was a discernible antipathy amongst the faculty towards the sciences, one which I initially imbibed myself but later realized-- as did C.P. Snow a generation earlier-- was not only misguided but would ultimately prove suicidal for the humanities.
Already at that time political correctness was staking out an unenlightened and despotic domain, as artisanal or cottage specialty fields complete with entire lexicons of esoteric jargon and ideological re-interpretations of all of Western Civilizations sprang up in wanton revision because "dead white men".
I still remember vividly the day when, as president of the history club at my school, I realized that many of those working not towards a bachelor's degree in history as I was but rather in secondary education were actually at best B if not C students, and it horrified me that they would be handing some of their future students the grades of A. And many of those hoping for futures as history professors as I was did, in fact, have more interest in preaching left orthodoxies (as did I, at that time) than in nurturing open minded curiosity and going where the facts led, not where the ideology did
For another side of the problem, see CK from
Rye's problem below.
14
Just to address some of the “facts” in this story, there are 11 UW System universities outside of Madison and Milwaukee. Enrollment at UWSP is down significantly over the past 10 years, but overall undergraduate enrollment at these 11 schools is up a little more than 1%. Despite the fact(?) that “Young families left rural Wisconsin for Madison and Milwaukee” undergraduate enrollment at UW-Milwaukee is down over 15% in the past 10 years. Enrollment at Madison is up a little over 6%.
As a business school professor for over thirty years at a large public university, I can confirm that corporate recruiters are, indeed looking to hire graduates with strong critical thinking skills. But they also want graduates who have depth of knowledge of the functional/technical skills needed to hit the ground running in an entry-level job. Yes, they could hire someone with a liberal arts degree and train them on the functional/technical skills, but they don’t really want to. And of course, there’s no guarantee that a liberal arts grad has those critical thinking skills – it’s a tough thing to judge in a job interview.
In today’s world, a history degree is a “luxury” that fewer and fewer public universities will be able to afford to offer. Liberal arts courses will continue to be offered, as part of a broader curriculum, but as public school tuition rises to offset decreases in tax-based support, students of modest means will find it difficult to justify the cost of a liberal arts major.
10
I too decry this trend, as we need history to guide us. However, I do wonder if history professors are partly to blame here. I have watched them become increasingly politicized, using their classes to indoctrinate students. Many history professors in my acquaintance are Marxists who seem bent on making everyone hate America. So it's not surprising that students give the history major a wide berth.
10
Scott Walker destroyed one of the world's best public education systems in the world in eight years. Oh, and he also was pretty good at ruining the environment and the infrastructure too.
Wisconsin is happy he is gone, hopefully forever.
30
Wisconsin has a new sheriff in town. The challenge is that a gerrymandered Wisconsin legislature is out to eliminate his responsibilities with the blessings of an arguably inept former Governor Walker who had a minimal amount of education.
Let’s hope that the spirit of Robert LeFoulette is alive and well in the dairy state.
6
It is an elitist statement to imply that only college graduates "know how to think". Even if true, it should not be left to universities to "teach how to think". High school graduates should already have honed their critical thinking skills, and many have. And, they should be better educated than they are on average. American college students go on a junior year abroad because their peers in other industrialized countries graduate high school with the equivalent knowledge of an American college sophomore! Post-high school education must have a purpose. Universities have painted themselves into a corner by thinking the good times of granting tenure, evaluating professors on their research vs. how well they actually teach, letting professors bypass teaching and making assistants do the actual teaching, and charging exorbitant tuitions would last forever. They've sold kids a bill of goods by counseling them to "follow their passions", assuring them they will change careers several times but their thinking skills will follow them, etc. Now the day of reckoning has arrived, when finding employment is more difficult than ever, salaries are stagnant and debt-laden graduates with liberal arts degrees find they don't know how to actually earn a living. Personally I wouldn't support my children getting useless degrees in sociology, women's studies, world religion, or whatever other money-maker these ivory-tower professors dream up.
13
@Roberta I think your analysis is accurate in the main. But, the inclusion of the statement that salaries are stagnant is puzzling. Unless you mean stagnant for possessors of humanities-type degrees, it is not clear that this factor should not be taken out of the argument. If they are stagnant across the spectrum of disciplines, this ought not to be pertinent.
Some universities and colleges prosper and others don't, of course. Some are no longer viable and close. Others open. That dynamic applies to everything except the Department of Defense.
Rural areas are famous for their hostility to book learning, taxes, and government. Expect public institutions in those areas to reflect those attitudes and to flounder. All we read about here is the rural educational flounder supply.
5
Much of the problem with education in this country is that it is no longer valued. Many people now consider college education to be subversive, elitist and worthless. Businesses resent paying for the value education brings to themselves and society. It is assumed that most university graduates are liberal Democrats and therefore fair game. Technical education is very valuable and helps when getting jobs in a lot of sectors. That does not mean that a well rounded education is not also valuable. I've studied both nursing and history and both have been invaluable to me. Knowledge of history allowed me to understand cultural attitudes towards healthcare of the patients who are different from me and understanding those attitudes made me a much more compassionate and effective practitioner. The entire educational system from grade school to post graduate programs seem to be moving to create cookie cutter replicas of their students. Our society will be much poorer if education becomes solely job training and does not include a broader range of subject matter.
13
Scott Walker, who never finished college, along with his Republican cronies, have destroyed one of the finest higher education systems in the world. They stole hundreds of millions to give billionaires more money. Their crimes continue as their gerrymandered Republican legislators continue to undermine voters. They have destroyed their state.
16
Universities were once places where people went to learn to think for themselves. That led to the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-Vietnam War Movement. Ever since, the powers that be have been trying to turn them into glorified trade schools to teach people job skills without questioning. Of course, many of those job skills soon become obsolete, but that's too bad, isn't it? The student should have known better than to major in something technology would take over a decade later.
The attack has been on the liberal arts, especially the Humanities--after all most of those 60s rebels were in the Humanities and the Social Sciences--probably because, as Arum and Roksa found (see their recent book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses) "Students majoring in liberal arts fields see "significantly higher gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills over time than students in other fields of study."
It's irrelevant that these cognitive skills are exactly what people need to survive in the modern world (In a recent survey, 93 percent of the employers surveyed said that "a demonstrated capacity to think critically, communicate clearly, and solve complex problems is more important than [a candidate's] undergraduate major, and more than 75 percent of employers say they want more emphasis on . . . critical thinking, complex problem-solving, [and] written and oral communication): better dead than re(a)d.
2
@Maureen Hawkins
I am sitting in China reading a NY newspaper. Later today I will fly out to another country on holiday. I researched on line and found airfares and a private rental studio. I will travel with ride sharing and online maps which give me directions to any place on earth. If challenged by language I can get instant translations on my phone.When bored, I will download e-versions of books from a distant library. I will post pictures of my adventures from a phone which will be seen instantly by friends and relatives. This is the modern world, so different from my first overseas trip 40 years ago.
Being able to do these things has enriched my life immensely. So what was the contribution made by liberal arts graduates with their enhanced cognitive and problem solving skills in making such things possible?
6
So basically, Stevens Point must make the decision on whether they wish to educate students or train them. There is a world of difference.
12
The problem is not the universities or the curriculum. The problem is the new thesis that taxes are bad, investments in the future are theft from the present, and universities aren't there to educate, but to train. There was a time when we understood that an investment in the future paid off many times over. Now, though, we're a nation filled with angry people (many of who gained opportunity through funded public education) jealous of every penny that goes to people who don't look like them.
They say "those who forget history are destined to relive it." I suggest a corollary - "those who don't invest in the future won't enjoy the successes of the past."
19
The most valuable courses I took in college have proven, over many years, to be (1) economics and (2) Portuguese.
Portuguese was my third-choice elective out of four I tried to enroll in during junior year. Lucky me that I was shunted into it.
If my college has offered Portuguese in recent decades, I'm not aware of it. I believe it may also have eliminated its one-person linguistics faculty. Too bad.
It is, however, offerings lots of ethnic-studies courses.
The alumni review recently excerpted an ethnic-studies faculty member's essay about the homing and nonhoming of Chicanxes through Biblical scripture.
There was recently an ethnic studies course whose catalog entry states that race is "understood not as a biological . . . phenomenon." That is a form of Lysenkoism, if I understood the catalog entry correctly.
So, it doesn't do society any good if universities churn out only technocrats, but when parts of the humanities and social sciences slide into solipsistic grievance-airing, is it a surprise they lack for students?
10
A university provides an education in critical thinking, knowledge about the varied dimensions of being human and helps create well-rounded citizens. I believe in educating people for specific careers also, but don't call a trade school a university...they are not the same.
7
Nice long article. Exclude Vermont. It is idiosyncratic and its rural areas are fairly liberal. Nowhere in the article does it mention the salaries of the various administrators.
Republicanazi state governments love nothing better than to starve state funded colleges. They correctly view them as places where woefully uneducated high school graduates have a last chance to learn something about economics, etc.
4
Don’t we have enough barsitas already?
2
If you want to know why the country is divided, it’s all about what you learned in school. The success of fake news depends upon your lack of knowledge of history.
17
There’s this thing called Google. History can be self-taught. Easily and for free.
4
If you go to school to get a job, go to a community college or trade school. If you want to learn something that will help you get a job, go to University.
4
It’s about time! While I think Walker’s tactics on many fronts are appalling, there is an oversupply of college locations and programs across the country. I have never understood why state university systems put up with duplicative programs across their enterprise, other than inertia and the discomfort of challenging the status quo. The duplication is made all the more absurd with the rise of distance learning programs. Why does Stevens Point need a history department when Madison likely has a top shelf department, and students can undoubtably plug into courses there or elsewhere around the country? Private, rural colleges too will close in the coming years, as rising costs, paltry endowments and lack of student interest in attending such schools force their hands. Tragic? Perhaps. Necessary? Indeed. Hard? Absolutely.
Maybe the long talked about disruption in higher education is coming to pass, and schools will no longer be able to send blithe letters to parents letting them know how they’ve worked hard at keeping the coming year’s tuition increase to 6 percent, 3 times the rate of inflation. I should have saved those letters when our daughters were in school. Now, the piper is being paid.
5
Not everyone who wants to is accepted or can afford Madison or Minnesota or Michigan or Harvard or Yale or etc. etc. etc
6
...or you could save a couple million each year by eliminating the army of administrations, assistants to the administrators, and vice assistants to the assistants. I'm serious.
30
Without history courses it is not a college or university but a trade school! This does not mean that upper level trade schools should exclude the important history of their technologies.
9
Part of the unspoken buisness-oriented strategy, I believe, is to create a surplus of workers in the professions and lower to middle level managers, is to drive down wages. Those jobs are becoming " proletariatianized". Precariousness,loss of autonomy and declining income are in the cards. The Tech industry will eventually have a big target on it's back.
Welcome to the 19th Century.
5
Here's an economic fix for all US colleges. Drop all sports and athletic programs and spend the money on real education. Just like European universities.
22
I am a History major and I use the skill set daily - in commercial real estate development. Gathering information, organizing it and communicating in a way that allows you to capture trends and raise capital is valuable.
Plus, when I travel, it helps provide context regarding the mindset of the local population. Knowing what occurred during the Cultural Revolution might give American business people a better insight into the attitudes and mindset of today's Chinese consumers and businesspeople. Or if you go back to the culture wars of the 1960's, you'll understand why all of your parents are so screwed up with their politics.
I am very happy that I studies History and since graduate school is becoming mandatory, why not study something you can enjoy your entire life.
You can learn about History by having an inquisitive mind and a library card. But to learn who to gather information and determine what's meaningful in drawing conclusions, you need to be a History Major.
16
I am a recent board member of a small fine arts college that is closing its doors due to declining enrollment.
I joined the board because I believe in--and support with donations--the fine arts, including art education at the college level. However, a few years ago, in response to the decline in enrollment, this arts college deployed a laughable marketing campaign that purported to show how studying fine arts (painting, sculpture, etc.) inculcated valuable skills in planning, budgeting, time management, etc. that could be of value in non-fine-arts sectors.
First, this approach pretty much acknowledged that students who actually wanted to practice the fine arts would have to move to the non-fine-arts sectors if they wanted to find paying jobs.
Second, few savvy business persons in the non-fine-arts sectors would believe that bohemian, free-thinking, non-quantitative fine arts students (yes, that's what they were like) would want to join--or be likely to succeed in--the profit sector.
If college/university education is not a pathway to better-paying jobs for graduates, parents and students are being cheated.
4
How about using the $20 billion set aside for new nukes to help our state universities?
6
Yes, cut history and languages. But for gods sake, keep the football and athletic program. Must keep our values straight.
26
My Daddy was ignant, his Daddy was ignant and dag nabit my kids are gonna be ignant too. Welcome to USA 21st century.
6
In Georgia outgoing Gov. Deal and Minority Leader Stacy Abrams worked at expanded the Dual Enrollment aka Move on when Ready. So now High School and HomeSchool students starting in the 9 th grade can take college classes that count the same as AP, IB as strength boosts at any of the University of Georgia Systems schools, including trade schools, two year, four year and at the University of Ga and Ga Tech. Of course you have to apply and get accepted ( Ga Tech is not taking many freshmen, if any). But many areas of the state did not offer any AP classes they simply can not do it when your whole county is the school district of k-12 with only 200-800 students. Then there is also internet issues in rural areas, but the college campuses with 1-2 day classes help people with long commutes. Then they wisely added about ten smaller private colleges that asked to be included.
The State covers all the tuition ( my daughter is taking 11 credits and I the State is paying around $1100-1300 directly to the local Technical college to cover 4 classes that are exactly the same at any part of the State system. Last semester she took Freshman Econ and Freshman Gov. Which would have been AP Econ and AP US Gov. They count towards high school graduation and high school.
Now they have built new campuses and buildings at some of the states smaller schools because they have so many high school students and home school students attending.
3
Demographics being what they are, plus the huge influx of online colleges (which is a very unfortunate trend, in my opinion), leads me to believe that there are simply to many colleges now. On top of that, many universities continue their trend of administration bloat (ahem, SUNY), to the detriment of being able to afford full time professors. Perhaps rather than strip colleges of the very courses that make them centers of education, it would be better for all to consolidate, even if it means closing some colleges.
5
The Royalty of Europe would send their children to Jesuit institutions to get a classical education in philosophy and the liberal arts. Today, will we continue to only teach vocational courses and not have our students learn critical thinking skills?
What price will we pay for having citizens that do not have a world view?
11
We’re already paying it. The buffoon in the White House is only the most egregious example.
17
@Nicholas
Today, a degree in History, Religion, Fine Arts at a private university... can be justified if you are one of the idle rich. Why else to get in debt for $100-150k? How to ever repay without a nervous breakdown?
The problem is systemic, and starts with the inexcusable high tuition (to pay for inexcusably high administrator salaries and sports facilities). Universities asking kids who majored with History to repay $100k are, in my view, exploitative and unethical.
9
This is part of merging universities, two-year institutions, and technical schools to create industrial widget factories. The elite will still have their ivied institutions; the rest of us are to be channeled into the services categories, where critical thinking will eventually peter out. You know all those jobs we left for immigrants? Yup, that’s the future for a lot of us. Bussing tables at Mar-A-Lago...
7
The problems with not knowing history could not be more dire in the new Dark Age with Trump. In the 20th century, Keynesian economics got us out of the Great Depression and funded ourselves in WW II. We had 25 years of prosperity after the war. But Reagan brought back trickle down economics and greater income equality. Reagan dropped the Fairness doctrine from the FCC and allowed propaganda sites to call themselves news. And now we have a brainwashed population that think moving into an authoritarians state where Trump's words are law is somehow making the U.S. "great".
We need historians with history degrees more than ever. But then, we need a respect for education and knowledge in our country that has been eroded by propaganda.
We now have an administration that denies science...denies science.
13
Sweet Briar College in Virginia is an example of how a college can become more relevant and cost effective. The tuition cost has been radically reduced. The semester system has been reworked to focus on initial, short courses on leadership, followed by the regular curriculum. SBC.EDU
4
There's nothing wrong with being a technical institute or business college. Just don't call yourself a university.
14
The liberal arts aren’t what they used to be, broad open inquiries into a range of possible interpretations and points of view. They have become ideological. History “studies” are often post colonial, postmodernist deconstructions of western civ. English courses focus on ethnic or gender or non-western literature. Psychology has been abandoning biology and sees human identity as a “social construction.” There are whole departments called “women” or “Black”or “lgbtq.” And all of this produces the social justice warriors. The liberal arts have been destroying themselves. Many Students have been voting with their feet to stay away from them and to take useful, career-building courses and majors. I can’t blame them and I have ph.d. In English from years ago.
10
God forbid we should stray from white European studies and discover there are other cultures, voices, expressions.
5
The point of the university experience is to help young people become informed citizen who think with their own heads. A university without Humanities cannot do its job properly.
The problem however with many Humanities departments is that they have strayed from their purpose, becoming outposts for intolerance and mccarthyist pseudo-intellectualism. Students do not lean about great philosophers and writers, only about attacks on these philosophers by politically correct "postmodernist" and "postcolonialist" rabblerousers.
So that when young people critique Kant and Heidegger it's because they have read their works, instead of postmodern misinterpretations. Instead of abandoning the Humanities, what needs to be done is declaw their ideological nostrums.
8
As expected, Higher Ed is focusing on the wrong solutions. Reducing the enormous administrations that have grown within universities should be goal #1. Then they need to stop admitting so many students. If everyone goes to college, then it becomes like high school. Stop lying to and taking money from the students who aren't going to get white collar jobs right out of college, because as we've seen, a lot of them will wind up at minimum wage jobs after university but now with lots of debt. Finally, limit the courses taught to somewhat pragmatic ones. I majored in history and was temped to take a "Piracy in the Americas" seminar because it sounded cool. As a corporate lawyer now, I would have been better served with economic history courses, history of banking, history of commerce, etc. Professors have been allowed to focus on their narrow interests even if impractical for the students, and administrators have permitted extreme mission creep. The only answer may be to scrap the current institutions and start over.
7
Perhaps they could still offer history majors by joining other
University of Wisconsin campuses using online courses while keeping some faculty for introductory courses on each campus. The technology is already available and the Madison campus has the depth.
5
The immediate sharing and arguing of ideas is stifled when isolated students try interacting with their Dells
1
Colleges have gotten rich off of worthless liberal arts degrees. Parents and students have gotten wise after being crippled with debt that cannot be repaid without getting another degree. I would never want my kid to get a History major! I'd say pop on a marathon of Biography for a week and save me the 200K.
5
Mindlessness. Career based subjects are all definable in mathematical terms. This means that they can be described with algorithms. Starting to see where this is headed? Career based subjects are more easily automated. It’s the liberal arts that lends the education to people that transcends such algorithmically describable processes. It helps people think outside the box by presenting them with the many other ways to approach what challenges people.
The engineer’s greatest challenge is not the skills and knowledge of engineering but determining how to use them in any particular case. Once that is determined, the rest is well established and can be accomplished by anyone trained in the subject.
The engineer who becomes a manager turns to the skills taught in the liberal arts. Eliminating the liberal arts and neglecting the sciences to save money in education is common these days and hare brained.
8
It is unthinkable that universities in the US are forced to shut down programs in history.
It is also true, however, that the primary goal of universities should be to prepare students for gainful employment. The humanities are less useful in this regard than the sciences and engineering.
The problems of this university in Wisconsin reflect twisted priorities in the US. There should be federal funding for education in the sciences and engineering available to students in Middle America, such as Wisconsin.
The US has a shortage of physicians. Many communities in Middle America have no doctors and people must travel great distances to get care. Moreover, medicine is becoming increasingly complex, with new therapies being developed which require the training of specialists.
The failure to train a sufficient number of physicians is one reason that medical costs keep skyrocketing at much more than the rate of inflation.
Another problem is illegal immigration. Immigration in general increased the US population by 86 million since the passage of the last Immigration Reform Act which has been largely ignored by liberals.
The result is not just the underfunding of education, but the increasing gap between rich and poor in the US. The US has created a vast underclass of poor, founded on a prison system with 2,2 million inmates. The incarceration rate is the highest of any large nation, except for North Korea. Fourteen times that of Japan.
3
I wonder if the leaders at Stevens Point considered cutting its athletic programs to focus on why kids are in college in the first place? After all, can a school like this really justify spending money on a men's baseball team, men's basketball team, men's cross country team, men's football team, men's hockey team, men's swimming and diving team, men's track and field team, men's wrestling team, women's basketball team, women's cross country team, women's golf team, women's soccer team, women's hockey team, women's softball team, women's swimming and diving team, women's tennis team, women's track and field team, and a women's volleyball team and say that it cannot afford its liberal arts programs? (according to its website)
None of those "student athletes" will be going into lifelong careers in those sports yet what are the coaching, recruiting, maintenance, and scholarship costs for these "essential" programs?
24
I could not agree more - little kids in elementary school do after school sports if they want to be in a league. This should be true at every educational level - remove sports as a money sink and distraction from our schools and colleges and universities...people can play in pick up games, independent leagues, or go to the gym. The sports machine at high schools and colleges are a bunch of useless nonsense!
6
Now more than ever, we need people teaching and learning History!
11
Doesn’t seem like it is being eliminated at every school in the country so should be ok. As stated in the article, all schools can’t be all things. Want history major, can go to Madison.
2
While most of the world beefs up its higher education, in the US we are intent on its soft destruction... through budget cuts and weird cost-benefit thinking. And our higher education has largely adapted by... taking foreign students who pay full freight. Stevens Point wasn't good at that trick.
5
Quite frankly any school that does not have a history department is not a legitimate university. Period !History is the mother of all disciplines. History is inescapable due to the fact that we reside in history!
11
You can have a history department without history majors. The instructors teach core courses and a few electives to business and STEM majors.
5
A liberal arts college degree is highly over rated. Accountability in colleges is long overdue and much of the liberal arts studies were not worthy of funding. Why should students incur huge debt for going to college that they can not hope to find a decent job in their field? Rural industries and factory jobs are being replaced by automation and low skilled jobs can be sent offshore.
Why not train people young people with skills for the jobs of the future such as IT, engineering, Biotech, where there is a demand for those skills and high paying jobs?
5
@Joseph B I am not sure what your college experience was, but in my liberal arts college, science and math majors were abundant. This was one of the most notorious liberal arts schools, somehow or other turning out skilled scientists. And all of these degrees were from a recognized liberal arts college.
1
No surprise here. The overwhelming majority of history graduates will not get a job teaching high school. That market is saturated, and has been for decades. I have known several such graduates who eventually became case managers in nursing homes, working for about 30k, or went to community college for their RN degree.
If you have a genius IQ, you are a Rhodes scholar, and a humanities graduate from one of the top handful of colleges in our country, you can possibly do a little better.
But these types of educational pursuits are now hobbies for the 99% of us who have to support ourselves.
4
@Mrs H I have a degree in History (and English) and I did not become a HS teacher (not that there's anything wrong with that).
There are so many avenues open to those with liberal arts degrees beyond teaching. The disciplines that it takes to earn a degree in the liberal arts are applicable to just about any career pursuit you can imagine.
I've been able to support myself just fine, thanks.
11
Smart and focused on majors that have value after graduation. That does not mean no classes in History, or some other liberal arts, but no majors in those things.
$2 million shortfall?
Harvard or Stanford can take one of its many $100 million donations and save 50 schools.
Yes, it’s not as simple as that, but the rich get richer.
12
Students in Rural America Ask, ‘What Is a University Without a History Major?’
Home schooled....
4
Looks like this campus should not be a four-year university anymore.
3
I recently completed my B.A. in history, and something I loved about studying the subject was the emphasis placed on circumstance and perception. You can't really make sense of history without first trying to understand why people behaved the way they did at a certain point in time. I don't think it's a coincidence that some of the most empathetic people I've ever met were students (or teachers) of history.
History curriculum also embraces critical thinking, along with strong research and communication skills, which can be used to pursue careers in a number of fields. (Many people with history degrees go on to work with archives, data, businesses, non-profits, etc). This can also go a long way in distinguishing real information from, well, fake news.
12
I can see that the liberal arts education in the US is highly regarded by NYT readers. As a humanities person myself, I understand the appeal. But, I think it is worth giving you a different perspective. In Australia, all Universities offer an Arts degree for those who want to do it, but most also offer vocational degrees as well, which are very popular and are regarded as proper university degrees. Sometimes students will choose to do a double degree and combine their Arts degree with a vocational degree eg. arts/law, arts/education, or arts/commerce because an Arts degree on its own while useful for personal development is unlikely to lead to a career. Further, if your job is later made redundant, your Arts degree is not going to save you. If people want to change careers or specialise once they’ve had some work experience, then they’ll look for a Specialist Diploma, a Masters or PhD. My point is that vocational degrees are the norm here and they sky hasn’t fallen in, although the Arts faculties are less powerful and it is harder to get a job as an aspiring academic. The only University which makes people do a generalist degree before doing a vocational degree, is my institution, University of Melbourne. But, if you ask me making people do an Arts degree before a vocational degree is just a money spinner for the Universities, to keep everyone at University longer when they could be studying stuff that they will actually use and be out there pursuing their career.
6
In Trump's America getting rid of history courses seems like an excellent idea.
Who under the sun will want to remember the United States from this day forward?
7
This is a symptom of a much larger problem. I am a history instructor at a community college, and the problems revealed in this piece only touch a portion of the issues plaguing higher learning, but one theme is quite clear, underfunding at the state level. Other problems are the sheer dominance of administrative positions squeezing faculty out of existence, and of course the neoliberal ethos or obsession with money making.
The point of liberal arts being the back bone of higher learning is no longer being defended. Those walls have been breached the attacks are now within institutions themselves. This is also a problem that is not localized to rural regions of higher learning. Even large cities face the guillotine of budget cuts and MANY talented individuals are vastly underpaid with advanced degrees barely scraping an existence. It is a jeremiad. The question is, how extensive will the damage be to our civil body politic?
5
@NIno
Universities receive more federal money than state money.
1
Granted. But 20 years ago kentucky state funding provided almost 70% of state university funding. A political decision to not increase state taxes led to a freeze on state funding. Student tuiton went from paying 25% of university operating cost to 70% of the cost of university operation. So to say the feds provide more funding than states is true but tells only part of the story.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/06/12/study-us-higher-education-receives-more-federal-state-governments
3
@Russ Wilkey
I wonder why the article didn’t mention federal funding? I say a lack of objectivity caused its omission.
"there was already stiff competition for students with the University of Wisconsin’s other four-year campuses, five of which are within 115 miles of Stevens Point."
This fact strikes me as problematic in a state that is home to a slowly growing population of less than 6 million people. The horse and buggy era ended before 1900. A drive of 115 miles can be completed in 2 hours with a used car. I'm no fan of former Gov. Scott Walker and the full-on assault he waged against public university education, but somebody in Wisconsin prior to 2011 (when Walker took office) should have seen a major problem with a half-dozen four-year colleges being located an average of every 20 miles in a sparsely populated area.
5
So much to take in. I read this and thought about it all day.
As the product of retired teachers, I can sympathize with the challenges in academia. You have a changing demo (I don't imagine visible minorities are numerous in rural USA), demands of less academic and more practical - job ready outcomes, oft in shorter times, and also have the move by a younger, savvier student body looking for greener pastures (ironically) in more modern metros. And lastly, the *startup* buzz, and the push to want to work in tech and *code* is again driving the enrolment i'm sure away from liberal arts. Add that the educated are now being painted as *elites*, I'm not sure how these smaller institutions are going to survive these vectors pushing against them in the midst of a changing platform that is education in 2019 and beyond. And we haven't even mentioned MOOCs...
2
This article raises the important issue of the equity inherent in providing a liberal arts education for rural and working-class students. Restricting access to liberal arts degrees parallels the equity crisis we see in K-12 education where low income students and students of color are routinely provided with a basic-skills focused curriculum that denies them rich, exploratory experiences in science and the arts. Growing up in Stevens Point during the 80s /90s, UWSP was a beacon, offering diverse educative experiences and a chance to experience a college campus when that world existed outside the expectations associated with my demographic. Public universities are critical community assets that have impact beyond measure, and deserve to be funded as such.
It is terrifying as that WI legislators would allow for a fiscal crisis like this to develop in a university system that has for generations been a symbol of the collective values and priorities of a state defined by rural and working-class citizens. I cannot imagine that the only solution here is a career-centered educational track that perpetuates the class structure and inequality that public education is intended to disrupt. Instead, I encourage thoughtful risks in redeveloping university programs and brands to leverage the best research on the development of capable and employable graduates, in a manner that equitably addresses all stakeholders and the needs of the community served.
5
Every child should be encouraged to study an arts degree - expands the mind for a life time. Let them study “expert” subjects later.
In any case, online platforms such as Coursera, ALISON, Edx, and Udemy are going to eat their lunch.
I think that perhaps the UW Stevens Point may be on the right track -- for itself. Maybe the University of Wisconsin no longer needs this many satellites in its orbit. If it does, indeed, cut the curriculum in the way portrayed in this article, then the Board of Regents should also cut the "University" from the Stevens Point facility's name.
2
If all US universities have decided, for whatever reasons, to eliminate History (not history) from their liberal art education, then it is time for the United States and the world to panic. As is, what UWSP tries to do is a survival game. There are still many universities around that will continue to offer liberal art education no matter what happens outside the campus in the real world.
The demise of History major, for example, at UWSP and perhaps some other smaller rural college and universities in the US are nothing but a hefty price to pay in a market driven environment where the federal government could be shut down by the president because he has not gotten his money to build a wall that would fend off immigrants he considers undesirable from across the border.
When the market mentality takes over the government or the university, the most visible path for its survival down the road is follow the money until one goes nowhere. History has shown many tragedies of such one-dimensional approach.
2
The real story here is how the dialog on higher education over the last decade had been talking only about urban students rich /poor minorities etc getting into ivy and top notch universities.Forgetting there is a rural population with smaller public/private collage system in place .
Let concentrate on the real education undeserved population ,,,,,,,The rural folk
3
If you're going to be a community college, have the decency to charge those tuition rates and not university rates.
8
This observation by Tacitus (Jefferson's favorite writer) is appropriate: "Idque apud imperitos humanitas vocabatur, cum pars servitutis esset."
It means, "In their ignorance they call it,'civilization,' but it was really part of their enslavement." (Longer variant: Step by step they were led to things which dispose to vice: the lounge, the bath, the elegant banquet. All this in their ignorance they called civilization, when it was but a part of their servitude.
It refers to the Pax Romana and the hypnosis of Roman comforts to the loss of their own cultures by peoples who bent a knee to Rome. In this article we have bending a knee to Business, the New Rome.
Citizens drunk on pop culture, never concerning themselves to be interested in the big questions or the hard won wisdom of the giants of the past, satiated by entertainment and material goods, heads overfull with the training of their employers, therefore unable to have perspective, think freely or differentiate the deep from the shallow. Slaves.
8
Who needs to study History, when you’re just gonna repeat it?
4
Written 55 years ago, Richard Hofstadter's "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life" won a Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. It could now be considered historical as well, and addressed many of the conflicts we still face concerning the place of learning, intelligence and intellect in the course of the America story.
By retaining hockey, are they hoping to increase the incidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy?
6
I had a newly-minted microbiologist once ask me why I had so many history books on my shelf. "What use are they?" He asked. As opposed to what, fiction? I pondered. Nevertheless, in his genius insular brain he was adamant that teaching history was a worthless endeavor and only provided to those people who weren't smart enough to study something like microbiology. So I rose from my chair, walked over to him and gave him a swift kick in the shins. "Want to say that again?" I asked. "Not likely," he said. "There, see that, you've just learned a little from history. Easy for us simpletons to comprehend, but not a genius such as you, apparently."
It's unfathomable to me why people cannot grasp the basics of history. If not for history, and learning from it, we'd still be in caves. Although with an unread Trump, who refuses to learn or even take advice because of his genius genes, we're not so far removed from going back there.
The older one gets it's easier to see the mistakes people make, because we've often seen them made before, time and again. In youth, one can surely read and learn from others mistakes, but only if one has a mind to. The great irony of our time is that we live with the world's knowledge literally at our fingertips, yet repeatedly fail to acknowledge it. Thinking that simply by living in the 21st century we are smarter than all who have gone before. Recents events prove otherwise. Which event? Pretty much all of them.
12
And thus begins the final decline, which will spread up the ladder of prestige to the regional state schools and the hard-luck smaller private colleges. Many will perish; it happened in the 1960's. Then it's on to the over-leveraged big schools, bloated with superfluous administrators and buildings, which have irrevocably priced themselves out of any rational market. Can anyone imagine them cutting tuition by 80%, as they should?
While my doctorate is in electrical engineering my education is very much in the liberal arts, and it is education that has helped me survive weird political schemes, the charlatans in every field (including my own) and the end-of-the-world false alarms that everyone encounters in daily life.
Colleges began to lose their way when they turned from education to job training, and then compounded the error by confusing scholarship with job training and expanded their graduate programs into professor factories.
People will find their way out of the education dilemma, for there are many alternatives. But the present system of higher education will not survive.
6
College drop-out Scott Walker and Republicans have forced this choice by cutting educational funds for the last eight years.
9
Eliminating a major does not mean that all faculty members will be fired or that courses wouldn't be offered in that subject. General education English, history, and philosophy courses must still be offered; maybe in a department of general studies or social science and languages departments. Time to face reality. These former teacher's colleges never were "universities". There's little research and degrees only through the masters.
2
I taught in an engineering school on a regional flagship campus for 43 years. Most of us can no longer afford the luxury of a humanities degree. We need engineering, business, or nursing degrees to pay back our student loans. As the cost of college continues to skyrocket, fewer of us will major in humanities because we simply can't afford to. We will certainly take courses in history, English, or gender studies but we can't afford to major in them.
This does not mean there will be no historians, or English majors. Students from the upper middle class will be able to choose those areas of study because they can afford to. Their contacts and parental support will ensure their futures. Most of us in the lower economic classes must choose more vocational college subjects because we are on our own.
5
Then, in due time, the university of wisconsin-stevens point will devolve into a vocational school.
This country is determined to move downward.
People should have been paying attention 40 years ago.
Now, slowly and irretrievably, everything is melting away.
3
@BG
There is actually nothing wrong with vocational education. This place started out as probably a two year Normal School, teaching people-young women for the most part- to be public school teachers. Those schools started dying in the 60s because every college and university started offering Education Degrees.
So, they redefined themselves.
That is not working any longer, primarily because rural areas and the small towns in them are depopulating.
I was a History Major.I am an attorney.
My son was a History Major. He had a chance to go onto PhD level studies but he is in Med Sc
Honestly, if we would teach History properly in Grade School and High School then we might have more people who want to major in it in College. One of my daughters told me that she literall had no idea about what happened in WW@ in terms of who fought and why.
She was an A student at a perfectly fine high school. She said the emphasis was ":...Women in Work Forse and, of course, The Holocaust..." But as to the hows and whys- she literally was taught nothing at all.
2
@Lefthalfbach
It is possible to read history on your own. I did starting when I could read. It’s fun to read history.
1
It is obvious because of our current calamitous situation, the skills used in a history major are essential. Not that everyone should be a history major but everyone needs the savvy of a history major to become a functionally literate citizen.
Universities should never be become trade schools. Education means way more than a pay check. Therefore, a requirement in the history and practice of citizenship needs to be taught, WELL TAUGHT, not just a graduation requirement.
6
I assume in America you have a system where students can transfer credits from one school to another.
Instead of eliminating history, why not offer first and second year history courses that students can transfer to schools that offer history degrees.
And it's not clear to me that career degrees are that effective because liberal arts students tend to be better at work than career course graduates.
To give an example, our local community college offers a course in hotel management. I worked in hotels as a desk clerk while an undergraduate.
The way to become a hotel manager is to start as a desk clerk, and if you are good at it, you will eventually become a manager. So what's the point of the course?
3
No mention was made of cutting salaries nor making professors actually teach 20 to 30-hours per week.
No mention was made of virtual schooling.
No mention was made of the current budget line items.
Colleges come and go, just as businesses. Perhaps, it's time ...
1
I have two family members who work at UWSP - one as a professor in an area of study not yet cut from the curriculum. Both are extremely bright, hardworking and come from the area. They are amazing assets to their students, and are the young professional demographic rural communities are trying to retain. They bring infinite more value than they are valued. I love them, support them, but also wonder why they stay.
3
@Kars
I have no doubt that your relatives are bright and dedicated and do a great job. Unfortunately, the area where you live seems to be in economic decline.
What do you suggest be done?
I ask seriously.
If the answer is-raise taxes and put more money into the school- will that pass in WI?
Degrees in History and Econ, dual major, minor in Russian.
I went to work after college as a carpenter in Colorado. Figured my life course was set. I will always make minimum wage.
Surprise, I am the world's fastest framing carpenter! (1980, rig axe, no air guns).
I have worked all over the world building stuff you wouldn't believe, simply because I was a history major. critical reading, language skills, an open attitude.
Can we build it?
Yes we can!
17
@UTBG
Wonderful!
Another answer to the question of what to do with a degree in history, especially with critical thinking.
One does not need to be a history teacher to earn a living from what we learned as a history major.
2
Hiram College in Ohio has bucked the trend with the New Liberal Arts program. Possible national model for 21st Century skills and the preservation of liberal arts values.
3
I am both an academic historian and a former college president of a rural liberal arts college in the northwest. Many in this comment section have written eloquent tributes to what they learned in their history classes, and so I will add something I always told prospective students and their families about the lasting value of the liberal arts.
Unlike vocational training, the skills of a liberal arts education are not just to get the first job. Instead, the critical thinking, analytical analysis, extensive writing and research are all skills that contribute to a graduate's ability to be a life long learner. When I addressed prospective students, parents, and interested friends, I always asked two questions--1st: who in the room had had more than one job? Almost everyone would raise their hand. 2nd: who had had more than one career? Interestingly--in almost every case, more than half the people in the room raised their hands. Any professional will tell you that the much of the technical facts they learned in college have changed--in the sciences, it is estimated that the average college grad's knowledge is replaced within five years. A liberal arts education (and I include the sciences) is vital to being a life long learner. We do any population of students an enormous disservice by wholesale cuts to a liberal arts education.
22
I wonder if the administration plans to review how much the yearly athletic budget is for the 20 intercollegiate sports programs, before laying off the Philosophy, History and other liberal arts professors. Are we forgetting the purpose of higher education?
13
It's a degree that does not prepare students to engage in the civil discourse intelligently.
Part of this story is about trends all over America, but a big part of is Wisconsin's "Walkerism." Describing what Walker has done to higher education in Wisconsin as "a cold" is ridiculous.
Almost all states have been cutting contributions to higher ed; a study by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities states "Overall state funding for public two- and four-year colleges in the 2017 school year was nearly $9 billion below its 2008 level, after adjusting for inflation. And this study left Wisconsin out as anomalous, due to Walker's devastation in Wisconsin!
Stevens Point is a bit more than an hour north of Madison, the state's flagship public university ...
In 2015 Mr. Walker cut the University of Wisconsin budget by 250 M$ ... and then gave 250 M$ to build a new sports arena for the Milwaukie Bucks. Of of the team's owners is Jon Hammes, a top Walker-campaign fundraiser.
This even got written up in Forbes:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2015/08/14/scott-walker-takes-250-million-from-u-wisconsin-gives-250m-to-billionaire-sports-team-owners/#60d01646674e
Walker is gone, Wisconsin now has a Democratic governor, but the Legislature is completely controlled by Republicans (who spent their time on a bill to strip the Governor's power), and they remain broadly hostile to public education.
12
Many employers use an applicant’s college degree as some assurance of work ethic and the ability to “play by the rules” and get things done over the short and semi-long term. It’s a shame that employers have to use increasingly-expensive degrees to do this sorting for them, but with the push to graduate more kids from high school (and the grade inflation and reduced standards used to accomplish that), diplomas from many of our public high schools no longer are a guarantee of any true literacy skills, critical thinking and reasoning skills, numeracy skills, work habits, leadership and service aptitude, etc. The actual solution to all of this might be to make high school a 6 year endeavor for all students, with the final 2 years focused either on continued proficiency gains for students who were behind or more “liberal arts-esque” philosophy, poli-sci, Western Civ, anthropology coursework for those who are at an appropriate baseline 18-year-old skill level in reading and writing. Then, society still gets the benefits of all that liberal arts studies can provide without students needing to pay insane amounts for those courses in college. All 20-year-olds, high school diploma in hand, could then opt to go get a solid entry-level job, go on to a tech school, pursue an apprenticeship, or continue to a university.
4
Sometimes in a free society changes need to be made in order to survive. Otherwise if you stick to the same old, same old, you fail. I personally don't care for all the cells phones and computer technology but it is the way of the world now and while I mourn the loss of real communication life moves on.
1
Well, you can get a degree in computer science and have your knowledge outdated in a few years and get laid off, or you can get a History or English degree and end up running a major corporation. Take your pick. Isn't it interesting that is the kids who know this, while the university (and some parents) wants to channel them into narrow jobs that are the millennial version of the typing pool.
6
RIP To Newman's University (senryu/haiku) "No more wasting time - on majors that just might make - you educated"
6
I graduated with a Bachelor's in history from Brandeis and went on to get a Master's in history from BU. That was a long time ago, and I put those degrees to good use working in Europe and then back in New York for international companies focused on the manufacturing of clothing, with offices and production around the world. Studying history, simply put, made me "smarter". Having said this, it's not practical, especially in today's world, to expect every school to be every thing to every student. I don't think it's unreasonable for a regional state university to have a campus which doesn't offer a degree in history or French or German. While I DO believe that some basic knowledge of history at the university level should be part of a Bachelor's degree, not having a dedicated department offering a degree specialization is another matter and the simple fact is that if they don't have sufficient students to enable the maintaining of the faculty needed to offer a degree in certain fields, then they can't be expected to provide them and those students must simply go elsewhere where their preferred choices ARE offered, it's as simple as that.
2
I double majored in History and English, with a French minor. What I learned in college was how to research, write and express myself, look at all sides of an issue, think critically and be analytical.
These are valuable skills and in demand in the job market. I did not pick my majors with an eye to a career path, but as it happens, had a very successful career in advertising and entertainment marketing where I had the opportunity to use the skills I acquired in college on a daily basis.
I speak 4 languages and have never stopped questioning the world I live in. A liberal arts education is the basis for a full, rich and varied life. Not some sort of hermetic dead end.
12
The liberal arts--especially history--provide invaluble core lessons that will never go out of date. Coolhanded outlined them well (below) and I won't waste space repeating his words. But really studying history prevents the term GIGO from taking over a society fixated on keeping all education "relevant" to modern job skills. All those skills are useless if we forget what GIGO means--Garbage In, Garbage Out. It is up to us humans to keep the garbage away from computers or whatever form of artificial intelligence follows them. And the best garbage filter is the historical research and education model.
1
A couple of relevant quotes:
‘Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it’. George Santayana
‘A nation that expects to be ignorant and free...expects what never was nor will be’. Thomas Jefferson
3
Not to beat a dead horse, but of the 14 schools in the PA system, only 5 have an enrollmment of 7,500 or greater and only 2 are over 10,000.
5 schools are under 5,00 and 4 of those are under 4,000.
State governments have been reducing their funding for state universities since the 80s, so that these are really "public" in name only (in many states, state funding accounts for less than 10% of the budget). They are dependent now on tuition (steadily rising), foreign students (who pay full freight and then some), donors (many of whom like sports, so that large drain on many budgets will not disappear, and many of whom like to have their names on buildings rather than paying salaries) and, especially, federal research dollars. My students (at a large state university) are always surprised to hear that most of the university's support comes from federal research dollars, not their tuition. The liberal arts don't bring in that kind of money. Science and engineering do. On big flagship campuses, the sciences can carry the liberal arts so that a university is actually offering an education. On smaller ones with little or no research profile, they can't. As long as universities are run as if they are businesses rather than a public good, these crises will continue, and faculty will be more valued for the money they bring in than for the actual work they do, or, heaven forbid, teaching.
9
The result of Scott Walker and fellow republican jackals in the Wisconsin legislature attempting to kill public education, completely in line with the orders given them by the Koch Brothers. (They are quite open about it.)
Once a really fine university system is being killed. The state, "supported" by old, bitter people who want it to be 1943 again, will be even more of a backwater than it has already become. Outside of Madison and Milwaukee, forget about it
7
@Stevenz
Federal money far outweighs state money.
1
@Stevenz Totally agree. My daughter is a graduate of UW/Madison and I feel as if Scott Walker and his cronies have completely devalued her degree, one for which she worked very hard.
He hates higher ed, maybe because he got tossed out of Marquette (cheating scandal) just shy of graduation.
7
Regrettably, these chickens have already long come home to roost. Apropos of a dialogue I recently had with college students (2d and 3d year) in a criminal justice course, I rolled out a multi-syllabic word (7 syllables, and I think it was "contemporaneously") knowing full-well I could have broken the concept down into more manageable one syllable words to make the point. I quipped very quickly that this was an example of a Howard Cosell word. Crickets. No reaction. I took a quick poll and asked if anyone (5 varsity athletes were in that class) had heard of Howard Cosell. No one. Not quite as scary as the percentage of Americans who cannot name the three branches of government, but instructive nonetheless.
4
@Peggy: And one more story from the trenches (almost 50 years in CCs, State and Private Universities--graduate and undergraduate and still "ticking," I had occasion to chat at length with a County Sheriff (newly elected) in a rural (read: red) area of CA, okay...Bakersfield. And he told me in his legendary direct unvarnished way: "You teach 'em how to think, and I'll teach 'em how to be a cop."
3
Likely, most job training could be done at the community college level. Let kids get out of high school after three years and use the money the state would have used for the 4th year of high school to offset the cost of community college tuition
2
The picture of the chancellor, Bernie Patterson, is superb. No human, stark, no fun, no enjoyment, no life-enhancing cues. None.
It is the perfect portrait of this man.
1
I teach a college prep course to high school kids and here's what I tell them. Studying absolutely anything at any college that is free is a great idea--if you can get a scholarship to do it, go for it. You're young and you have lots of time; you can figure out how to make it pay later or go back for a different degree if the first one doesn't pan out. No debt=freedom.
But if you have to pay, pick carefully. Go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics website and figure out how much your job pays. Never borrow more than your first year of salary. Figure out how much the degree will cost you over four years at each of the universities you are considering and pick the one you can afford.
If you don't know what you want to do with your life, figure it out at community college. It's cheap and you can take courses in a variety of subject. It also gives you a second chance at university scholarships--you can get a transfer scholarship.
I teach my students that college was never intended to guarantee a well paying job and that it is more about the pursuit of knowledge. You can absolutely graduate with a degree and know a great deal about a subject that isn't in demand by employers. If your grades are excellent and the school highly regarded, you'll find a job even if the subject is not in demand--someone will hire you and train you. But if you make crappy grades at a low ranked school and take out loans to do it, you are pretty much out of luck.
13
Very well said. I agree 100%. I had terrible grades in high school and went to community college to figure out what I wanted to do career wise. I struggled with math and it took me forever to finish CC. But I worked full-time and took advantage of my employer’s tuition reimbursement program. I eventually earned 2 master’s degrees and even taught at the same community college. I only took out one small loan (about 10k) and quickly paid it back with a bonus from work. I hate when I see kids study things like philosophy, get themselves into tremendous debt, and then work at Starbucks.
I transferred from a famous institution in my hometown, Berkeley, to a small campus of the Univ. of California, Riverside. There everyone was required to take a year long course in the History of Western Civilization. It was the most exciting and valuable course I ever took. Because of the breadth requirements I had to take sociology, economics, philosophy, and, to fill out my credits one semester, a course in economic development of poor countries.
Then I went to grad school in microbiology and then medical school.
Those liberal arts courses were fascinating and invaluable, specially History of Western Civilization.
I am so thankful for my liberal arts education.
6
@Jerry Hendel, MD
Alas, these days on many campuses the very concept of "...Western Civ..." is under attack.
4
Defunding of the liberal arts in Wisconsin is mostly a byproduct of right-wing political carnage. It is a political choice, not the inexorable result of economic forces. Having said that, the corporate agenda for American public education is to produce cogs for the technocratic machine. Even rich, successful schools like Stanford happily dance to this tune, where the quality of the liberal arts curriculum is mediocre at best and generates little excitement among the undergraduate studentbody. Relevant discussions in the Stanford alumni magazine focus on questions of whether a modest dose of liberal arts can make engineers, scientists and other technical professionals more polished and competent at their callings -- the value of communication skills and such.
On a national level, the dumbing-down of citizens into mindless "consumers" largely incapable of thinking beyond their immediate need for sensory gratification reflects the same trend. Students used to read Plato and Aristotle to derive some sense of a greater public responsibility to society as a whole. We are now reaping the harvest of this intellectual degradation.
Finally, there is simply the cheapening of the term "university", which used to denote a major institution addressing education comprehensively. Abut 50 years ago state normal schools churning out primary level teachers renamed themselves state colleges, then added a few masters degree programs and declared themselves universities. What's in a name?
16
@woofer
The number of history majors nationally has cratered since 2008. It has nothing to do with Wisconsin. But the author didn’t think that was important.
2
Raise taxes on the top 10%. Fund education or we’ll
end up with more Trump voters.
8
No history. Interesting. I'm currently reading a book called "American Nations: A History - the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America" which is helping me ( a guy with New York-ish attitudes) understand why those krazy Southerners are so enamored with 45. They posit that the USA is actually an amalgamation of distinct regions, each with their own distinct cultures that continue to influence their thoughts and behaviors today.
If one believes the lessons in this book, one could interpret the current situation as being the old North and the old South, and their allies, seemingly intent upon forcing the other side to either adopt their ideals or get out of the way. Based upon the radicalization of first the Republican party, and now the Democrats (seemingly in response) I see a possibility that this will not end well. Keep in mind, a conflict of this magnitude, or the election of a leader who will squelch the possibility, would result in the destruction of major American cities, or the destruction of our way of life. I believe either of these will effectively end American dominance of geopolitics and the global economy.
1
It's not rocket science: adjust your curriculum to attract and serve more students or die. Private business takes the temperature of its clientele regularly and adapts accordingly; clinging to an elitist, academic Ivory Tower attitude that looks down on career-focused programs and trades training is the fastest route into oblivion. If that means adding welding courses and dropping Medieval French History because grads can get welding jobs in rural Wisconsin but not jobs teaching French history, then so be it. Germany fully understands that not every kid is "college material" and offers valuable, real-world trades training without the stigma we too often attach to the trades here. And, like it or not, not all colleges are the same academic caliber. The larger, better-funded universities often have more rigorous academic standards and give grads more valuable, marketable degrees than second- or third-tier colleges. When students have trouble competing in the job market after graduation, it may well mean the college failed to do its job: prepare them for the working world. Finally, no where did I see any listing of the actual salaries of the administration and how that plays into the schools' budget deficits. Why was that factor ignored?
4
Does private business take the temperature of its clients and adapt or does it (and by this I mean bigger businesses) take the temperature of its clients and change the method so the clients adapt to what business thinks will be in its best interest. as an example, look at the auto industry and how its advertising campaign for SUVs was adapted to reach women and anyone else interested in safety when it had saturated the market among men. or Nike, et al, creating a market for overhyped shoes while manufacturing costs dropped lower and lower.
It's become much more about marketing creating customer desires and less about meeting needs.
3
Yes! You are spot on.
Yes, it’s called voice of the customer.
Every American should get the SAME smount of federal government support/funding for their education, whether they stop at high school or continue on to college or for post-graduate studies. If they want to attend elite, selective and/or specialized institutions that cost more per credit hour than the public options shouldn't they pay for it themselves? Why are taxpayers in my county subsidizing Harvard's endowments when their kids have about as much chance of attending there as winning the lottery? The success within society that many NYT readers enjoy due to their astute investment into their own (or their kids') education is predicated on others in society NOT doing this - it's basically at the expense of the less educated. The audacity to expect that these folks then subsidize such higher education channels is profound, if they're aware of it.
3
As other readers have pointed out, the real reason for the financial problems at Wisconsin-Stevens Point and many other public institutions of higher learning across the country is Republican state legislatures that have withdrawn funding from public education, what one reader calls the murder of public education. It is not limited to universities. Republican state legislatures have attacked public education at all levels from pre-K through major research universities. And the attacks are not just the withdrawal of funding. The attacks include supporting charter schools with money that is taken away from public education. Vouchers that students can use in private schools. Promoting disrespect of teachers at all levels. Attacks on the so-called liberal bias of university professors. Attempts to promote conservative agendas in the universities. The politicization of university system boards of governors (North Carolina specializes in this). The list goes on.
9
@Historian
I am a Democrat and there is a fair amount of Truth in what you say. BUT, the reality is that there are too many of these Old State Teachers colleges. Once upon a time, they taught all the public school teachers but every big school has that Program now.
The cost of keeping open every such school gives the Rs ammunition, especially when money is tight-which it has been for 10 years running.
Maybe 1/3 of these schools could be closed in PA. Seriously. Then the remainder could be better funded and better attended.
1
@Lefthalfbach Why is money for education tight? Obviously, the great recession of 2007-2008 is one reason. Another reason is the program of tax cuts, especially for the rich, by the GOP. While states must watch their spending carefully, at bottom the major issue is priorities. And public education should be very high.
With regard to "Old State Teachers Colleges" who used to train most of the teachers in PA, I have no personal information. But I suspect that they never did just train teachers. And I am guessing that they do much more than that now. Again the issue is how high a priority should be placed on public education. With the world the way it is now, I suspect that the nations and states that put education at the top do the best now in intellectual and material terms and that this will be even more true in the future.
1
There's nothing wrong with a vocational career, but I think that schools that decide to trim liberal arts are being penny wise in the intermediate to long term. As the most prestigious schools demonstrate again and again, great reputations and achievements do not come from bread alone. Nursing is wonderful, but a school is unlikely to produce a great writer, scientist, or statesperson if it takes out those surplus history programs. If you don't let your people study Chinese for Russian, or even French, you're not going to have high level alums in the diplomatic corps someday. You're not going to produce a New York Times journalist, or a military general. I get the point that schools can't be all things to all people. Maybe the thing to do is to focus on being fantastic in a few areas, and letting others be great in other areas. So instead of freaking out and making everything vocational so that insecure, overly intrusive parents can feel more confident about their kids bringing in a paycheck afterward (if, however, never doing much else with their lives, let alone what they want to do), maybe the rural school can have a dynamite American history department and theoretical physics department and gender studies department, even if there is, say, no anthro at that particular place.
3
There is nothing wrong with technical schools nor with liberal arts schools. But don’t conflate the two. And universities, by definition, encompass more than trade schools.
If there is no market for a broadly educated populace, so be it. But be sure that’s the fact before transforming this physical plant from a place of higher learning to a place of more specific vocational training.
Both are necessary in this society, and a strong argument can be made for the current need for vocationally trained technicians, but is that the only offering Wisconsin wants to offer to the citizens in this neck of the woods?
3
1. There is nothing wrong with vocational or commercial education.
2. This school is not really a university. It just is not. It is what used to be a "...Normal School..." built to train public school teachers from its immediate catchment area Back In The Day.
3. Everybody is complaining about cuts in State Funding to these schools. Has everybody forgotten the Second Great Depression thru which we have just lived?
4. When I was a boy, it cost 400 a year to go to Temple. That might be 3 or 4 grand in today's money. In real life, today, it costs like 15,000 to go to Temple. Penn State's tuition has tripled in the last 15 to 20 years.
5. The reality is that this school and lots of others, public and private, is just no longer economically viable absent massive subsidies for which there is just no political support these days.
I am Blue, BTW.
4
my degree is history, but so many americans are clueless about their history and oblivious to the world outside the usa that i'm wondering if it makes a difference whether or not it's dropped.
2
In the long term, this dumbing down of America to give the wealthy even more tax cuts (and at the end, that’s what it’s all about) is going to cost the country, and the wealthy, way more than it saves.
7
This is your brain on capitalism.
I actually think this is the right move. Given the current high cost of higher education and its position as the gateway to economic opportunity in the minds of many Americans, students (particularly from poorer backgrounds) deserve to see a good return on their investment which can only be guaranteed by career-focussed programs.
But isn’t it a tragedy that broader “liberal arts” degrees, which are meant not only to increase worker value but to cultivate the mind, expand the breadth and depth of knowledge in the student, and provide a deeper appreciation of art, science, and history, are privileges only reasonably afforded to the elite who can afford them?
Education is often thought of as an important economic investment, but I think a healthy society ought to think beyond economics and value the liberal arts more highly, and we in the US ought to do more to make liberal arts education available, affordable, and desirable.
5
The liberal arts are seen as optional in the minds of many Americans, but a liberal arts education is one of the most important aspects of a college education, if not the most important aspect. Not only do the liberal arts help you learn how to live and works as a good citizen, but they help you prepare to perform in the many different roles you make serve throughout your life. This is especially true now as most people will switch careers multiple times throughout their lives.
What use is a technical/professional degree when that degree or profession is no longer needed? We've seen this every time an industry crashes. If people can't adapt, they get left behind. We need to be teaching people so that they have the skills that allow them to adapt to different fields. My liberal arts geography degree opens more doors outside of geography than my GIS certification. You can have degrees that teach technical skills but remain solidly liberal arts. My liberal arts school has fantastic engineering, nursing, and education programs, but they are still liberal arts at their core.
4
Maybe a side benefit of this will be a reduction of Social Justice Warriors on campus. For all the benefits of a liberal arts education, it tends to prompt students to brood on the ills and grievances of society--and how to correct them. Outcome: Aggrieved and outraged students attempting to micro-manage other people's politically incorrect behavior.
We would all be better off if more people focused on learning job-related skills.
1
Eliminating core elements of a university education certainly can be contemplated during periods of budget shortfalls, but I believe that it would be dishonest for a school that actually did so to continue to claim the title “university”. Instead, in the interests of full disclosure, they should change their names to things like Stephens Point College. This reverses the trend since WWII of changing “colleges” into “universities”, but so be it.
No one expects to eliminate core requirements. History departments will still have instructors for STEM and business majors. It just will not have any majors.
The sad fact is that the “business model” (4 year away from home residential experience) by which we deliver higher education services is too expensive to operate and too expensive for the market to afford. If we are to educate the proportion of our population we need to educate, we must replace the “hallowed halls of ivy” with a technologically affordable educational experience. Online classes offered by accredited degree awarding schools can easily replace most of the first two years of the college experience. (Many 1st and 2nd year classes are already offered in giant lecture halls best used for sleeping anyway.). Allowing students to learn from home remotely is far cheaper for all concerned. Yes we must adap[t, utilizing audio visual skills already used by Hollywood and the television industry and fewer, better lecturers must learn new skills and improve their techniques. But pouring more money into subsidizing an antiquated business model is foolish.
Trump will outlaw history as biased.
2
Part of the reason — a large part — for the pickle we’re in is that there is a sizable slice of the electorate that lacks any understanding of history and/or civics, let alone critical thinking. This is just great for people like Trump, who deliberately appeal to the “gut” of fearful, helpless people who don’t know where to turn when inevitable societal change occurs. An educated, well informed electorate is a pillar of democracy. The Republicans know this, which is why know-nothings like Betsy De Vos are in charge. I hope the Dems will turn some much-needed attention to restoring the glory that was American public education in the 50’s and 60’s.
2
The purpose of college used to be teaching people to think, not training them to get jobs.
Wisconsin used to value rural education--and providing access to students, no matter how geographically remote--more than almost every other state. In the late 60s, it merged its two state college systems to make the state colleges co-equal with Madison (for fictitious example, Sausageville State U. became UW-Sausageville). Even diplomas would not specify which branch of the University of Wisconsin the grad had attended.
It's probably easier for anybody under 65 to picture higher education in another galaxy than Wisconsin in that era.
At Madison itself, even the university probably didn't know how many different majors were possible for the approximately 40,000 undergraduates in its assorted colleges, schools, programs. Registration took place on foot and on paper; it involved a week of walking all over the six-mile campus to stand in lines. Nothing was entered in the university's mainframe until days or weeks later; students who finished the grueling registration process got a rubber stamp on a handwritten card.
That was after paying tuition: around $250 per semester for in-state students and about $950 per semester for out-of-state.
At that price, "wasting your folks' money" was defined as failing to graduate, not failing to get a job afterwards.
Regrounding our state's higher education system(s) would be a massive task, even without eight years of Gov. Walker.
1
As an engineer whose work has been steadily automated over the past 40 years, steadily up the scale of cognitive ability, I believe the universities better start preparing students for the emerging world run by AI. In this new world almost all of today's technical jobs will soon be done by AI. The remaining jobs will be those involving human interaction and so require understanding of human behavior. This understanding benefits from a liberal arts education. If these schools eliminate their humanities programs they will produce graduates who will soon be unemployed.
5
My town and SUNY branch seem similar to Stevens Point on the surface. Our local SUNY has had funding and enrollment problems. For a while, it appeared education majors were becoming extinct. Now, with many teachers retiring, teaching is on the upswing; so are education majors. We have business majors and a double major in physics/engineering. Theater majors also roam the campus.
Our community college is offering basic liberal arts courses at night at interested local high schools as an experiment this winter to target working adults.
"Practical" and liberal arts programs are vital to well-informed citizens and need to be supported by public funding. Look at the mess our country is in now,
Finally, there is too much social and media emphasis on institutions like Harvard. There are many fine colleges with excellent faculty at a fraction of the cost of Ivy Leagues. GIve them some publicity too.
2
Liberal arts students and those who want to specialize in the humanities must look elsewhere for quality education. It would seem that Stevens Point and other specialty schools should consider themselves as glorified trade schools and promote those studies. They obviously cannot compete with universities offering a broad spectrum of educational curriculum.
I'm late to this valuable discussion, so apologies in advance if I am repeating other comments.
What I see happening is that politicians and lawmakers evaluate higher education, and their physical facilities, as if they were parts of a large corporation, called Education, Inc. From that point of view, return on investment (ROI) becomes the benchmark of success; have you ever encountered a legitimate ROI for intellectual capacity? Probably not.
So if enrollments are falling, the target audience has moved away, and who values history, anyway, it's nothing but a small step to conclude that a state doesn't need regional campuses, just like a corporation doesn't need marketing departments, HR, or sales.
America has conflated education with utility. They are related, but distantly. Education is intended to improve intellectual capacity. Utility is data on what works according to pre-conceived notions of the most efficient human activity. Hint: it isn't improving intellectual capacity.
8
A "university" that decides to reinvent itself by becoming a career-focused school is no longer a university; it is a vocational-technical school.
Without the liberal arts, the goals of the University (capital U) are lost. Students do not learn their place in the river of humanity; they do not take up the benefits and responsibilities of understanding the impacts of the Reformation, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, etc.
The University stands as a preserver of cultural ideas and ideals, but because of its student body, it also serves as an instigator of innovation and social challenge. When leaders lose sight of the real mission of the University - as they clearly have in this instance - it is up to the students and faculty to remind them. Protest loudly: a university is NOT a community college or tech school. It IS a "different lane." I hope the students and faculty at Stevens Point can impress this on Dr. Patterson - and anyone else - who seems to have misunderstood this.
5
If Wisconsin could think like Germany, they would turn this university campus into a european quality trade school with a strong foreign language and humanities requirement, free tuition and partial scholarships for room and board.
Some financing could come from Wisconsin companies that sponsor “chairs” for both faculty AND students, with a paid 3 year company internship at the company at the graduation.
Companies need to hire young people BEFORE they are trained for the job. If companies in other states want to join in, more chairs would be created.
The students will come from across the world. Add an arts scene with cafes and a local museum and students will create small businesses and spend money in the local economy.
5
@BBB
IN a small town in more-or-less the middle-of-nowhere, Wisconsin? Seriously?
Maybe if they put it in Milwaukee.
University was not always for everyone. Back in the day, people were held back by money, class status, racism and other nasty stuff, but there was also the theory that not everyone was cut out for "book learning". Then we opened doors with the GI bill and tuition was much lower and great people flooded into college and managed to finish in roughly four years. Then we decided to get rid of all our high school vo-tech programs. Then we had to create affordable two year community colleges (and rip-off proprietary colleges) to teach those who should have gone to publicly funded vo-tech programs. Then we decided that college was too expensive and everyone should go to a community college for gen ed courses for their first two years, so community colleges have to teach gen ed courses AND welding and bed pan level nursing and food services, etc. All of those taught by adjuncts. Then we had to staff four year colleges with adjuncts instead of tenured professors so we could have huge administrations with sexual harassment & diversity officers and whatnot. Now we've decided that we can't have every program at every four year college - too costly. We've decided we should just train up students for careers instead of giving them a college education for their college tuition. Can we get any stupider? Really, what is the end game? Training people for what jobs? What should a college educated citizen, alumni/ae of your alma mater, be like? A really good, white privilege checking welder?
11
THIS is the success of Scott Walker and his ilk - destroying opportunities for intellectual development, because sheep are easier for the GOP to lead around by the nose.
12
@Bonku in Madison, I hope you aren’t representative of UWMadison, the one in the Wisconsin line up that is well respected over the border.
Having taught at a "regional state university" for some time, I can say that we have reached a turning point. The combination of ever-diminishing state support and the Great Recession has created its own dynamic. The cost of education is so high and the fear of un- or under-employment so real, that fewer students feel they can indulge in the liberal arts. This is beyond opinionating about critical thinking and the mission of a university. If the majors keep disappearing in certain fields, there is not much justifiable rationale for keeping them. It's called starving the beast. We have become a country that believes that a quality education--like health care and many other things--is deserved only by those who can afford it and that taxes are only for preserving and protecting the privileges of wealth. Unless that changes, public education will essentially become a jobs program.
10
Nice pseudonym, Wallace, what with it being Sunday morning and all.
Here’s the thing, dude: stand up. You don’t have to be one of these screaming...ah, people, but you do have to stand up.
If you really love books. Others have, and paid for it, oartly because they thought that the gift would be carried on.
So stand up.
2
@Wallace Stevens your points on the severity of anxiety over unemployment and conclusion on the job program makes sense and i share some of your concern, but the article did identify the demographic changes that impact rural and middling sized cities, as well as the upside to the draw of other urban centers for higher ed systems like other areas of the wisconsin systems that are thriving.
yes the cost of education is a real burden no matter where one lives, but in the case of the rural settings with less opportunity maybe that is how it goes. its kind of like the misguided expectations of going from high school to college. its not for everybody and there are lots of alternative routes for a career that requires less financial cost to the student and better return if you advocate for your future that does break down into highly specialized and fluid skills that a BA does not offer however skilled one becomes at critical thinking and cultural studies. maybe the career focused programming really is where more remote colleges/universities need to apply themselves.
even so, i got a BA from a liberal arts school in the mid 80s only to feel the need for something else at the end of the 90s to get something out of it. i suspect that is the way lots of BA holder feel.
1
This is exactly why former Governor Scott Walker drastically cut funding to the UW system: to essentially turn universities into business training centers, not institutions of higher learning/critical thinking. It will take WI years to reverse the effects of his disasterous partisan policies.
15
40% of college graduates work in jobs that don’t require a college degree....barista, waitress,..degrees in art history, history that are valued less than accounting and engineering. Following ones passion is getting more difficult. Maybe that passion is best followed as a hobby.
3
Maybe it isn’t, and the perversion of chasing the Almighty Dollar is.
I got America on my side. You got what...Herbert Hoover?
7
Maybe some of those baristas, waitstaff, and others are working their way through college to land a better job and be a better-informed citizen able to make better decisions.
Not all people need to go to university, but that option needs to be there for this country to continue to grow.
1
College/University used to be about a liberal arts foundation with a specific major. This foundation gave students a higher level, more well-rounded education, so they could evaluate culture, politics, and complex life situations and knowledgeably make decisions for themselves. Now it's beginning to look like corporate schools, churning out nice little bots to be used as Human Capital. Without history and literature, there would be no context for deciding what did/does and did not / does not work in human affairs. Democracy needs thinking, informed citizens. This will continue the "dumbing down" of our electorate.
10
Wisconsin is on a mission to broaden The Base. An educated population wants nothing to do with the GOP, and vice versa.
Educated people don’t elect reality TV stars to run the country, let alone watch the shows.
The State of Wisconsin is not interested in developing the thinking skills of their voting population.
10
The short answer to your question is "It's a trade school". I would even go so far as to say no undergraduate degree should be conferred on anyone without taking a minimum number of arts/social science credits that require the use of logic, critical thinking skills, and engaging in a respectful dialectic discourse. Wouldn't the chances of America's fall from grace have been reduced had this been the case?
10
Want a job that requires critical thinking, good writing skills, speaking well and empathizing with others? Major in History and the Liberal Arts! Best preparation ever for STEM careers AND the gig economy (also grad/law/med school).
12
Maybe cutting back on administrative personnel is a better option than cutting liberal arts programs?
7
YES!!
It is remarkable how cutting the administrative bloat is never discussed as the obvious solution to this problem. It’s always discussed as if it were inevitably a Sophie’s Choice choice between “raise tuition” vs. “cut out the useless arts and humanities.” How about firing a few deanlets and VPs, instead?
8
Six percent of their budget is spend on servicing debt. This school is simply facing reality, and doing something about it. If you want to study liberal arts, attend a liberal arts school. If you want to study wildlife management, or ecology, go to UWSP. (A few Californians would do well to study forestry management at UWSP...) But they should get rid of their football team: in the last twenty years it has only been rated twice. Clearly football isn't a good fund raiser for UWSP.
Now, if only the US president would do something about our national budget deficit before it is too late.
Why would Californians study forestry management in Wisconsin when they can get that, plus a solid grounding in the humanities at UC Berkeley, with a social conscience thrown in? That last one is not available in the Wisconsin statehouse which controls the university budget!
1
The way we are going is just to turn every university into a trade school. That hardly develops minds and thinkers. Sounds like how we complained about Chinese and Indian schooling. They learn lots but have no imagination. Now they are spreading out while we just want people to be 'work ready'.
5
We don’t need everyone to be poets and philosophers. If you go to college in a very rural area, chance are you’re not going to leave that area after graduation. What kind of jobs do you think there are in rural areas?
If the decline of rural public education is like climate change, the Republican Party, Scott Walker, and Betsy deVos are burning coal.
7
Does US-SP really need a Women's and Gender Studies program?
1
Yes. To attract women, who are the majority of university students, to avoid falling enrollment.
@BBB
You're implying that women are so narcissistic and narrow minded that they can't possibly want to pursue a major that isn't named after them. How insultingly condescending. Then let the cafeteria offer only cookies and soda, lest they likewise fail to attract customers.
The attack on higher ed continues. After brutalizing student loan holders and eradicating basic math and English courses in every college and university, now the movement to produce drones is going after the basis of American democracy: critical thinking and expanded world view. The catalyst for dismantling higher ed is too many thinking people asking too many intelligent questions about too much protectionism for the controlling 1%. Mindless unthinking puppets and drones are what the oligarchs want, from the white house to Wall Street to police departments to WalMart---no thinking allowed.
6
Too many colleges. Too few students.
3
Too few students. Too little education in the Pre-K ranks.
I was a 1974 History major/ graduate at Colby College and my History Professor, Cliff Berschneider, would often use George Santayana’s 1905 quote “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
We already have a president and administration who have no respect or interest in what happened in the past and what potential precedence might be learned from those events
They’re proud that all decisions today are made in Gut.
And look at the chaos we live in today
Imagine if we abandon the history major;
Who will know give us perspective and help us avoid “Touching the Hot Stove” ?
4
Well, as Henry Ford said, history is bunk. Maybe if you don't study it you will repeat it, but what's wrong with that? Remember, if it weren't for the Second World War we wouldn't have atomic bombs. Maybe we can do it again better, with modern technology.
This is not just about "history" as a major, but y'all who are making comments about history know the Chronicle of Higher Education published a study in November that showed history is in sharp decline everywhere? Can we use that as background and context? (Should the author have referred to it?) 33% percent drop nationally since 2011.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Why-Are-Students-Ditching-the/245163
1
What are the differences between a university (a college) and a trade school? Is the sole purpose of having a college (university) education only to find a job. When I was in college, all students were required to take the U.S. history (one year. two courses), the U.S. government (one semester, one course), plus several other courses to graduate with a BA degree. We do need these courses (history, philosophy, literature, etc.) in a practical point of view to understand vital and complex matters and issues that affect our lives.......
3
Many of the commentaries on this article have pointed out the importance of learning history and social sciences to be able to understand the past and prepare ourselves for the future. I agree: I would add that the process of degrading degrading humanities and social sciences has gone on at least since the early-1970s in an attempt to make an ever-more uninformed population so that the ends will justify the means.
6
“If you want a career-focused program, I think then you could look at a community college or tech school,” said Madeline Abbatacola, a senior studying history and wildlife ecology. Universities like hers, she added, “have a different lane.”
Wisconsin does need more plumbers, electricians and other skilled laborers. But too often the critics of the education shift are conflating the professional four-year degrees with trade school degrees.
We keep hearing that students need the liberal arts so they are taught critical thinking. This assumes that professional field programs do not teach critical thinking. Anyone who thinks that engineering doesn't teach critical thinking shouldn't get in a car or an airplane.
It should be the responsibility of the liberal arts programs to convince the professional field programs of their value, not to convince the governor. These professional fields are bringing in many of the students (business, health sciences, etc.), and they can recommend and require the liberal arts classes to their majors. If the professional field programs are calling for their students to take history and other liberal arts, that will be the strongest argument to strengthen the liberal arts. For decades the liberal arts programs have looked down on professional field programs at many universities, so there is some building of bridges to be done.
1
The greatest universities in the world all revere the liberal arts, and the sciences flourish in all of them. The real problem is expense. We have made higher education an investment decision rather than an educational choice to broaden the mind, hence it is affordable only to those who expect to make a living out of such a heavy investment. Lost in all of this is the concept of having a well-educated, open-minded citizenry. States like mine, Texas, have long since given up on that worthy goal.
7
I wonder if Universities ought not to think of teaching life long learning. Create programs for all adults up to and past retirement to learn from experts in their disciplines. I suspect many mid life and older persons will flock to history courses. And others will return for professional certificate courses. I am a retired surgeon who attended courses run by a mix of organizations as part of professional competence. Universities might be able to create up date education programs . And in retirement, I expand my course attendance into the liberal arts, and fine arts, science and society.
3
One thing that's long differentiated US education in technical fields is its symbiosis with liberal arts education. That helps our students learn to innovate, and to think critically about how their work functions in the world. Other countries educate scientists, engineers, and an increasing number of other professions, who work more cheaply than Americans -- and many of those jobs will eventually be eliminated by AI.
While I think Stevens Points initiatives to promote majors with local impact are good ones, I'm concerned at the number of comments here that consider liberal arts to be expendable. Besides the serious societal impact of a population with a narrowed education, it makes no sense economically. Leaving a few "History 101" classes, while better than nothing, doesn't cut it. Engineers need to eat, room, and study alongside history majors so they can learn from one another and collaborate. Companies that innovate need founders and employees with a a range of educations, from technical to creative.
The etymology of word "university" itself refers to "the whole." If the US, despite its own history, convinces itself narrow education is the key to competitiveness, we're shooting ourselves in the foot.
1
It seems like higher ed hasn’t caught up to cable tv, healthcare, etc and realized that the next step is consolidation and expansion. A lot of these local universities are not on a sustainable financial path and are increasingly not competitive. How long before Harvard, Penn, or Stanford gobble a few of them up and open satellite campuses?
Most advanced countries have a three tier system - universities, colleges and vocational training. Advanced countries like Sweden, Finland and Norway also place a lot of emphasis on individual students at all levels becoming an "educated person". This emphasis combines liberal arts with skills training. An effective democracy can only function if the population is educated and able to critically examine leadership alternatives. The U.S. lost this model of education a long time ago. The consequences are devastating for the future of our country and its leadership. Trump and his core are only a symptom of the underlying problem described by Mitch Smith in this article.
5
I didn’t go to college because I needed a job. I went because I had passion for learning and a desire to make the world better. I got a liberal arts degree in art history and French and went back for a masters in architecture after paying my dues at a series of jobs. I use the lessons I learned from my undergrad degree as much as those from my professional degree.
8
It seems that people, who actually studied history or other branches of social sciences, are far too academic and least practical. They also show higher tendency to be more emotional and religious than rational or professionally objective, besides obsessed with the past than learning from that to make better future. But they dominate politics and public policy sector, but hardly can solve issues that our society faces, more importantly for increasingly complex issues that need some good grasp of science and better sense of logic. That void is affecting our collective ability to create wealth and inclusive growth for every section of the society and in every places. More so in rural America.
The situation become grimmer as credibility of university degrees are declining (almost anyone with money and/or connection can buy almost any degree these days) and impact of personal connection (networking) and money is becoming more important to have a productive or lucrative job with a decent wage, which are also concentrating in bigger cities (just like better schools, health care, entertainment etc.)
1
@bonku
Can you provide any evidence for your assertion that people trained in the social sciences are more religious than others? I would think it was the opposite.
3
I think an issue is schools need to be more honest with prospective students about what they're getting. If you want to focus in history or some other liberal arts field than that's great, however, it doesn't seem everyone is on the same page with the goals of their education whether personal growth or career. It never seems to fail the same people bemoaning a lack of career opportunities inevitably reveal they focused on some niche major with no career prospects.
The old saying ”do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” definitely has two meanings.
4
Though market forces are forcing schools to reconsider their traditional curricula, the idea that jettisoning subjects like history, however superficially appealing, ignores how these disciplines--and they are disciplines not just the exploration of some fusty past--shape students. I confess to being trained as a historian at some of America's most prestigious universities and spending my academic career at another. But I had a second career, far distant from my interest in 13th century canonists, that depended on the skills I acquired as a historian. Digesting vast amounts of information, making justified inferences (I hope they were justified), writing coherently and, most of all, formulating issues that I then investigated). One son with a major in biology and a minor in classics, has said that he had an advantage as a post-doc in synthetic biology, because of just these skills. I wonder how many undergraduate (and graduate level)history majors deployed their skills in business, in law and in other professions. Indeed, during the late middle ages a surplus of university graduates in England found their careers among the merchant class. I often wondered whether as they toted up their accounts, they gave some thought to Aristotle, Boethius and Cicero. If so, their lives were the better for that.
4
Wisconsin appears to have a problem attracting out-of-state tuition fees.
Wisconsin has falling enrollments because the world’s educated parents are not attracted to the state’s politics. Full stop.
Falling University enrollment starts in Pre-School. Wisconsin should look there first. The state’s program for 4 year olds looks like day care, meets only 50% of US federal requirements and doesn’t come close to world’s best practice.
Wisconsin, drop the word ‘University’ for truth-in-advertising and just call trade school a trade school if you are going to drop the liberal arts that underpin an educated population.
8
@BBB
There may be some truth to your point about Wisconsin's recent politics. Traditionally, of course, it was a fairly liberal place. It actually really still has a lot of liberals in it. The State Legislature and the Congressional Districts were ludicrously gerrymandered after the Tea Party Sweep in 2010.
Having said that, you may be making too much out of the Out-of-state student thing. Most "...Big Ten..." kids go to their home state University. I would not think that too many people go Out-of-State in those places, not to another public UNiversity, anyway.
Anybody who go go to their State School but looks elsewhere probably looks at Michigan for scholastics and., frankly, Penn State for Social Life.
The school in this article is dying because its catchment area had and has a declining population and because nobody with an option who lives elsewhere is going to spend 4 years in a small town in the middle of nowhere.
These old "...State Teachers Schools..." need to be consolidated. There are too many of them and they are located in places where kids do not want to live.
1
One way Stevens Point tried to increase full-tuition enrollment was by paying commissions to a Chinese agency to steer students to it. See the report aired on Marketplace.
Lots of other colleges and universities, public and private, have done this too, of course.
@Lefthalfbach
I am a Professor in a science field in a land-grant university. My experience is that when students and their parents are choosing their college/university, son or daughter wants to talk about "what they are interested in" and mom and dad want to talk about "the job market". Universities that don't talk about the career opportunities will find themselves with a lot fewer students.
There are two separate issues here. The decline of the Liberal Arts, generally, and the decline of small colleges in rural areas, specifically.
many of these schools did not start out as universities, or even as Liberal Arts colleges, per se. They started out as Teachers Colleges. As the article points out, most of them are in small towns in rural areas. Those towns are struggling. many of them are dying. Why would kids with an option to go to a City, or to a big state university opt for a school like the one in the article?
The decline of the Liberal Arts is a different issue. Part of the causation is the increasing vocational focus of education, especially in these difficult times. Part of it is the ned to "...get your money's worth..." espcially if a lot of debt is involved.
Maybe, too, however, part of it is the near constant criticism of Western Civ in general, and the incredible narrowing of focus in History in particular.
Just a thought.
Institutions evolve and careers evolve.
This article shows the outcome of pushing the cost of education onto those directly receiving the benefits. This dismisses the notion of public good.
At the same time, some US professional degrees are not consonant with the educational requirements of other similar nations. In all cases I am aware of, the US requires more education. Allowing this harms the public good, by driving up costs as well as restricting those who can participate.
1
The lack of historical perspective here is apparent in the first paragraph, "his 125-year-old university needed to reinvent itself."
The University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point has been a "university" only since 1964, less than half the institution's life. It has mainly been a normal school and a state teacher college. Its graduate degrees -- master's -- focus on teacher preparation. It does not appear to have a graduate program in, say, history.
Stevens Point is an example of the status inflation that swept state college systems in the 1960s and 1970, as enrollments continued to grow. But for many teacher colleges the upgrade was mainly a change in name.
The notion that the United States has long had a network of rural public universities is a stretch at best.
I wonder how many history majors Stevens Point has?
1
@George
Yep. Here in PA many of these old Normal Schools are struggling., especially the ones upstate and, unfortunately, the school that was traditionally the "...Black kids..." Teacher College- Cheyney out in deep rural Chester County.
West Chester is doing quite well, but that Part of Chester County has had a lot of population growth. So, that school has an expanding population of potential students.
If college were affordable, or paid for by tax money so it did not cost anything if someone wanted to go on to college as many countries offer, wouldn't more young people go on to college and fill many of those empty chairs at universities? And please, don't ask "where will the money come from?". Give me a large black magic marker and the military budget and just watch what I'd be able to do. What will happen when young people get completely fed up and tell us after they graduate from high school, "Nahh, I don't want to go to college. Your think that I should go? Make me go to college.". Also, if universities got rid of their top heavy administration and all of the assistant Deans and Vice Presidents in Charge of Sitting by the Door, universities could hire more faculty, offer more programs, improve facilities,...
4
I'm a 31-year professor in the UW system. We are relieved Walker is gone. As a college dropout, he loathed us. Hopefully, WI higher ed can recover (including our colleagues at Point!). Funding from Madison continues to diminish. We get more support from the federal government, suggesting, for example, US-SP...instead of UW-SP. Just give us the autonomy we deserve! We can go it alone, thank you, without threats or ultimatums from Madison.
2
Wisconsin has a substantial budget shortfall because of poor business-oriented management in the legislature and the governors office.
Specifically the state collects less than $800 million annually from tobacco taxes and tobacco settlements but overall healthcare costs from tobacco exceed $2.5 billion annually for a shortfall of $1.7 billion.
The state and other governments pay not only for tobacco related healthcare costs for Medicaid but also for state and city government employees including those at the University of Wisconsin.
While NY State has a $4.35 per pack cigarette tax with an additional $1.50 for NY City totaling $5.85 per pack and has a minimum of $13 per pack cigarette cost in NYC, the cigarette tax in Wisconsin is a paltry $2.52 or $2 less than NY State tax and about $3.50 less than the NYC tax.
The state's 17% of adults that smoke are burning up money that should be used for education but is instead used for extra healthcare costs from tobacco.
The residents of Wisconsin need more business-oriented state government like that of NYS and NYC.
Wisconsin is not alone in having poorly run state government that allows funding that should be going towards public colleges and universities to instead pay for health care costs for tobacco because tobacco taxes are low.
https://truthinitiative.org/tobacco-use-wisconsin
2
I understand college is not for everyone and we need more people with actual hands on skills HVAC, Plumbers
but do we really need more Business majors? I used to believe the liberal arts were a joke, now as someone in their 50's who majored in accounting, I realize business and accounting majors are the ones who don't follow current events.
4
When I was young a wise person instructed me that I would have to “pay my dues” before coming into my own in a satisfying vocation and career. I had a time of becoming enamored of glamorous, immediately gratifying jobs and pastimes and finally settled into something that required hard and sometimes frustrating study and which made use of a sturdy liberal arts foundation. I was fortunate that my elementary, secondary and undergrad education taught me how to read, comprehend, write, think, be aware of subtext and which did not dampen my curiosity. My siblings were not as fortunate since our authoritarian upbringing discouraged us from questioning authority and thus suppressed curiosity and motivation. My clients who sometimes comprise University professors are often scandalized by their student’s lack of ability to think, read, write and have a comprehensive view of the world around them in order to apply real world matters to their works and their loves. The lack of meaningful classical educational curricula only makes that University look like a fraud and then causes all University grads to take on the appearance of pretentiousness concealing stupidity. Graduates of such institutions then gain a reputation of being insufferable and opinionated morons. There will be plenty in Asia, Europe and South America to carry the flag of scholarly inquiry and humanism while US becomes a land of unthinking robots. You pay your dues coming or going but dues will be paid.
3
A career-focused school is called a vo-tech, not a college.
7
Universities and colleges are becoming trade schools. Before I was an accounting major, I was an English major. I took more courses than I "needed" in English, philosophy, and theology. It was a good thing I did because I used my writing and critical thinking skills on a daily basis on the job. This helped me advance from an entry-level staff accountant to a vice-president of accounting in five years. The liberal arts helped me advance. And while advancement was not my goal in taking these classes, it did produce the outcome.
Job-oriented classes teach students what to think. The liberal arts teach students how to think. That is education.
12
this happened to my former employer Wichita state university the president pushed through a merger(currently under investigation by the new Democratic govenor)with the local technical college ) and mysteriously 16 tenured professors, including, myself, took early retirement. This is happening everywhere and not just in rural areas; It represents a seismic shift in American education and deserves more public discussion, Do we really want a two tiered system of higher education ? Is a two tiered system actually in the public interest ?
2
What I see in the problems observed in this article and in the comments responding to it is a somewhat myopic focus on the connection between education and employment. It's an important connection, I get it, but it's not the only reason to undertake higher education.
The ideas and experiences you're exposed to in college also enrich your lived experience as a human being--or, at least, they have mine. A larger vocabulary helps you make sense of your experience and name its subtleties. Learning to read geological features, looking into a telescope at the lunar surface, and knowing a bit about how photosynthesis works may give you a sense of Earth's and the universe's complexity and mystery--and a respect for it that might stop you from knocking down a Joshua tree in an unsupervised national park, for instance. Discovering the perspectives and histories of peoples from all over the world can help you feel connected to others and strengthen your appreciation and respect for how culture develops. I know "it's the economy, stupid," but it's also your experience of life itself, how you make sense of the world we're in, that matters greatly. A well-rounded higher education is also qualitatively valuable.
Will it ever be possible for us to incorporate these kinds of considerations into our policies? Or are they just pie in the sky?
11
I teach English in a community college. My students are by no means stupid, but the breadth of their ignorance of history would indeed take your breath away. I once gave a quiz on Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. I asked from what source Hester Prynne got the name for her baby--Pearl. Many students (who had obviously read the novel based on their other answers) responded "Pearl Harbor." This instance has not been the only time when I have elicited such outrageous responses. So, sure, let's get rid of history. ...and, yeah, let's give 'em college degrees.
7
@lmg I taught a class that covered creative writing using other sources. For instance, a play and screenplay from Of Mice and Men. When I said that Arthur Miller based The Crucible on the Salem Witch Trials, not one of my students knew what the Salem Witch Trials were. This was at a four-year college.
When I explained what the witch trials were, they were horrified. Some literally had their mouths hanging open. But, they had never heard of it.
4
@lmg
I taught for several years as an adjunct at a fairly uncompetitive private university where my students were all juniors and seniors. I had the same experience.
Not one student in the class could accurately provide the timeframe or geographic locale of the American Civil War. They were guessing France or Russia! They also had no clue about WWI. When these references came up in our reading assignments, I realized from class discussion that the students were completely mystified by them.
It is not much of an exaggeration to say that their knowledge of history was nil. They also mostly could not read fluently above a 6th or 7th grade level, nor could they sustain their focus for more than a page or two of text.
It was enlightening- and also horrifying.
2
@Lee I had students who thought England won the American Civil War.
A University without a History major is a University that will be history or a University without a history. History is something you learn through out ones life time. I learned History in school and got the passion to learn and follow history on my own in Universities and all through my life.
3
Does an institution that so drastically amputates its liberal arts curriculum deserve the designation of UNIVERSITY? I think not. Is Trump University the new model for rural America? The country is adrift in so many ways. When education loses sight of its meaning and very essence, things are truly falling apart.
9
History of Art and History major. The Humanities teaches one how to read between the lines. It is imperative to navigaate through the pitfalls of life and recognize a charlatan when one sees one.
7
I find it interesting that the Provost himself; Greg Summers, has a PhD in History from UW-Madison. He must think much of his own credentials.
3
Although the branch colleges are part of an overall university system, they are hardly universities themselves. The term university is much abused and used for all sorts of lesser instructional institutions.
2
Just scanned this article to see if there was a single mention of what this school charges for tuition. Not a one! The author is oblivious. Tuition at a regional four year public school was less than $1,000/year circa 1980. Now it's around $10,000 in most states. At the rate of the CPI for the last forty years tuition should cost no more than $4,000/year. College administration and faculty salaries have sky rocketed. The government should have made tuition caps a requirement for schools to participate in student loan programs. Massive failure of leadership
2
@bill Sadly, it's not the faculty's salary that has skyrocketed. Too many colleges and universities hire adjuncts, part-timers who are paid less than cost of living, given no benefits such as health insurance and retirement, and never know if they'll be rehired from one semester to the next. Most of the freshman today are taught by people who have to hold another job or two or three teaching jobs just to keep their heads above water.
At the community college where I taught, 75% of the general faculty were adjuncts. Eighty percent of the English faculty were adjuncts.
2
Uh, no. I believe that administrative salaries have gone up, but faculty salaries certainly have not. Even Republican state legislators acknowledge that the UW System faculty are underpaid. You may be interested to know that faculty salaries vary a great deal by discipline and seniority. A business professor can earn twice as much as an English professor, if not more. So, UWSP will not save money by getting rid of lower-paid liberal arts faculty in favor of higher paid pre-professional faculty. In fact, they may end up losing money.
1
@Linda In our state adjuncts are used extensively at community colleges, not so much at the regional four year schools and certainly not at our flag ship universities.
History and arts are necessary to help STEM professionals to shape their personal individual, social, national, and world view and duties arising form such views.
As a science and technology professional, I now spend more time to learn about public policy and other related issues of social science to change the way science and technology can actually add value to the world, to our economy and help solving real world problems. On the other hand, people who actually studied history or such social sciences are far too academic and least practical, but dominate public policy in the country.
Now the way we in US use STEM education in universities are almost exclusively to generate data (mostly for sake of it) to publish (mostly) useless papers, mainly to get tax payer money in form of state funded grants. Not many faculties are interested to develop drugs against AIDS or Cancer, those are only for public consumption.
In short, most STEM faculties in Univ are more interested to work for themselves, promote their own careers in academia than contributing to the society or even teaching. More than 90 percent of faculties in US university would fall in that category and only 1-2% actually are productive. Now those 90% use the work of those 1-2% to get grants by doling out "huge possibility" to address issues of basic or applied research.
2
@bonku You have had horrible colleagues, evidently. Not my experience at all and pretty offensive to many hard-working scientists/educators.
@Charles K. I do not think so. I worked in some well renowned public universities in the US and also aware of the situation in research sector in the country. In 1995, when systematic data collection started, USA was 2nd (only after the Swiss) in terms of quality of higher education and research (as per citation per average American publication). That ranking came down to 16th in 2012 (the last data I have).
I'm also aware of quality of teaching in most US universities and also in few other West European countries. Now USA has the highest percentage of college graduates who "strongly believe that God created Human being in its present form". It's the worst in our own recent history (since 1925, era of Scopes monkey trial when teaching of evolution of was banned by the Supreme court). It's also the highest percentage among 35 developed countries surveyed (Muslim majority Turkey came next to USA).
Working condition in most US universities also deteriorated fast- mainly for graduate students and post-docs (the backbone of US research system)
1
To comprehend where we are today, history must be studied. Only then do we have any chance of making the right decisions as a society. Did the school keep Political
Science as a major because it is more popular and probably less rigorous as a major? It would seem so. This is very sad, specifically that a university would give up a basic discipline, History, in favor of what is, in effect, job training. But, that being the case, the school can not rightly be called a university. It should just be called trade school: that is the reality that others have noted must rule the day.
3
I find ironic the fact that Provost Greg Summers, one of the administrators at Stevens Point who has moved to eliminate the history major, has a graduate degree in history. Indeed, he is a faculty member of his institution's history and international studies department. His history degree does seem to have prepared him for a successful career. Its not clear from the article how the university stands to benefit from cutting that major, given that the cost of administering a major is very low. Presumably, Stevens Point will still continue to offer history courses as part of its general curriculum, so the department will continue to exist in some diminished form.
1
I graduated from a liberal arts state university in Michigan with a major in History in 2008. Being so, I recommend that those in this field make two major adjustments. First, faculty need to redefine the role of the History major in the modern world. The only path discussed in my program was a P.H.D. and the possibility of authoring the next popular historical book. To do this, we need to understand that it's not likely you'll find a position as a historian upon graduating and that those who take a History major are in it for the long-game, bringing me to my second point--we need to give this degree some teeth through collaboration with other fields. The History major should either be offered as a minor or should be combined with a more modern career focused major. For example, we need to do a better job of preparing those who seek world knowledge for a masters that will help them become employed in a profession made more meaningful through their knowledge of History. We can prepare them for law school, teaching, or human services and provide them with a stronger sense of social justice. After working in the legal field, serving in the Peace Corps, and now pursuing a masters in Social Work with a policy focus, I'm content with my History major, however, it was not due to any direction from History faculty. It was trial and error on lonely roads.
4
I am a proud graduate of UWSP (1980). I majored in poli sci and minored in history and philosophy which are some of the majors being impacted by these proposed changes. I believe that the education that I received in these disciplines helped both in my graduate education (U. of Chicago, J.D. 1983) and in my career as a lawyer. To this day, I can still remember some of the specific lessons that I learned during my classes at UWSP, and I believe those lessons make me not only a better lawyer, but a better member of society as well.
Although I chose to go to UWSP, some of my high school friends chose to go to UW-Milwaukee or UW-Madison. Our experiences were not the same. Because those schools were much larger than UWSP, the students in those schools did not have the same chance that I did to interact with their professors. Therefore, I believe that in some respects, their quality of education was less than what I received. In other words, there is a real value in receiving your education at a smaller institution.
I realize that some concessions to a budget have to be made. We cannot have everything that we want. However, we are a rich society, and we certainly have enough money to spend on the important items. We just have to evaluate our priorities. I firmly believe that giving students the option to study liberal arts at a small university (without having to be burdened with student debt) is something that would pay big dividends to are society in the future.
7
I remember this approach being advocated by business "leaders" in Oregon in the 1970 to 90s. They proposed that rather than state money going to universities and colleges based on numbers enrolled, more money should go to programs that "advanced" the Oregon economy and less to programs which, in their minds, did not. So engineering, science (although I am not sure all science programs), business, economics, etc., would get a much higher number of dollars per student and other programs, such as history, languages, sociology (and at the time, communications, before it became dominated by marketing), etc., would get much less per student.
Fortunately the legislature did not go along with this idea at the time. Not sure what happened after I left, but at the time, this science and technical worker found it frightening. Of course I had been in college at a time that there was serious consideration to cutting engineering to a three year degree program due to a shortage of engineers (guess what class requirements would be sacrificed). Even coming from a conservative family background, it appeared that would merely serve to graduate semi-educated engineers and force down salaries by increasing the number of graduates.
The sad reality is that companies rarely hire those with liberal arts and social science backgrounds for most of their positions. As a result, colleges have become glorified vocational schools, and many graduates lack both writing and critical thinking skills.
Well-written letters with relevant references are uncommon artifacts in American business these days.
2
I commend Dr. Patterson for not ignoring the problem, but diagnosing it and devising a solution.
As a philosophy major, long ago, I’m an advocate for liberal arts, but why should every school have to offer everything?
There will still be plenty of places where one can study history.
There’s nothing wrong with being trained to make a living.
6
Having majored in history and political science and competed in intercollegiate debate, I went on to have a career in both non-profits and for-profits. I don't understand why liberal arts study is defended mostly as a civic good, ignoring the charge that the liberal arts have little value compared to vocational studies. Yet earnings of those with liberal arts backgrounds often quickly catch up with the earnings of those with vocational majors. The reason is that liberal arts study burnishes the ability to absorb information and concepts, analyze it critically, and communicate it. When I worked in a large corporation with access to the top echelon of managment; I was shocked that these very intelligent people trained in accounting, engineering, and marketing were so inarticulate, didn't analyze with rigor, use evidence well, organize arguments, speak clearly or write cogently. Some couldn't communicate well even with close colleagues. I wondered how many of the corporation's poor strategic decisions and tactical blunders were caused not by rigid management structure--a frequently cited problem--but because of lack of intellectual curiousity, the poor analysis of hard data, and the inability to cogently and persuasively present written or verbal arguments--and then defend them. This, to me, is the argument for liberal arts as a major or required coursework. But those advantages must be explained to students, and the teaching explicitly shaped to foster those habits.
5
i know of two University of Wisconsin system graduates, including one from UW Stevens Point, who were never employed (in any capacity) with their "Environmental Education" degrees. I give the institution credit for focusing this school on being beneficial to its constituency. By existing falling enrollment, it appears students have already decided UWSP isn't going to get them to the place they want to be. Schools need to provide students with thr knowledge to succeed in order to be successful themselves.
1
English major via music and history. Secretary for years (single parent) MA in education and taught in public schools for many years. Now back in grad school for another degree - to teach some more.
Many incoming undergrads are looking for a major that "promises" a job. Especially since they are (or have be made) aware of the financial weight of a college degree.
Humanities programs are actively "justifying" their existence and worship data just as much as the programs with wealthy alums who donate to their areas (see business, sciences)
This is an argument that has its roots - ironically -in the history of the Land Grant Acts and the institutions it spawned. History explains the rise and fall of "major" popularity.
Why are we importing so many H1-B visa holders? Can't we educate sufficient numbers of our people in the areas where the demand exceeds supply?
Why should we saddle our (rural) youth with education loans in majors that will not offer a clear career pathway to jobs that will help them pay back their loans?
If the rural universities graduate sufficient numbers of graduates with skills that the employers seek, it is likely they (employers) may locate more of their facilities closer to such institutions.
2
So, trainees will not be educated anymore?
1
I recently read Stoner by John Williams. Set in the early 20th Century, the book is about Stoner, a son of farmers who is a good student directed to higher education. He's rather passive and goes along. But one day a lecturer inflames his intellectual curiosity and from then on he's driven to learn and to teach. It becomes a lonely endeavor. He perseveres.
No more Stoners.
1
Answer: not a university, but a trade school. Dr. Charles E. Odegaard, then president of the University of Washington, told us “the university is the cafeteria of the mind” — possibly the only thing a university president ever said that might stick in your mind. How I enjoyed that cafeteria! Really, you can’t be a university unless you are universal, and that must include all of the humanities.
3
Will they still preserve the essential and employable majors like "Gender Studies", "Trans-athlete Coaching", and "The Racism of Gravity"?
5
There has been a push in recent years by Republicans to remove any reference that "liberal" leftists formed our country and wrote the Constitution. This could be just what they are looking for. Fake history.
4
There is a big difference between eliminating majors and eliminating all courses in that area. Students can still take history courses as part of a different major. It is a pernicious myth that you have to major in the humanities in order to learn how to write well; it is an even more pernicious myth that only the humanities teach a person to think clearly. Large-scale housecleaning of US college and universities is long overdue. Our butts are being kicked internationally because we churn out too many humanities majors while other nations rightly recognize that society needs engineers.
1
The US churns out “too many humanities majors” because the majority of American students can not grasp complex reasoning delivered via maths in the early years. Hence, China and India have to fill the gap or US innovation grinds to a halt.
1
I live in a town with the same problem as Stevens Point, WI. We have a university that is a cornerstone of this community. It is essential that it survive and change with the times. While a broad based liberal arts education with the opportunity of learning how to problem solve creatively, write cogently and think deeply is the ideal this may not serve Stevens Point, Wisconsin nor Indiana, Pennsylvania. Our students here need to be prepared to start a career and have funds to pay their student loans. Hopefully the faculty at universities in like these can help students learn how to be better and broader thinkers but ultimately these students unlike those at Harvard need to have the tools to be middle class or more.
1
More to the point, what is a society or country without a sense or knowledge of its own and world history? Or for that matter, art, literature or science. It’s a civilization in rapid decline. One that will bring you more Trumps.
4
Speaking as a recovering history major, the answer to the question: "What is a university without a history major?" Answer: Not a university. It's a vocational school. If that's what the citizens of Wisconsin want, fine. But it's not for me.
For a democracy to flourish, one where populists and hucksters do not dominate the political conversation as they do today, the nation needs an informed public. And for that to happen, people need to know history, government, and above all civics. Of course, everyone needs to acquire the skills to find and keep a job, but there is more to life -- and liberty -- than that.
5
May we assume that for every faculty position eliminated at Wisconsin-Stevens Point an administrative position will be eliminated, also? Boy, would that cause an uproar from the National Association of Overpaid/Overstaffed Higher Education Administrators.
9
My best high school teachers all agreed on one thing, that no one who memorised anything should be admitted to university. Critical thinking counted even then. The humanities, including history, are what train people best in this. Consequently the education they offer is of enduring value -- regardless of your major -- long after almost everything in a pre-professional education has become outmoded. Majoring instead in business tutors you in a mindset that is itself open to question.
4
The major reason for the financial strife facing this college is that the state support has been dwindling to the point that tuition alone can no longer sustain its operation. US is one of the industrialized nation (other than Japan) that willingly take away money for education to fund defense and tax cut (in Japan it is spending more on the rapidly aging and sickening population). Unlike Germany or France, we as a nation do not think educating the net generation is as important as giving the very rich another big tax cut. US, different from our European friends think healthcare and education should be profit driven,thus the status of our healthcare and education is in such a shamble. ANyone surprised? I certainly am not.
5
@Mary
And Scott Walker and his anti-science, anti-intellectual minions in the Wisconsin Legislature have done huge damage to what was one of the top state systems in the country with cuts in nearly all programs in the university system.
Those who think the sciences and other "most valuable" programs will be spared are failing to learn from recent history.
3
In 1972, I wanted to major in Mathematics. My high school counselor told me to change my major; Mathematics was a useless degree. She suggested I major in accounting instead, in which I had zero interest. I was stubborn and refused. I never regretted my stubborn choice of a major I was interested in versus one that was vocational. My father did not care what I majored in. He felt the important thing was having a college degree. He was right. Each of us was allowed to major in what interested us. None of us chose a vocational major. None of us regretted it.
6
Historians and journalists share a common trait. Their membership ranks of such scholars/professions depends on the whether the general public are willing to pay to learn about their past and their present. (If the LA Times newspaper does not believe it should have an international news division for its readers then why should University of Wisconsin'Stevens Point offer a scholarly foundation in history for its students?)
Should private profit be the only motivation to determine what information should be disseminated (and what should be withheld) as truth?
Shouldn't we restore our governmental role to protect our citizen's right to know what affects our wellbeing? Governmental records and research should never be allowed to be destroyed without judicial consent. By allowing the president to keep his tax and financial records private we are violating this most fundamental principle of government. Even the decision to defund governmental research and record gathering is, in effect, to deny journalists and historians the resources vital to their profession. Furthermore, to eliminate environmental research is to destroy any chance for rational decision-making based upon scientific data.
It's as if the present adminstration were driving a car with the engine warning light on and deciding to solve the problem by turning off the warning light. Our journalists and historians, along with our scientists, are our engine warning lights: our "canaries in the mine".
2
The article buried the lede.
Almost lost in the story about demographics and transportation and curtailed curriculum is funding: the state underwrites 17% of the university's budget, down from 50% in 1970. Without that money, and with the brand-name recognition of even Wisconsin's main campus (let alone the Ivies), the university can't attract students by saying, "not fancy, but good, and cheap". Faced with the same costs as elsewhere, why wouldn't a student choose a more glamorous school? Especially if the place with the better name is though to offer a better education.
Ultimately it's up to Wisconsin. It has nothing to do with rural versus urban, and everything to do with funding. Wisconsin can decide to fund the school, or not, to narrow its offerings, or not, to integrate the school with the larger system, or not. De facto, they've chosen. Wisconsin chose Scott Walker. It chose to defund its university system. It chose this outcome. This is what democracy looks like in 2019.
7
Unfortunately, at the regionals and even at the flagships, what many of the students need before they can get anywhere is literacy. The students who can read and write well have left rural states as state-U cost of attendance has shot up and private universities and public Ivies have become competitive for them. If you can get a package from Vassar or Hopkins that puts your COA at $18K, why would you go to the University of Nebraska for $13K in housing with a full tuition ride?
I’ve watched as the level of the courses have dropped through the floor and assignments have become appropriate for high school, even junior high. There’s nothing else to do; many of the students cannot do more advanced work when they show up. They don’t have the basic reading, writing, research, and reasoning skills. Many cannot read and understand an average NYT column. And these are the ones going to university, so imagine what things are like for people who aren’t going to college at all.
It’s not their fault, either; K-12 and public libraries have also been gutted in rural states. But talking about poli sci and history versus polytechnic courses...more profound needs have to be addressed first. They will not be, of course: it’s no way to sell degrees. Everything will be done on a pretend basis, and the losers are the students, who smell a fish but don’t know what’s happening, need a degree, and borrow.
4
The University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point will have the distinction of becoming known as The Trump University of Wisconsin.
3
I don’t understand the strategy of promoting Education as a major while eliminating history, foreign languages and other humanities. What are those educators going to teach? Not all teachers teach math. I Who wants a social studies teacher or an American history teacher who was “educated” at an institution without a history department?
Listen, if what you are doing is not working, then change is called for. But if change takes you outside of your mission, then you have to tread very carefully. The point of higher education is not merely the survival of the institution.
5
Scott Walker and the republicans created this crisis. The state of WI needs to put more money into the small colleges and universities. It will be money well spent!
4
It will soon be that the scholarly subjects that offer a means to organize resistance to oppression will be only accessible to the wealthy. It will soon be a signifier of high social status to possess a humanities degree. Do the trust fund babies really need to know about Marxism of Freire? Or the people in underprivileged parts of the country who might struggle to reconcile their situation with the world that’s been sold to them? And do we really think that catering to the needs employers by offering pre-employment “training” is any sort of way to invest in a young workforce given the how quickly the work world can change in the digital age? Should we not teach people how to write and think and situate themselves in the fabric of history? I guess not. Dangerous, dangerous times indeed, this age of willful regression to a state of mass ignorance.
4
So, previously the state provided as much as 50% of the budget, but now only 17%, and this is the provost's response: “Sometimes, I liken it to climate change ... The higher-ed climate has changed profoundly and it’s not going back to the old normal.”
Good analogy, bad conclusion. Like "climate change" this is a totally manufactured crisis that Republicans choose to pretend is just some sort of force of nature beyond of our control. UW Stevens Point's woes, as well as that of rural Wisconsin itself, stems from leadership that believes the education of its citizens is a bad investment, but that lavishing billions of public money on foreign corporations like Foxconn in exchange for empty promises about factories and jobs is a good governance.
And to add insult to injury, when the citizens of the state predictably respond to this malfeasance by voting the bums out, they keep their majorities in the legislature through gerrymandering, and vote to strip the incoming Democratic governor of his power. No wonder Wisconsinites are fleeing the state. Who wants to live in a place where the Government is actively working to sabotage your future, if you have a choice?
5
Governor Scott Walker -now thankfully voted out of this office with the November 2018 elections- in 2015 cut $300 millions to the University of Wisconsin systems, a 13% decrease in funding over two years. Added to this were $ 1.5 million in cuts to UW Stevens Point. The 13% decrease was $6.4 million in each year for UWSP, 2015-2017 of cuts. Since 2013 the UWSP cut its spending by $10 million.
The Wisconsin Idea, progressive and the brain child of Robert M. La Follette, mission was to make the Wisconsin University system a "laboratory for democracy" to educate Wisconsin's citizens to solve problems, improve health and quality of life, the environment, and education. Walker in 2015 wanted the removal of the Wisconsin Idea from his budget for the University system. Walker attended Marquette University, Milwaukee, but did not graduate, 1986-1990. It said that Wisconsin is the Alabama of the North: a refuge of conservatism, low-information voters, of the 50 million residents 82% are white, and the medium income, $30,043.
Strangely enough, the planned changes to the UWSP, because of the $8 million short fall at UWSP, are an Institute for The Wisconsin Idea which is to "focus on non-traditional students with families, jobs, and financial constraints, "and the "Creation of the Center for Critical thinking to provide critical thinking to high schools, employers, nonprofits, and community partners."
Reminiscent of B.F. Skinner and Walden II.
3
Liberal arts graduates find very few positions that require their expertise, except in teaching. Still in practice most non technical positions are filled by graduates of liberal arts. Maybe this requires a bit of compromise but eventually everybody finds a position and can make a living.
The question is, if we as a nation want most people to be college graduates even those who don't really need it for their job? My opinion is yes. We can afford it, and it makes the country a better place as a whole. It should be a higher priority than the trillions we spend on defense.
3
Let us all note Stevens Point is in the middle of nowhere. It is not trendy like La Crosse nor near populated places like Whitewater. And, most importantly, neat places like the West Side of Chicago can only be accessed with degrees employers will pay for.
1
How many MBAs do we really need? Those "Executive MBA" programs that give you a degree in a year or so with only weekend classes contribute what to the economy? Have there really been scientifically valid studies on the value of such programs? What about communications (aka, advertising)? But those programs receive lots of money and support because they feed the "business" ideal pushed by business people and businesses.
One problem with eliminating programs such as history is that is likely to result in using only adjunct instructors who function on year to year (or semester to semester) contracts. Reviews of their abilities as teachers will be based on a lot of comments from folks who, for the most part, are only taking those classes because they are requirements.
IN the early 70s, I saw the split between those fellow students in science and engineering programs, many of whom saw taking liberal arts classes as useless to their future, and even their professors who thought such courses were valuable to those in such majors. I ended up transferring to a "Liberal Arts" college which had very, very strong science programs. At least there I could take the liberals arts courses I wanted (as requirements) AND get a superior chemistry education to what I would have received at the Science and Engineering focused college I was originally enrolled at. But I don't think that would have happened without dedicated liberal arts degree programs in place.
1
The University isn't proposing to eliminate the teaching of history and other humanities. It is merely proposing to remove the option of majoring in these subjects due to lack of interest combined with lack of support. General education requirements and elective courses can still offer students some grounding in the skills and perspectives of the humanities, while also equipping them to earn a living in an economic universe that increasingly demands specific technical skills of job applicants.
Good Lord, when I went to college in the early 1970s, there was nothing wrong with getting a liberal arts degree. There was also of course, nothing wrong with becoming a doctor, nurse, lawyer, teacher, scientist, etc. But my anthropology degree got me my first job in a nonprofit population research firm that needed someone who could understand the literature they were publishing and help the editors with the material. Later I earned a masters in business because finding a job that paid more needed that additional information, technology, and methodology and no one in the finance or technology worlds would look at a resume that “just” said liberal arts degree. What my professors told me was that the liberal arts degree taught you how to read, how to research, how to analyze, and how to write and organize your thoughts. All those skills can be used across the board for all kinds of disciplines.
Sad to think Schools are only thinking of turning out students with a set career path. Mine was very good, from nonprofit to government to small business to fortune 500 to consulting and eventually into education. And I don’t regret a single minute of it. I wasn’t born to be an artist or a doctor or something that specific in my heart, but everywhere I worked I used my teaching and communication and writing and research abilities. It served me well, and in retirement, I am quite happy doing volunteer work and living off my savings. I feel sad for those who won’t have that opportunity.
8
The article says that Stevens Point is considering dropping the history major. Does that mean that there will be no history classes? Also, it seems to me that one of the major reasons for having a dispersed set of campuses is to educate the local populace. By doing so is there not a goal to help keep at least some of the graduates in the local area? In order for those people to earn a living they need to have the education and credentials that will get them a job and a salary in those places.
2
There is a marked difference between educating and training someone. Educating someone challenges thinking and problem solving. Training focuses on process and skills. Some subjects favor one or the other and sometimes both. The dilemma is when one method takes precedence over the other. Society needs a balance of thinkers and doers...otherwise there is anarchy.
5
To paraphrase George Santayana, those who don’t know history are condemned to repeat it. Thinking certain classes and majors are unimportant is antithetical to the whole idea of a liberal education, which means, for those who are unfamiliar, education about a little bit of everything as well as a major in one speciality. We have been headed this way a good while, as my 70 something year old ex husband had a great business education, but was completely ignorant of history and literature.
However, aside from the consolidation in the flagship campuses and the hollowing out of rural America, the author stated and then glossed over what I think is the crux of modern education’s problem: the underfunding of elementary and secondary education, leaving many places with undereducated or incompletely educated students.
“Fewer students graduated from high school in the area around Stevens Point, including a 14 percent drop in its home county from 2012 to 2016.” Scott Walker and the cutting the budget year after year? Republican rule?
We in this country have to realize that everything costs money, including educating our children. The gutting of our public education in favor of the often (mostly?) inadequate home schooling is making us less competitive for jobs at home and for business internationally.
3
In answer to Miss Mueller's question - a university is not a university without a history major. If it prefers to be a technical college instead then there is plenty of room for success as that, but Stevens Point no longer serves its mission as a college.
6
Problem I see here (this is not specifically limited to Stevens Point) is that many of these schools expanded beyond their expertise into new areas rather than be the best at few subjects they all wanted the title "University". Now a market change has forced them to retrench and decide what they want to be. They assumed they were immune to market forces just as so many failed companies. Are these schools really any different than Sears? Yeah, they had some product selection but Walmart ate their lunch at the low end, Lowes ate some lunch on tools/appliances, Amazon finished them off. What we have happening here is Devry etc siphoning off some, the big state school taking some, rural de-population taking some. All of a sudden the cost structure of the rural school no longer supports all this staff.
1
The author and much of the commentators have this argument turned upside down. UW-Stevens Point was founded as a vocational school focused solely on producing teachers for that section of the state. This transformation was quickly copied across normal schools and agricultural colleges throughout the US. Then in the 1960s, largely at the initiative of the faculty and former faculty turned administrators at these universities, they took a radical turn and sought to transform in to a Wisconsin-Madison or the expensive private liberal art college model to produce art history majors and philosophy majors as well as the degrees that met vocational needs.
That experiment proved to be financially unsustainable. Not only because of this article's focus on state governments no longer supporting what are now public universities that are 3 times their former size, but the local student pool in these largely rural communities, that need to go $30,000 in debt to graduate, did not want to gamble on a philosophy degree from the former normal school in the job market.
3
@DoctorRPP
Indeed. Had UW-SP remained a teacher training college it would have had a small history department (maybe one or two faculty members) to teach future history teachers at the K-12 level, and all would be well. It's the mission creep that results in the reckless push to convert these kinds of colleges into universities. They would be much better off with the original focussed mission.
The issue may be less about liberal arts versus vocational, but between cities and rural areas, since the flagship universities are thriving.
In that respect I think it’s a healthy and normal trend, as there has been too much urban sprawl, contributing to deforestation and gasoline use just to commute.
Most of the world’s people live in or around cities for practical reasons. As crowded as that may be, in the context of overpopulation and dwindling resources, it’s still the best way to go.
Bonus: in cities you have to learn to live with other people :)
@lm...Judging by the crime rates in some cities [not to single out Chicago or Baltimore] some of y'all folks need to take some remedial courses in Living with Others. Just sayin'...Just curious. Are all of those escalating tuition rates at flagship universities an indicator of thrivingness? It just seems odd that students would protest paying lots more every year or so for such success at dear old U of $$$.
I had a long career after a PhD in a STEM discipline. But some of the most influential of my undergraduate teachers were in history and literature. My freshman history professor reversed my aversion instilled by terrible high school teachers. I became a member of the History Book Club for many years, whence I was privileged to read, among many other great books, Hofstadter's "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life." Reading it may be helpful to some commenters here.
In literature courses, my take on our readings did not always
coincide with what my instructors expected, but my views were always respected and I came to understand these experts' more nuanced interpretations.
Now in retirement I am a voracious reader of history from any era, and of American literature. It is a blessing to me to have had the opportunity to learn far more than what my nerdish majors and research afforded me.
18
There is a name for educational institutions that offer only occupationally oriented courses: "Trade Schools".
There's nothing wrong with a trade school; I went to one myself, years ago, and learned a trade that served me well for as long as I needed it.
But, if a University is going to re-invent itself, snuffing out the light of "liberal" education- which, I would argue, contains the subjects that make us fully human, social creatures, it should ask itself why. What is worth giving up that which is so important? Is it the buildings? The offices? The titles? What is more important than, say, instilling a historical perspective in a young person's mind? What is more important than awakening a sense of beauty, in a poem or a work of drama?
Perhaps it is presumptuous of me to judge, so far from Wisconsin, but I would argue, from the heart and all my life's experience, that a real Educator would choose to teach in a poorly heated storefront, if that was all that could be done, and that preserving the University becomes meaningless if that University chooses to deliberately fail in its primary task: the liberal education of young minds, for the benefit of all.
12
Public universities should not be "competing for students". This indicates an excess of supply for demand. Taxpayers fund public education to meet a need for education and research and the campuses do a great job at this. Perhaps the Wisconsin state legislature should be closing campuses where a combination of lower demand for places at the university system and a decline in birth rate have made the excess superfluous.
4
This cries out for a paraphrase of the Santayana chestnut - our increasing ignorance of history will condemn us to rinsing and repeating for whatever remains of a plausible future.
Doing away with history departments, particularly in red states, carries with it just a whiff of willful forgetfulness.
11
Am I supposed to feel bad for student loan profiteers? Let the University go beg their pals at Scammie Mae for one of their fabulous high interest loans.
3
"administrators are risking the very essence of a four-year college experience"
And what is the "very essence" of that experience? Fraternity beer blasts? Sexual experimentation in the dorm? Being taught how to hate your parents? Chanting in university-sponsored anti-Trump rallies?
Universities used to be centers of debate, thought and learning. Now they're some kind of four-year party where you emerge with a worthless degree in Gender Studies (or whatever) and $100,000 in student debt you'll never be rid of.
Can the "Liberal Arts" and make it a vocational school. It'll be a win-win for the students and the school.
3
If the only ones with a future anymore are computer hackers and burger flippers, which don’t require degrees, I think the question colleges are asking themselves is moot. Big corporations can just breed their own.
3
I'm not sure why ANY American university has a History Dept?
We Americans are THE most educated, IGNORANT humans that have ever walked on the planet.
Thanks to "smart phones", we are stupider and lazily and, therefore, easier than ever to manipulate. China thanks you, Apple Corp.
Thanks to social media,we have lost the shared values of civilization and progress in value of the values of warring tribes. Think Afghanistan. Russia thanks you, Facebook.
What does THE most ignorant nation on earth, led by THE most ignorant human on earth, need with history?
7
You speak for yourself and your experience. That isn't true across the board.
1
Frankly it is about time that universities tamper their enthusiasm for liberal arts and focus more on conservative arts, like business, finance and corrections. Freedom! And Jesus!!
I find it difficult to believe that you have come to the conclusion that this is only happening to rural colleges and non-flagship campuses when faculty from Stonybrook University, a SUNY flagship campus on Long Island, has been trying repeated to get the NY Times to pay attention to how their campus is being destroyed as a true University.
4
In order to remain solvent Bernie Patterson can fire a whole bunch of tenured history professors, radically change the character of his institution, and hope for the best. That might work.
Or he and the folks at Stevens Point could find a way to make the school attractive to those kids who aren't getting in at Northwestern and such (I advise them to read the NYT piece by Sarah Vowell extolling the virtues of an education at a rural, land-grant college for ideas).
With Scott Walker out of the way, I think that the latter option might be doable. The world needs historians more now than ever.
6
Eliminate liberal arts, and in particular philosophy and history, and you'll have many more Trump-likes leading the country in the future. This is about what kind of a society we want to live in, but it seems that the neoliberal takeover has already achieved its main purpose of creating masses that are unable to think critically, question, reason, and identify faulty logic, and that sincerely believes that the individualistic consumerist notion of the good life is the one everyone should pursue. What makes us human is our ability to think, question, and create meaning out of existence. And this beings with asking the fundamental questions of life: what am I? who am I? what should I do with my live? how should I live? what is happiness? what should be the purpose of society? and so on. If you don't have a decent philosophical education that will encourage you to ask such questions and help you cultivate the skills required to think critically, and if you don't have the content from history, sociology, literature, and the like, you can only become a very successful cog in a fancy machine which, back to the beginning, is what many believe that would make them happy -understood as mere possession of goods and consumption. We should all be resisting the violent transformation of colleges to cog producing factories.
10
The purpose of a Liberal Education was to create grounded citizens who knew how to think, and where their career choices led them, put that ability and what they had learned to work. It has not been perfect, and masses of people will argue it did not work at all.
These things I fear; absent "Liberal Arts", and and an education focused on job-related learning, we will create citizens whom we see only in clusters in history...scientists who create chemicals knowing of their use on humans or devastation to the environment, clinicians who pull plugs on respirators because a cost/benefit analysis "proves" it is the best use of resources, men and women working on projects and "go where the science leads them", no matter the impact on life, liberty, and the planet. Men and women who push buttons or pull triggers because that is "their job".
Think that is in a far-fetched future? Have a drink one afternoon with your company's CFO, get him or her to talk about "share holder value", marginal utility, and the efficiency of markets. And compare what they say against the empty factories, deserted towns, broken lives, and China's unlimited spending power based on our purchase of bright-shiny objects and technology transfers. That is where a tight focus on "job-related" education is going to take us.
6
@DEH. Think? Let me ask Siri what that means before I reply . . . . We did this to ourselves, I’m afraid.
1
@DEH
Exactly! The creeping evil of cost-benefit approaches has contributed to the loss of ethics and morality in so many areas. And that includes the willingness to game the costs and minimize the value of benefits to ensure the "victory" of those who claim costs are always excessive.
2
Part of the financial woe the University of Wisconsin system has faced has been invented and exacerbated by former Governor Scott Walker. College dropout Walker had endless hubris for the liberalism and intellectualism in Madison. His mad dash to cut taxes rendered less money available for UW. Three years ago he moved $200 million from UW to fund the Milwaukee Bucks new stadium in Milwaukee (shared with his almost-alma mater Marquette). He has also worked to keep in-state tuition flat for years by raising tuition for all out-of-state students dramatically so they could subsidize in-state students. This left many in Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Iowa, and Minnesota with better and cheaper options outside of Wisconsin. He and his GOP stalwarts also belittled the liberal arts as pointless and see tech as the answer to everything. Thus it is even more ironic that UW had less money for R&D as a result of Walker's slashes and redistribution of money to the for-profit, private Bucks. He also killed high speed rail and the promise of hundreds of good jobs in Wisconsin to avoid dealing with Mr. Obama. His final master stroke was hobbling the state by giving excessive tax breaks and infrastructure improvements to mediocre Foxconn whose rich deal may never see Wisconsin make money from the company.
8
Sad, but everything ebbs and flows. The demographics have changed, and the (Republican slashed) funding has changed. Things have to change, as uncomfortable as it is.
But, political "science" was spared? Why not astrology?
As our universities become more utilitarian, we wonder why our society is less empathetic and compassionate?
5
The NYT headline gets one major aspect of this issue completely wrong: this is not only about students in rural areas. It's about all regional state universities whose primary function is to serve students who are place bound, whether they are rural, urban, or suburban. Lower-income students who need to be able to live at home. Students with children. Students with full time jobs. Students who are taking care of elderly parents or grandparents. Students in the military. Students who have to live in a certain area because of a spouse's career. And so on.
Traditional-age (18-22 year old) students from upper-class or upper middle-class families can afford to move away to attend more elite institutions: flagship state universities or private colleges and universities. So the defunding of regional universities like UW Stevens Point is basically about limiting educational options for everyone else. If you're a working single mother who's always wanted to become an editor, a history teacher, or work in a museum, you can forget it. The state of Wisconsin is now no longer willing to support your dreams.
11
Look behind the smoke and mirrors of the Chancellors and Presidents at these colleges, and you'll find dozens if not hundreds of high-salary administrative positions that have been invented in recent years.
Director of this, Assistant Associate Dean of that -- and very likely no teaching responsibilities.
11
I'm not sure a little consolidation and specialization among 4-year public colleges wouldn't be a good thing. They become political fiefdoms at the state level, and compete bitterly for state funding.
Having said that, there are many other things that also need to change, but much of what is wrong is an outgrowth of the catastrophic and ill-advised drop in public funding of higher education.
The most cynical, and shameful thing American higher education (and our government) has done is saddle our youth with never-ending debt from a usurious college loan program, custom-designed to benefit the financial industry. We have acknowledged the wrongness of this system, and yet it continues.
None of this explains or excuses the administrative bloat in our universities, which needs to be pared back significantly.
6
It is now up to the accrediting agencies to certify that no institution that eliminates history from its curriculum deserves to take tuition from prospective students paying for a college or university education. Although in a country that takes pride in being "exceptional," this phenomenon is probably no surprise--particularly since it has already long been clear that one of the ways Americans are different is their ignorance of history, perhaps especially their own.
3
A history major is what allowed me to learn the difference between fact and speculation. It helped me learn about how personal biases can effect people’s interpretations of fact and truth. It was my introduction to law school.
From its beginnings, through the reading of Carr’s “What is History,” I learned that politicians try to alter facts to serve their agendas. History is written by revisionists attempting to support both the truth and/or the beliefs of their corporate connections, ethnicity, faiths, race, or political parties.
Sometimes, the writers backgrounds are intertwined with a variety of sympathies. That means that to understand what is history, we must both accept some facts, yet question other due to the author’s proclivities.
I was required to take other courses to fulfill my liberal arts degree. These classes were omitted from my business degree. I believe that a lower case “liberal arts” education creates valuable Americans.
It is important for some Universities to rethink how to educate engineers and scientists, whose undergraduate coursework ‘may create’ robots, not citizens. We must not omit courses that provide us all viewpoints. Again, a history major can teach both näive and skeptical students how to evaluate what is fact, from what is mere legend.
4
My daughter was crazy about history, read everything she could lay hands on about the constitution and civil war. Her dream was to study history much to our chagrin.....we are scientists with a love for history as an accompaniment to the main course. Then we met an owner of a shoe shop, who on hearing of her passion, narrated the story of his son who had a PhD in history from Berkeley and was struggling to find a post doc. He was working as an office assistant. He said, those history profs, they never retire, how can youngsters ever hope to get a job. Sure hope his son is now in his dream job.
She is majoring in computer science, minoring in history. Her love of history will change the way tech companies connect to people. This is the new face of history. It should be taught alongside other concrete disciplines so it infuses our daily thinking. It is time those old fashioned dinosaurs who are destroying history as a discipline make way for a new thinking. Wisconsin needs to rethink history not destroy it.
5
Thank you for providing a good example of how to adapt to circumstances without discarding an important to course of study.
1
The NYT's recently had an article the rural life is dying.High unemployment drugs and soon their will be no post offices thanks to Trump and the culture of corruption GOP. The students should plan to move to the big cities for a better life. I lived in Nicholson pa. In the 1970s they had two grocery stores and a fair economy. Now Walmart moved in the 1990 closed Nicholsons two grocery stores so the people have to travel 13 miles one way to a decent grocery store. They will have to travel that far to get their mail. Rural America has lost its charm . Now it is a place to live and dye. Give me city life any day.
1
This is what the triumph of capitalism, plutocracy and celebrity media “culture” have wrought. I was probably the top history graduate my senior year at one of the world’s finest public universities, and the skills I learned led me on to Harvard Law School and a superb legal career. I’ve never stopped reading history, nor Scientific American, as I took any number of science and math courses at my university as well.
Both are important. But eliminating liberal arts, be they the social sciences or humanities, is the way to a totalitarian future. One where highly educated STEM or low tech drones are at the mercy of a system they do not realize they have the power to change, or how to go about that. History certainly teaches those things.
We will, or at least some of us will, remember this when the new feudalism is in full force. We are well on the way to that.
And let me be clear—I am not defending bloated and overpaid university administrative bureaucracies, or tiny, politically correct niche majors. The universities need reforms, tuition prices need to fall, and the educational loan sharks and for-profit schools brought to heel. The conservative war on public education at all levels has to be confronted and defeated. But throwing up our hands and slashing whole areas of the liberal arts is not the way to go, if we have any hope of preserving our country. Assuming it deserves preserving with its current “leaders” and their deplorable lackeys and supporters.
4
The American education system needs to be reved up. What is taught in the first two years of college should be taught in high school... and frankly, a second language should be taught starting in early elementary -- the time when the brain's ability to learn language is at its optimum,
That said, Coursera, EdX, Udacity -- all online platforms providing free university level education with inexpensive certificates verifying course participation and passing the course. Rarely mentioned in these days of worrying about what messages politicians' clothing send!!
In many cases we really don't need brick and mortar universities for people to learn. Today I wikip'd (I wish people would stop telling students Wikipedia is BAD) -- Lawrence of Arabia, the Decameron, the Canterbury Tales -- relationship between Bocaccio and Chaucer who did visit Italy--, Fabliau. THERE IS TONS ONLINE -- for anyone who seriously wants an education. And yes it's a starting point.. not an end point, unless you publish online.
Not a word in the article about the underpaid and furloughed this month adjunct professors who provide much of this education, BTW.
Why not figure out how to run a university with minimal support personnel?
(There was also a period when lots of local community colleges were then changed to universities with many goodies :fancy auditoriums, student unions, sports centers, dormitories, etc.- 1980's-2000's now closing, changing demographics.) How do we adjust to change??
2
"That said, Coursera, EdX, Udacity -- all online platforms providing free university level education with inexpensive certificates verifying course participation and passing the course."
A university-level education is about more than just "course participation." It is about working with others of different backgrounds. It is about exposure to a wide range of ideas and concepts, and the ability to discuss them with fellow students. It is about a chance to grow socially as well as intellectually.
2
Wisconsin history, not so greek
15-20000 effigy mounds are history drawn in the ground unique to this part of the country. Only 4000 left.
One less than 5 miles from the campus.
I studied history at the University of Washington. Probably the best history program anywhere and the libraries to back it up! And now I have to come to terms that history has been relegated to below underwater basket weaving somewhere in the USA! A sad day indeed. First K-6 took out cursive writing in many states and now some places of higher learning want to/have to gut the ability to maintain our understanding of the past. A sad day indeed.
In the future, our schools will have a one day historical survey only with a test at the end and it will be multiple choice and all the answers will be the first option “A”! Even I could pass that!
Wait, there is a double-whammy solution to save the day: Just fund the wall and correlate the impact of historical study influencing global warming; either way, a massive government grant is as certain as taxes!
2
Answer to headline: A trade school. Trade schools are perfectly fine and for many people a far better choice than a traditional college education; just call them what they are.
2
Dropping the humanities from a university turns it perforce into a trade school.
2
Wisconsin is turning universities into trade schools. Good for them. Just rename them so all universities are not degraded by their model.
2
High school graduates in rural areas within UWSP's region are down 15-20%. And history majors have declined 50% in the last five years. Obviously the article title is misplaced ..... "Why aren't rural students chosing history?"
Also, UWSP began as a state teachers college serving its region and then inflated into something else with the UW boom after the 70s .... And that's not sustainable now.
If you want to read the data and plan for yourself it so here at the "Point Forward Proposal" link: https://www.uwsp.edu/pointforward/Pages/default.aspx
2
No more history, sounds like the school is preparing students for jobs in the trump administration.
3
I couldn't help but note the Philosophy professor took no position. Dante reserved one of the nastiest places -- the limbo just outside his inferno--for just this category of wafflers
3
Susan Collins will be there too.
The core purpose of an institution of higher learning is to develop CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS in its students. How will THAT help them "make money" you ask?
Without these skills a human is uneducated and much less capable of securing the best, most productive future for him/herself. Higher education need not be a choice between technical education (plumbing, electrical, computer repair, etc) and liberal arts - they should BOTH be mandated for ALL institutions as the most important investment in the future of America.
Until people understand this, we are doomed to keep falling and failing. Trump's base is largely uneducated white older men - and look what we got from them! India and China stress higher ed, and they have provided the United States with extraordinary talent; talent that is overtaking the "white" stereotype of Republican ideology.
Students in rural America most of all NEED to learn how to think or they will not be at all competitive on a world stage. They cannot protect themselves by building walls or denying the truth. They need a government that prioritizes this goal because they are too young and inexperienced to see the forest for the trees. That, by the way, is where "progressives" excel for ALL Americans. "Liberal" is NOT a dirty word to be demonized' it's the essence of our Democracy.
4
@RealTRUTH sorry, but a degree in a Liberal Art (or any other art like my Music degree), has not provided Millennials with a full time job paying adult wages and health insurance. I went back to school for an MS in Healthcare Administration and got a 6 figure job with Amazing benefits. Now I could support a family. I often tell young students to look at college as a financial investment to major in a skill/profession that will get them a great salary with benefits (because one day they'll have a family and they need to provide medical care for their children), but minor in any arts. I think the entire education system needs to be revamped from Kindergarten through high school. we already take history and World Civ classes in high school. If we need more of it, then get high school teachers to do a better job teaching it. Let college be focused on learning a profession. I think it's foolish to get into $30k debt just to become enlightened but you can't make a living off a useless degree.
@Vegas Keto Geek
Has it occurred to you that a lot of what you absorbed in your MS program was "critical thinking", yet you treat it as though it was merely a technical skill. The fact that you cannot see this disturbs me, and that you convey this attitude to unsuspecting students is even more so.
Harken yee history majors: Carleton Fiorina, undergraduate medieval history major, was not self-limited by premature closure of career and life options but was open and able to ply paths untroden, lead, make history, and live a life as full and fruitful as any parent would wish for their child and as any society desire of their citizens. You will never know what life in a free country may bring you if you foreclose, narrow, and limit it.
1
I hear trump is all for a new university that specializes in coal mining.
In 2015 then Gov. Scott Walker cut $250 million from the state budget for the university system. Later that year he provided the plutocrat owners of the Milwaukee Bucks $250 million for a new arena.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/15/sports/bucks-new-owners-get-house-warming-gift-of-public-money.html
Is there any clearer picture of the priorities in the USA right now?
I agree with the comments of those graduates in history about the benfits of the degree.
6
There’s a causal relationship between lack of education and voting against your own best interests. There’s a similar relationship between lack of education and believing the lies spun by Fox News.
An institution that jettisons the humanities in favor of job training honestly doesn’t provide an environment that fosters the kind of thinking that helps people make wise decisions in the voting booth. I know there’s more to it, but still.
I have to ask: President Patterson, if you’re going to get rid of History, French, and similar programs, why bother using the term “university” at all? Just rename UW-SP a job training institute and stop pretending.
Or would it be better to focus some energy on banding together with other public colleges and universities and lobbying the legislature for increased funding? And maybe even cutting the budget for administration?
4
Is history important? Well, the lack of historical perspective in this story might be an example of the consequences of ignoring it. How can one write about how so many regional institutions got into trouble without mentioning the post-WWII GI Bill benefits? The resulting wave of students is what caused so many of these institutions to expand programs and go from colleges to universities. And it's government action, or rather, inaction that is causing many so many problems. Many state supported schools are no longer significantly state supported. State contributions to budgets have shrunk to under 20% in most cases and the single digits in some. Tuition funds these so-called "state schools". Many of the lawmakers who have done this got their degrees when state schools were worthy of the name but have cut off their children. Of course, many voters assented to this. We are eating our future.
3
So many comments are disappointed about diminishing demand for the liberal arts. Think about it, with fewer graduates these majors may have an increased value. As an immigrant, with engineering background I always wondered why so many Americans get into these arts majors without thinking about theit futures. US was wealthier, and people had the option to pursue fun subjects in college, that they enjoyed as college-life. Just look at all the pamphlets these universities send to attract students, it is all about having fun.
It no longer is the case, now those majors are reserved for the wealthy, who can enjoy their college life, get a degree and inherit a management job.
4
Though this article goes in to great lengths to describe the demographic challenges that UWSP has, it only glosses over the real problem that afflicts the university, the enormous cuts in state funding. If funding had been maintained at historic levels, the university would have a healthy surplus. Part and parcel of republican strategy has been starving public universities of funding so as to squeeze students into for profit schools which in turn gladly fund their campaigns. I would like to add a term to our political lexicon to represent this arrangement; DeVossing. It also serves quite well to another republican aim, the "stupidification" of America the defunding of institutions where evidence based education is provided and replacing them by religious affiliated schools or schools where critical thinking is not required at all.
4
You’ve hit the nail on the head.
1
Critical thinking skills aside, what about the empathy gained from liberal arts classes? Reading about ideas, people, and places different from ourselves may help us empathize with contrasting ideologies and heal the nationalism and polarization our nation is moving towards. Perhaps english and history majors aren’t vital to our workforce, but if every major in every institution maintains or introduces a core liberal arts education, our nation’s empathy and cooperation skills could vastly improve. This is also necessary for high school students, even those who are not pursuing post-secondary education.
3
Is this a part of a larger cultural divergence among urban & rural America? We've heard the calls by Republican politicians for less liberal-arts and more vocational, technical training for America's student body. Often it's veered into outright derision of the liberal-arts as being nothing more than indoctrination for "SJWs" and supposed left-wing frivolity. I can't say I'm all too surprised that universities like this are suffering as a result. I can't say I'm surprised that this is happening primarily in rural areas, either. I think this just the latest manifestation of something deeper occurring in American society -- while folks in urban areas continue attending university at higher rates and benefit from it, the rural folks are rejecting the traditional liberal-arts curriculum in favor of a more vocational path because their economic needs are more pressing than say somebody who attends UC Berkeley as an English or History major.
Is this somehow bad? Maybe not. Perhaps we do need a two-track system which filters America's student body accordingly into either academia or into vocation. Something akin to the German model, perhaps? Take all of this in while also noting the widespread economic and cultural stagnation in much of rural America and I don't think it'd be a bad idea for rural universities to begin focusing more on a vocational curriculum rather than traditional liberal arts. It's unfortunate but I think it is indeed the new normal.
2
If rural institutions focus on a "vocational curriculum" while urban institutions continue to turn out graduates in all disciplines, don't we risk hardening the divide between smaller towns/cities and the large urban areas? As has been often discussed in this newspaper, corporations are increasingly locating in urban centers because that's where the talent resides and, further, that's where the talent WANTS to reside. The educated employees sought by these companies want an intellectually vibrant atmosphere. , not a city filled with technically competent but culturally unaware people.
It's interesting: the liberal arts university system fueled the greatest economic expansion in history--yes, plenty of engineers, but the history and philosophy and fine arts and music majors all found places. And now we turn against them as "not profitable." But what is the point of an economic civilization if you can't cultivate thought? Is it all just about getting the next iPhone upgrade?
6
The cost of education today is such that the college major has to provide a good income after graduation to pay off the debt. In spite of all the good things said about an LAS education which I agree with the simple fact is that companies on the whole are not willing to spend a lot of money on training. If you can't do what they want you are out of luck.
Professional training after undergraduate school just heaps more debt on students.
The simple truth is that the wealth needed to produce a well educated society is in the hands of a few who are in a position to strongly influence tax rates.
4
This issue isn't just an American one. Canadian universities have cut back public funding leaving higher debt burdens to students and financial struggles for schools. This leaves funding from multinationals and foreign students as more reliable sources of funding. This in turn simultaneously diminishes liberal arts education, displaces local students from highly sought after Universitites and pushes compnay objectives over academics ones.
Many years ago at the UofA I took applied sciences and got the degree I wanted and have largely worked in my field ever since. That said, some of my most enjoyable classes which had unintended usefulness came from my liberal arts options. Russian history was one of my favorites and everything I see Putin doing now is reminicient of his predecessors - the Tsars. This understanding of history also shed some light for me on prevailing attitudes by colleagues I have worked with from Ukraine and the region.
Knowing how to write technical manuals that are reasonably enjoyable (English and Psychology), tailored to the audience (communication studies, history) and critically think about solutions to problems relies on all aspects of my degree program and a healthy dose of experience. Tailoring a University to a smaller, narrower field may make sense financially based on today's reality, but those graduates will be denied some valuable tools for a well rounded education. More tools makes sense if you want adaptability for future change.
10
As a professor at a state school facing similar headwinds, I too am struck with sadness at the changing face of higher education. At my institution, Republican-appointed board members are openly hostile to the liberal arts and humanities. They are enamored of STEM and have no reservations about turning the university into a glorified job training center. One publicly proclaimed his preference for associates degrees, because less education makes workers more moldable.
As has recently been written about in a variety of different contexts, we as a nation need to reexamine our priorities. The so-called "business model" has failed us in a number of sectors. Higher education has many practical applications but it is born of love as an end in itself. We quantify it at our peril.
11
Look some can say what are you going to do with a degree in Russian, German, history and many more, but that is up to the Student. I remember many years ago when my son and I were looking at Colleges, an advisor was talking to us. He told my Son on average people have seven jobs and three careers when it's all over. Here I was in my early 50's thinking I'm in my third career and seventh job. So let the Students study what they want at 18, 19, 20 they just may wind up somewhere else at the end any way.
4
The state of state universities reflects that of society -- an increasingly widening gap between the top tier and "the rest." I know as I've taught at both during the past 30+ years and have watched this unfold firsthand.
I can't speak for other states, but in Pennsylvania, there is a complex system of "state affiliated" colleges and universities; there are NO "state colleges." Really. This despite Penn State being located adjacent to the town of State College.
Originally, while some students were accepted to the main University Park Campus right out of high school, all of Penn State's satellite colleges, as far as I know, were limited to 2-years, after which students could matriculate to the Main Campus.
This was SO important as it meant regionally different students came together in the melding of the University Park. But, as state funding began to wither, these two-year campuses transformed into 4-year colleges and universities, helping to keep separate youth from different regions, creating a glut of Bachelor-degree-granting venues that was unsustainable, in quality or quantity.
Whether or not Stevens Point has run afoul of this sort of business plan, I don't know. What I do know is that was an wrong-headed cultural model and is proving a lousy economic platform. And how does The University of Wisconsin partially solve this problem? They attack the tenure system. The Flagship did not just "catch a cold" -- it's blood ran cold.
4
When a university gets only 17% of its funding from the government, it is basically a business (that receives a small subsidy). Like all other businesses it tries to optimize the products (programs) it sells. It chooses the programs that attract the most students who are willing to pay the most money and cancels programs to do not attract many customers.
If you think the university should be addressing particular social values, for instance if you think learning history is good for society, you should be lobbying the government to pay for this.
I am afraid that what you are seeing is a natural result of government reducing university funding.
8
@Alan White
Not accurate at all. State universities receive more federal money than state tax dollars. The article was completely inaccurate. And I believe deliberately.
Funding cuts. funding cuts. funding cuts are the root of the problem at these smaller. community oriented public schools. I'm willing to say that only national private for-profit institutions are giving out RN degrees; medical technology, pharmacy training,and other technical degrees and even full teacher training programs in the region. All of these private for-profit schools, so loved by the GOP, will charge far more than the public state school. The destruction of public higher education, particularly community colleges and smaller community universities, is solely in the interests of these for-profit education corporations. The public at-large suffers.
6
When I was preparing to go to college I wanted to major in English literature. My father told me that was a major for "the rich kids." Unfortunately I was persuaded by that argument. I majored in Business Administration at Cal State Fresno. Most of the other students in the classes were jocks and not remotely intellectually inclined. The only challenging and interesting classes in the entire major were a two-semester Statistics course and an economics course taught by an excellent old-school Irish academic. With these two exceptions, I found my Business Administration degree to be worthless and unacademic.
I next went to law school, at UCLA. To my chagrin I found that an English literature major was an entirely acceptable underpinning to my law studies as most of my classmates had liberal arts undergraduate backgrounds. I did derive amusement from my classmates' frequently-demonstrated innumeracy.
I spent my entire career as a legal advisor to one corporation. The founder of the company attended Harvard as a math major on the GI Bill. He appreciated my contribution as something essential from the other side of the intellectual aisle. By the time I retired at the start of this year, I had witnessed the invasion of the now much larger company by second-tier MBA graduates injecting jargon into every functional process and insisting upon sports analogies for every managerial function. These are the product of the new career-oriented "universities."
23
@Flaminia
I thought this was probably the most candid and perspicuous comment I've read this evening.
Can't history be taught without it being a major – along with other liberal arts courses?
4
yes, but it is complicated. without majors, liberal arts programs and courses exist only to serve as general education credits for the career oriented majors. pressure is then exerted on those liberal arts professors to customize their course content for students who resent having to take general education courses at all. liberal arts professors have to compromise what they decide to teach in the face of that pressure. meanwhile, the professional programs are being pressured by their accrediting bodies to expand the curricula within their majors. professional program administrators and faculty then push for the college to reduce the number of general education requirements for their majors. consequently, those liberal arts courses get crowded out of the curriculum almost entirely. once that happens colleges hire fewer and fewer liberal arts faculty and offer only the most basic and generalized liberal arts courses. gone are specialized courses on interesting but narrow topics that often pique non liberal arts majors' interests in ways they never anticipated. where once a liberal arts department might have offered a course on mythology and the role of heroes in comic books, they can now only offer a survey course on literature. this dynamic is playing out in many colleges across the country and will be very difficult to reverse.
We have far too many mediocre colleges that aren't worth paying the tuition to study there. Close many of these schools. Create trade schools in their place. Wise up America. You've been sold a bill of goods.
2
without history majors who will coach high school sports?
5
If you can coach, it won’t matter what you majored In. You’ll still be hired and can still teach history,
@nick
or become principal?
Great, so we can look forward to a further dumbing down of the country over the coming decades.
13
Hey. 2016 has taught us you can become President of the United Stares with absolutely no grasp of History OR English. None. Welcome to our not-so-brave new world.
13
This is a good article, an example of investigative journalism in which Times newspaper excels. But the trend away from the trivium and quadrivium, "los artes liberales, "began long ago, and I can remember as long ago as 1996, when on sabbatical and enrolled for a course in Islamic history at Baruch, the professor, of Armenian extraction if I recall, went around the room polling students on what they expected from the course. Response was unanimous:"a good grade!" To which the professor, anxious to keep the class and his place in the department, replied: "Oh, don't worry about that!"What was he doing except, as Conrad would write, "defending his position in life," autrement dit, keeping his job!Role of identity politics cannot be underestimated either, and positions for old white males,"vieux de la vieille," anti progressives are in short supply! Pick up a copy of Chronicle of Higher education and under tenure track positions available there is a proviso making clear that women and other minorities are encouraged to apply, my paraphrase. To "revenir aux moutons,"trend away from liberal arts is intensifying in favor of technical subjects and that Wisconsin school is just one example! Recall a conversation long ago with a French student, to whom I had mentioned the name of Marechal Petain, and to which she queried: What is that:the name of a rock group!"
1
Cutting French, German, and History, but keeping Women's and Gender Studies. See under: left-wing bias.
https://www.uwsp.edu/cols-ap/wmnstd/Pages/default.aspx
3
What does not having history education cost...........Our Entire Future!
3
Totally agree...History courses teach the principles of the Declaration, Constitution, and Bill of Rights... It seems to me that our current crisis is a consequence of a cultural shift that dismisses the necessity of understanding first and foremost the concepts that actually made America the icon, even if very flawed, of the City on the Hill. And a deeper understanding these concepts includes the corollary that we are a nation of immigrants who are bound together to defend these ideals even if it means giving up the lives of our young men and women. The loss of History courses dedicated to imparting these ideals is why we are sliding into chaos.
Two of the most successful medical professionals I know, who made the bulk of their income through patents, majored in philosophy. Philosophy taught them how to think, challenge assumptions, and find creative solutions.
9
In addition to the education of students, universities have also always had the role of being centers of knowledge in a society--both in terms of its preservation and its production. When schools cut departments, they aren't just eliminating educational paths for students (and we can argue about whether that's warranted in some cases or not), but they are also diminishing the ability of the university to produce knowledge by eliminating faculty in certain areas. I suspect that faculty at UWSP spend most of their time teaching and not doing research, but I'm sure there are faculty members there doing their own research, adding to the collective store of what we as a society know.
I am reminded of Masha Gessen's fantastic book, The Future Is History, in which she follows the lives of some Russians from the tail end of communism in the 1980s to the return of a similarly oppressive regime in the 2000s. Research in the humanities and social sciences was extremely limited in the USSR era, experienced a brief period of liberation in the 1990s, and has since been restricted again. An authoritarian government has no interest in sociological studies about how people are actually feeling and thinking. They want to tell them how to think and feel. Likewise, they have no interest in historians who strive to work out nuanced, accurate accounts of important historical events. They want to write the history books.
7
A History major is an important and highly relevant course of study, especially in these "a historical" times.
With that said, every university may not be able to properly fund and/or staff this major, or even find enough students wishing to pursue this major.
Stevens-Point isn't a lessor institution because it won't have a History major.
1
The American public is clinging to ideas about education that are long overdue for rethinking. Parents in particular are being sold a bill of goods by college ranking publications that tell them that only top-ranked schools are good enough for their kids. It's time to take a look at what our population really needs for higher education -- needs which change as the world changes -- and start to refine our systems. As a history major, I do believe that the study of history teaches one almost everything you need to know about human motivations and character, and we need to offer history classes, but not every school has to offer a history major. Not every publicly-funded school has to be a liberal arts school. Not every student needs to spend all four years at a university. Carefully-tended community colleges that are part of the public college system should be the port of entry for many students who may not have the money or the scholastic preparation for a university. Parents need to understand that Princeton or Yale may not be the best school -- for their child. While we need to have a unified approach that lets each school specialize in offerings that make sense for its location, facilities, and financial capability, as part of a bigger system that is better designed for today's needs, we also need to educate the public about how to make better use of that system.
4
Not an easy question to address and answer as the ideologues on either side of the issue would both have us believe. We have far too much ideology in contemporary America!
My own thoughts are that before investing time and money (and especially any borrowed money) in university enrollment, prospective students should have done research on projected job openings(and salaries) in various fields of interest, which the Federal government publishes online. Then they would do well to contact people already successfully employed in those fields to get their advice. Be aware that academics are not exactly unbiased in offering their opinions. They sell what you are being asked to buy.
1
I just love reading from all the retirees and their satisfaction with their liberal arts education from the 60's and 70's. Many of them had no loans and could pay their tuition at a state school from their summer job earnings.
I would like to refer them to the current century, in which tuition has skyrocketed, pensions for new hires have evaporated, and good jobs require skills. Measurable skills.
Getting a degree that doesn't provide employable skills is now a luxury for poor and working-class young people. Plain and simple.
Is history important? Absolutely. Are good communication skills essential? No question. But can they be gained while the majority of credits lead to a marketable degree? I think so. I got one, in allied health, and got a first job paying twice what my roommates earned. Student loan evaporated in a few years, not decades.
5
@Cathy :Cathy, consider that we may be living in an inflationary economic universe in which food and energy have been kept affordable but everything else has hyperinflated as measured against the aggregate cost of stocks peged to p/e - the most enduring inflation hedge and perhaps real measure on trend.
@Cathy :Cathy, consider that we may be living in an inflationary economic universe in which food and energy have been kept affordable but everything else has hyperinflated as measured against the aggregate cost of stocks peged to p/e - the most enduring inflation hedge and perhaps real measure on trend. Make that food, energy, and labor.
And yet, where you went to school matters more, and statistically, parents’ income and education level tend to predict their children’s. Rather than trying to make education more accessible and affordable, or employers better at recognizing that “skills” and “degrees” don’t correlate, arguments like yours deny the poor and working class the same opportunities available to their wealthier peers.
You and your roommates should check back in the decades to come.
1
Such universities should get roughly the same amount of federal support, per credit hour, as more selective, public universities get - and CERTAINLY as much as private universities get. As it stands now, as I understand it, they receive about 20 times LESS federal funding, per credit hour, than do elite universities. (We subsidize endowenents, enormous tuition, high-end medical research, etc..) Why must taxpayers subsidize (at obscene levels) instititions that their children have nearly zero chance of using; institutions that only keep them in this state of limited opportunity. They are paying for their on exploitation. We need our public higher education institutions to vary in character and focus. But they should be EQUIVALENT in terms of funding and overall quality - and we need private institutions to be truly private. Germany would make a good role model here.
1
I don't understand why "liberal arts" degrees are core to critical thinking. STEM requires and teaches those skills as well, or should. For most college freshmen, i woild expect the skills covered in English and History to be the same as what they should already know after getting a high school diploma.
3
@Andrew
I'm thinking that the STEM education may or may not come with adequate social topics. Two of my three daughters graduated from the Colorado School of Mines (not well known to the public, very respected in engineering circles). I was extremely impressed with the non-technical classes they had to take. Spoken as a lover of the humanities, ex-middle school teacher of history.
So, I guess it all depends on how it's done.
3
No, college-level English and History classes definitely go beyond high school classes in those subjects. Ask a professor in any subject about grading freshman papers versus upperclassmen if you think that writing/communication/critical thinking skills are good enough right out of high school.
I wasn’t a STEM major, but the ones I work with have trouble writing coherent emails.
Republican policies of starving the democratic institutions of the funding they require to make America great is to blame for the decline you see in Wisconsin. The Kick brothers don’t want critical thinking employees, anyway. Don’t like my opinion? It’s the truth. Get Republicans out of office now. Wisconsin did a good thing in November. The damage Scott Walker has done to the University of Wisconsin will take decades to repair.
4
High school English teacher here, and one just back from the MLA Conference in Chicago. I saw a shift from traditional broad knowledge to job training. In my district, as a teacher of writing, literature, and speech, I’m required to incorporate lesson plans aligned with jobs in my tourist town. Corporations are pushing job training onto public education. The new feudalism has everyone nervous about food and shelter. Tuition rates are unrealistic. Universities are corporations.
Most notable takeaways from the conference were: first, literature is disappearing. One talk on teaching composition centered on “sneaking” literature back into writing classes. Second, history is absolutely disappearing. Literary criticism uses the terms “diachronic” and “synchronic” to indicate whether a study is based in time, that is, cause-and-effect, the influence of one artist or idea on subsequent generations—or thematic, by subject. We’re in synchronicity now.
The internet makes everything that has ever happened equal. Whether a theory comes from 80 BCE or from the last five minutes—on the www—they’re all equal, simultaneous. It would seem the modern consciousness does not see any value in studying history and background, when it’s on your phone. I see endless reinventions of the wheel on the horizon. Look at Trump. We already vet all incoming people; we already have a wall, but whenever something occurs to him, well that’s the first time anyone has ever thought about it.
8
@Naples But grammar and syntax are not 'taught' by Lit classes (although they're sometimes criteria for marking a lit paper). Systematic Grammar was outlawed by faux-progressive Facs of Education 25 years ago as "oppressive." Today, the only grammar a Lit class concerns itself with is the suppression of His or Her over Zhe. On the other hand, take a corporation that's putting up a web site. The developer will have to write the interface. If he or she goofs on basic use of grammar, the company can get into legal trouble. How else do you safely describe a product or a process, except in good English? English grammar and composition _improve_ with advanced fictional readings; however, they're _taught_ in old-fashioned, non-politicized Composition 101.
@Carling
Stylistic imitation surely can help.
We have new Pearson ed consumable texts with equal amounts of fiction and non-fiction. The old Holt editions came with grammar books. These do not.
So we are responsible for teaching grammar without grammar books, as well as for the added Pathways job training responsibilities, discipline and life coaching techniques, special ed accommodations, ELL, FEP and REP classification, fundraising, and committee work.
I do not believe reading non-fiction teaches more about writing and grammar than does reading fiction. And, quite frankly, I see lots of corporate grammar errors on line. I'm also a little confused about non-fiction not being—political?
What we lose when we lose art, is anywhere in the curriculum where psychology or philosophy—or emotions—are discussed.
I like grammar. Grammar interests me. I've taken whole courses in Transformational grammar; much linguistic analysis underlies modern literary theory. My experience is students learn more grammar when they take a foreign language. But even then, programs like Rosetta Stone and Babbel prioritize experience and context over structure.
The age demanded, as Ezra Pound once noted,
"...chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the “sculpture” of rhyme."
@Naples To begin with your last point, removing the 'sculpture of rhyme' from peotry was a style point won by modernism at the end of the 19th century. Not sure what that's doing in that list. The 'politics' I referenced is the discourse theory pushed in college lit crit, now called French Theory. It is political more than universally cultural. The bad English on a website is probably produced by an underemployed English grad who never lost marks for bad grammar in college lit, but should have -- not a technical editor who knows what she's doing with text. There is no 'loss' in reading acquisition, be it in reading fiction or non-. In fact, all high-school English must stress fiction. But studying fiction nowadays tends to be less concerned with the beauty of careful phrasing, and more, with social and political discourse.
A new slogan might do the trick - instead of 'Liberal Arts' call it 'Conservative Arts' and see what happens to enrollment.
2
Welcome to Scott Walker University! Education policy as conceived by a college dropout. "We don't need no education. All we need is thought control!"
4
I am a marketing professional in an engineering company and a music journalist as a second career. Most American engineers took only minimal liberal arts classes, no more than required. Most of them are horrible writers, with terrible spelling and incoherent sentence structure. On the other hand, I was a liberal arts major and I am terrible at math.
2
You can be both. I was an arts major who was a very successful finance executive.
Fear not!! You might have lost history, French, and German, but the Women and Gender Studies department is safe, offering 12 interdisciplinary courses this Spring. You can still take a course in gay and lesbian literature. The Diversity Council remains strong. Inclusivity indoctrination ... er, training remains mandatory for Frosh. A program just won a social justice action award The Gender and Sexuality Resource Center, as well as the Multicultural Resource Center are unaffected, An active Latino Student Alliance, Black Student Union,SE Asian American Club, and organizations of Hmong and Native American (or American Indians as they call themselves) all prosper. They even hosted an event by the author of Waking Up White.
See? We've got the important stuff covered.
2
Your comment shows your ignorance of different kinds of university programs and how they are funded. The student organizations you mention are all funded by student activities fee money, which is a completely separate pool of money that can't be applied to academic programs. So getting rid of them would not fund the History major. And Women's Studies, like other interdisciplinary programs, typically doesn't cost anything because it doesn't have its own faculty. At smaller universities like Stevens Point, classes that count towards Women's Studies are already being offered by other departments like Sociology, English, Psychology, and so on. But you cannot have a History major without History faculty, and History faculty cost money.
First, remember than in the slow process of dumbing down American, many people holding doctorates are about as brilliant and imaginative as once upon a time sophomores. When Truman announced in 1950 that "Everyone" was entitled to a college degree that essentially took 4 years of young people off the unemployment dole.
It put unprepared grad students in Teaching positions they often taught badly. It gave campuses cause to join in great fund-raising, building projects. It eventually made university presidents pro money raisers, bright was beside the point.
Education today is yesterday's vocational training. Even Harvard, Wellesley, & Yale spew forth ignorant people who govern the country. We might as well reduce it all to computer manipulating (it's not "science", plumbing, maintenance engineering and other useful jobs. The elite schools will bring up our lawyers and how to make big bucks.
Who needs culture, art, history and such when it's so clear that anyone can be President any more. All that's needed is an ego that's been well fertilized and the Blah-Blah For Dummies book.
2
In the West, the liberal arts, fine arts, and natural sciences, have, over the last two and a half millennia, become the historic core, the intellectual soul of the academy. To evicerate a university of these core elements is to nourish what has become a commonplace belief among Americans that the principal purpose of the institution is vocational training rather than liberal enlightenment. To the extent that an institution drops these elements, that institution ceases to be a university. To the extent that we collectively allow this type of intellectual erosion in our universities across the country, we demean ourselves, and feed the vulgarity and civil decay evident in our society today.
8
"The state, which had provided half the university’s budget in the 1970s, was now covering only 17 percent of it."
Republican politicians for state and Federal political offices have successfully run on tax cut promises before and since Ronald Reagan. The Koch brothers won, the citizens lost.
Voters consistently demand that state and federal government provide first quality educations and services, but absolutely abhor paying for them. They believe they are entitled to such.
Texas is a prime example, ranking close to the bottom in the education and healthcare it provides to Texas' citizens, but...Texas has no income tax. Business lobby won, citizens lost.
3
@Political Genius
Yuppers on your Texas observations!
But we have some of the highest property taxes in the country, and that's even before using the Robin Hood law that sends boatloads of money from Houston or Round Rock to the Bumfuddel, TX school district. Which the local residents and/or the state should be supporting.
I'm continually astounded at how UT became and remains one of the best universities in the world. I am actually proud of that fact, not much else here to be. And I'm not talking about football.
I’ve worked on 6 university campuses in 3 states. The number of top administrators and useless administrative staff is a common observation. Everyone knows this, but the administration has the power, not the people who actually teach “students.” Three quarters of all undergraduate classes are now taught by part-time instructors who get no benefits. You won’t find any part-time assistant vice chancellors.
Add to that the fact that in the 70’s many community colleges were renamed and restructured as state colleges and even “universities” and you see where the drive for vocational training comes from: these same communities. The inability of college presidents who make $300K to a couple of million each year to run an efficient college without cutting academics is the result of their own self-interest.
8
I was once told that throughout history, only the top 5% of the population is ever truly educated. By that he meant in a liberal arts sense in that they could (and have) read widely and deeply on many topics, are fully numerate in that they can cipher and apply mathematics to a variety of applications, and can write concisely and well at any length, on any topic (given adequate time to research) and to any audience. The rest of us had, at best, jobs training.
I have never been able to prove him wrong. Since the birth of written language, it was always a small subset of the population that was fully educated. At first it was the free, rich, land-owning males. Ok, it was really them for most of history. But eventually the gates cracked open a bit and others were educated. Always, though, the top 5% floated to the top.
If (almost) everyone learned to read, then only some could afford to go to high school (aptly named at the time). Once high school became common, a few went to college. As that became typical, graduately school became the new 5%. And now it’s only the top tier schools that still focus on the liberal-arts ideal. The rest have become increasingly more complicated job-training centers. Ninety-five percent of the population doesn’t care how well they are educated, they just want job-training. Colleges are starting to reflect this as everyone gives college a try.
The idea that universities should focus on vocational training is severely misguided. In our modern economy, job requirements changed constantly with technology and with market demands, and professionals rarely stay in the same job for a lifetime. What is needed, and the qualities most employers seek, are ability to express oneself clearly in both writing and in speech, ability to creatively solve problems, knowledge of the world, of politics — and history! — and of science, and desire to continue learning.
These are the qualities that a liberal arts education provide. Conversely, if we shift to training for jobs that exist today but probably will be substantially different in a couple decades, like coal mining say, then we will have a workforce unprepared for the future and obsolete as the world changes. This is how the U.S. continues to fall behind other industrialized nations.
5
China has 6.5 million undergraduates and 0.5 million postgraduates majoring in science, engineering, and medicine. Look at the international rankings of universities and you will see that China's are steadily rising; of course, our graduate school system is the best in the world; but, would rather be No. 1 or with the rising tide? In other words, not knowing the details of the game, would you rather be throwing touchdowns in the first half or the second?
How we've lived our lives has caught up with us. Wisconsin is now an authoritarian state. Why should its citizens expect good schools? I'll bet Paul Ryan's children will be able to find a full four-year college to attend that offers liberal arts. Just not YOU.
3
"Students in Rural America Ask, ‘What Is a University Without a History Major?’"
A fair question. The answer is, not a university. If Chancellor Patterson wants to "re-invent" his school in the name of solvency, he can create a trade school, presumably with naming rights being sold to the highest bidder.
There are skills more important than learning to write code. This can hardly be news. As a history major at SUNY Buffalo in the 1970's, I learned essential research and critical thinking skills. A person can never know too much; learning where to find reliable source information and how to evaluate conflicting evidence never goes out of fashion. A sharp and functioning mind is the most valuable asset any person will ever have for facing life's challenges.
From a major NY law firm to a mid-career "sabbatical" at McKinsey (nothing like a change of scenery to re-invigorate the mind) to my current post as a federal judge, those 4 years in college prepared me well for all that has followed. Thank goodness my alma mater still understands what education is all about.
2
Don’t be fooled into believing the issue at UWSP is all about looking honestly at the numbers to make cuts. Had the author of this article dug deeper and looked at the reality of numbers of students in different majors compared to those in the proposed majors to cut, along with other factors about the way majors contribute to the university, a more complex understanding of a philosophical approach by the administration at UWSP would emerge. The liberal arts were targeted, with questionable logic and argument for the cuts used by those officials quoted in this article. This fight at UWSP is an extension of the gerrymandered conservative rule in WI and thus the philosophy of the state, as well as conservative distrust of education and educators, in particular in the area of liberal arts.
3
Why does one want to study History on fin aid and later cry about lack of jobs, default on student debt which is mounting every year??? Major in a STEM program and have a thriving career. This is what China has been doing for the past 15 years and look how much they caught us up. India tried the same thing but the systemic corruption in that part of the world contributes to its brain drain that we so leverage in Silicon Valley. Overall we need to revamp our rural universities into job training and career focused institutions and we can have history and gender neutrality sciences in Flagship campuses that can tolerate them and cater for liberal audiences most of those campuses have.
1
No one is saying students don’t still have to study English, history and philosophy. Just won’t be as a major. What most students do anyway.
students should be able to learn enough about civics and American history to become critical thinkers. Certainly, they should learn enough to make informed. choices--choices that will allow them to view political candidates with a critical eye, critical enough to recognize and evaluate our current debacle of a president.
4
Just this week we heard the news that within 20 years half the jobs on earth will be done by robots. Half the people on earth who now have a job won't have one, and no one has said a word about how these people will eat or pay the rent.
Universities should concentrate on education that teaches a skill or thought process that can't be watered down to 0's and 1's. Junior colleges should also adopt this goal.
We need nurses, car mechanics, and manicurists.
If your client is close enough to touch, you'll probably have a job in 20 years. They say robots will take the place of doctors, but since most of us don't fully trust their doctors, why would we switch to a machine not unlike coin-operated casino poker.
I love history, my husband loves history - on our own time, and at a minimal cost. I have practically the equivalent of 4 majors - history, economics, journalism and political science. Did this ever help me to get a job? Except for being able to check that box that said College degree? No! My degree could have been in basket-weaving as long as I had that piece of paper.
History no - Chemistry, Transmission repair, Nail art - YES>
Trump's recent comments on Afghanistan should be enough to illustrate to anyone why a history major might be a useful thing to have in this day-and-age. The fact that it isn't is even more frightening.
3
Wisconsin use to have a very good Public University system. Welcome to the reality of Republican Government. poor health services, poor Social Services, poor underfunded education. Not any intelligent persons idea of MAGA. Today Stephens Point, tomorrow Madison,
4
If you want another example of how Republicans exploit the very people they claim to be wanting to help, this is it. Republicans have had a stranglehold on Wisconsin for a decade. Killing public education is just one part of the Republican plan to dumb down the public and serve the wealthy at the expense of the middle and working classes. As many have pointed out, an education that includes history, literature, the social sciences and basic science is the key to developing the analytical and communication skills that are crucial for getting and keeping the best jobs. There is a place for vocational schools but they do not offer the upward mobility that can be gained from a good liberal arts education. As a bonus for Republicans, gutting education for everyone but the 1% makes it less likely that the 99% will have the knowledge and tools to fight back. Talk about a win-win for the Party that doesn't like democracy!
4
My understanding is that this college’s history major was centered around the History of Cheese Making as well as Dairy Diversity. The Mathematics program took majors up to long division so as to ensure the ability to operate in Gallons, Quarts and Pints.
“All things to all people” indeed...
There is a big difference between education and vocational training. There is a legitimate place for each but they do not both belong at a university.
There is already a shameful dismantling of rigorous, traditional classes at universities and their replacement with narrowly focused "special interest" studies.
Our country will pay a heavy price for its denigration of education.
2
I am a professor at a state university and I teach in a humanities-based, liberal-arts field.
Universities have many problems right now. We are suffering from radically reduced funding from our states. We are under constant attack by the anti-intellectuals who hate the fact that we want to impart knowledge to our students and teach them critical thinking skills.
Universities' responses to these problems have been completely wrongheaded. Instead of actively seeking to promote the virtues of the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge's sake, we have been quick to rebrand ourselves as factories that spit out corporate-ready worker bees. Ironically, of course, our graduates struggle to find meaningful employment and earn a living wage.
Universities could solve many of their own problems if they would stop hiring administrators upon administrators -- we have a "vice president" of everything these days, and each VP requires a staff, a cushy office, a travel budget, marketing materials, etc. Meanwhile, full-time professors -- those of us with the lifetime dedication to the pursuit of being experts in our fields -- are being replaced by adjuncts. The corporate model is a failure. Treating students like customers (giving them every amenity), has caused tuition to skyrocket even more.
When the student loan bubble collapses, I fear only few universities will survive. This will be disastrous for American culture.
6
I think some of those adjuncts you disparage may be the products of your teaching and your major. They too want to teach the subject you prepared for them. The pie isn't cut only to support the already employed professors. Where would you have these potential professors i.e. Adjuncts go? Elsewhere than your university and major?
@Ara, stop blaming the adjuncts. The blame lies at the university administrative level -- they're the ones cutting full-time positions and hiring adjuncts. If universities didn't see adjuncts as a way to get cheap labor and increase profits, we wouldn't have the problem of adjuncts.
In my grad-school cohort (I finished my grad degree in 2013, so I am not an old-timer), our "useless" liberal arts degrees have gotten us jobs as writers, editors, corporate storytellers, business owners, full-time professors, and yes, sometimes, as adjuncts.
I'm not suggesting people should be rushing to get graduate degrees in the humanities -- although, like I said, my grad-school cohort is mostly satisfactorily employed now. You're missing the point of what I'm saying. I teach undergrads, and I will never stop championing the value of a liberal arts education, which teaches problem solving, creativity, writing and communications skills, and the ability to think critically -- all things our great nation sorely needs right now.
I hear again and again, across all industries (corporate, healthcare, education, politics, etc.) that decision-makers love to hire undergrads who have humanities-based or liberal-arts degrees. They say these students are smarter -- easier to train -- more able to problem-solve -- more likely to think outside the box -- etc., etc.
You seem to want to discredit me and refute what my years of expertise has made clear. Why is that?
1
Maybe the people of Wisconsin will think long and hard about voting for a governor who cuts spending for public education while indulging the corporate sector with tax breaks. This is called corporate welfare! The former Governor did a lot of damage to public institutions.
2
Thank Scott Walker and his anti-intellectual followers who succeeded in gutting funding for higher education. Less education about history and foreign languages is right in line with creating a populace more malleable for the Republican Party and Fox News. The US continues its march toward ignorance.
2
Maybe it started with William Bennett. Maybe we began noticing this trend when Obama made fun of art history majors. I don't know. But education, culture thinking, analysis and the ability to advance our culture has increasingly taken a back seat to the market and blind obedience to those who control wealth.
We are increasingly sacrificing humanity to basic animal needs: get food, reproduce die and have children who will do the same. Nothing else seems to matter any more.
We are now becoming the animals with no mind or purpose that our masters want us to be.
How about the insanity of the eighty-five (85) colleges and universities in the U.S. state of Wisconsin that are listed under the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education.
1
At best it is fiscal short sightedness that the State of Wisconsin provides only 17% of the school's funding. State sponsored education makes money for states as well as the graduates. States, and local municipalities get to tax those graduates' higher earnings and spending. Economic studies comparing the average life time earnings of graduates with 4 year programs vs those with only high school diplomas typically demonstrate a difference of nearly 1,000,000 dollars. And that doesn't even begin to account for the compounded difference a modest increase in income dedicated to savings and investment can provide. By exploiting their education these graduates return more to the states than the costs of their education.
Unfortunately, increasingly this earning difference has been seen as an exploration opportunity for student loans to cover the underfunding by higher education by states. Funding education is not the business of capitalism, capitalism has too many built-in conflicts of interest to be trusted with the funding of education.
The alternative explanation is that this is yet another example of the Republican war on the middle class through the Republican controlled Wisconsin State assembly which wants a subservient working class, easily exploited with few opportunities and locked into low paying menial employment. A condition historically regarded as serfdom.
1
Both my undergraduate and law degrees are from the University of Wisconsin. I spent my first four years after graduation as an attorney in Stevens Point.
The city I lived in during the mid-1980s was a vibrant community, in no small part due to UWSP. The return of the student population in fall energized the entire town. The university's existence not only made it possible for area students to get a first-rate education without the attendant expense of paying to live far from home, it made the community a more interesting, diverse and well-informed place to live.
Two things have changed in the past three decades. One is that the college-age demographic has shrunk. I was a UW student with the boomer generation, when the college cohort was growing.
The other change is within our control. When I was a student, the people of Wisconsin valued having an educated, critically-thinking population. Thus, my fellow citizens paid over half the cost of my education. The debt I carried after graduation was manageable.
But until this week, the people of my state suffered under a governor (and still) a legislature that doesn't value education. Scott Walker denigrated educators (and all public employees) and slashed funding. The dropout governor saw college as a place to train workers, not to enlighten the public, provide creative thinkers and shape responsible citizens.
Thus, the results which this article describes: a society where a few are rich but society is not enriched.
10
In some sense, this trend may represent for such schools a return to their roots. Many were founded to promote the agricultural and mechanical arts at a time when the country was growing and most people lived on farms. Or had a specific focus, like Normal Schools for training teachers. Think Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862. Many of these schools expanded their degree programs and became full scale universities when money was flush and populations were growing. Now with rural parts of the country being hollowed out and small towns declining, these institutions are having to reconsider their places and their missions within their communities. With job skills training and credentials acquisition becoming ever more important to landing good jobs, and with fewer students, these schools are having to focus on providing the educational services their students need. Knowledge of history, literature, languages, social sciences and other liberal arts will always be critical to an informed citizenry, but first the students need to be prepared to provide food, clothing, and shelter for themselves.
2
@Steve Food, clothing, and shelter is critical, but ought to be taught in high school and by families if present. University is a place for cultural enlightenment, not career prep. Postsecondary institutions such as trade schools serve the purpose you misidentify as the role of the university.
1
@Charlie I don't disagree with you. My point was that some of these universities started out as technical institutions and grew into full universities, but are finding out that that model may be unsustainable as their communities and economies change. I hope that doesn't happen and wish them success as they adjust.
Within the University of Wisconsin system there are campuses with history as a major. There are also campuses with animal science majors or chemistry or physics or English. Because the overall system is funded such that individual schools cannot support every major, then prospective students to focus on being admitted to the schools that do support their intended major. The possibility to transfer among campuses is also available if someone changes their major.
4
I love history, but a degree in history is essentially useless unless your going to teach history. Majors like this are for the children of the rich and academics with an aversion to mathematics and science. This is not to say that we get rid of studying history all together, but 4 semesters in an undergraduate program is more than sufficient. How many people are working in low-paying jobs with degrees in History or Liberal Arts? In the current student loan debt crisis, we need to be pragmatic in following programs that will provide careers where students are able to repay their loans. Either that, or free college for all, which I love the idea of, but it is a long shot at best.
3
@Reader
Correct. History majors better go to law school or graduate school. I never would have majored in history without planning to go to law school. There were no corporate recruiters looking for me after undergraduate studies.
1
@Reader I agree with your point that a history degree is "useless" if we view it in terms of a career path. However, it is far from useless when viewed as a tool for understanding the world in its present and its past. While it does not lead to a concrete career path other than history education (or research in academia -- arguably as important), the research, writing and reading skills are transferable in many career settings. And these skills are similarly practiced across liberal arts disciplines!
1
This is not just a problem for colleges located in rural America. State sponsored universities in CA provide less and less opportunities for Liberal Arts scholars. Fields like History, Communication, Language Arts, the Arts and Philosophy, and Political Sciences and Social Sciences are barely funded due to extraordinary allocations of funding to technology, engineering and business schools. Very few students are learning how to build and sustain relations through effective communication, understanding of ethics morality and the workings of civilizations and societies.
1
The state of Wisconsin has the largest state university system next to California in the terms of campuses. It's not a surprise that they are having enrollment issues. What is a surprise is that it did not happen sooner.
6
In other words, they do not have enough in state students to fill up their system and not enough prestige to attract out of state or out of country students.
1
One thing that I think a lot of smaller universities need to seriously ponder is whether they would be better served by changing from a research university to a non-research university, especially considering that a lot of the research being done at four year universities is of minimal societal utility.
Community colleges are thriving nationwide precisely because they are not research universities, have a lower cost structure, and are therefore significantly cheaper than research universities.
Something to think about....
10
A university education absent a core liberal arts component is not an education. It is at best, a vocational school. The problem schools like Stevens Point will confront is that vocational schools already exist. Eventually, the Stevens Points of the nation will find themselves to distinguish themselves in that mix.
At the medium sized state university where I teach my colleagues and I have watched the state slowly bleed higher ed dry over the last 30 years. This is perfectly consistent with the neo-liberal / 21st century "conservative" goal of privatizing every public good within their grasp.
What is the end of this? Current trends suggest that the result will be a higher education experience bifurcated between those students whose families are sufficiently well heeled to send them to the more prestigious private institutions and those in the lower/working/middle/upper middle classes who cannot afford $200,000+ educations for their children.
The fortunate few will find classrooms with live persons as their teachers, where they will be challenged to think, to make and defend arguments, to question, and to answer those questions. It they allow themselves, they will get an "education."
The vast majority will find their experience to be one of on-line courses with "professors" they never see or meet, who are more like course managers than "teachers." They will receive a "degree" certifying they have received some sort of training, and little else.
20
Unless a state is seriously committed to educating all of its residents and foster an environment of economic opportunity, the state may well fall into a spiral of economic woes, cut budgets affecting education and social programs, which in turn encourages people to leave for better economic opportunities, as well as for a better education. Wisconsin is one of many states, mostly in the Midwest, that have fallen into this trap, which resulted in very small population growth rates (2.2%), including a negative growth rate for Illinois over the 2010-2018 span (Wikipedia and US Census Bureau). The whole region is well under the national average of just under 6%, as is the Northeast. An exception in the latter region is Massachusetts, its growth rate was 5.4%, higher than any of the other cold weather states that had many of its residents leave for the warmer southern tier states. The fact that MA has the top ranking in educational achievements in K-12 schooling, as well as being the home of a slew of outstanding universities, certainly suggests that the state's emphasis on education has much to do with retaining its educated residents and maintain a flourishing economy. In contrast it is sad that the state of Wisconsin provides but 17% of the budget to Stevens Point, one of its state universities. It is doubtful that the still Republican legislature will reverse this trend, particularly since they also have curtailed the power of the recently elected Democratic governor.
11
I completely agree with you. As a former resident of Madison, WI and now a resident of Massachusetts, I can only say that Wisconsinites have no one but themselves to blame for their predicament. Scott Walker not only survived a recall but was then elected again. His agenda was to destroy the great educational institutions of the state and he succeeded, not only by cutting funding for the university system but also by failing to create well-paying jobs that would lead people to stay in the state. The latter was the reason why we left. Both my husband and I have PhDs but we could not find jobs that matched our qualifications or professional interests. We are so happy to be in Massachusetts now where education and economic opportunity go hand in hand.
3
I lived in Massachusetts until I was ten. When I arrived in California, I was over a year ahead in the basics than many of the other students my age in my new elementary school, except those who also came from other states.
In Massachusetts, when I Iived there, there was no public kindergarten. No one left first grade without knowing how to read. Everyone could spell. Everyone could add and subtract. Second grade continued the emphasis on reading, writing, spelling, and computation skills. Science education began in third grade. Foreign language education began in fourth grade. I am glad to read that in the state of my birth, they are still keeping to high basic standards. I was, even as a child, disappointed in the K-12 education in California, as compared to the first four years of education I received in Massachusetts.
2
Along with many other readers I have been appalled by the decline in the perceived value of a liberal education. If I were a struggling college in today’s world and wanting to attract millenials, I would offer a major that included political studies, history, constitutional law, and environmental science. This would prepare these future activists and candidates for public office to enter their fields armed not only with enthusiasm but with the knowledge essential to make a substantial contribution to the well-being of our country and our planet.
9
However, absent these worthy pursuits, an enhanced vocational school education by another name will serve to create a reliably perpetuated underclass of labor to serve the needs of the “haves”. An undereducated and ignorant-of-the-wider-world population is exactly what fell for Trump. They are useful to those who wish to reman in power, because they are easily conned with lies and propaganda.
1
@Carol
Political activist as a career? Great. You will be groundbreaker. One of a kind. Good luck.
@Carol "Sounds good. Doesn't work"-Donald Trump
This is just a result of the path we've taken long ago. With presidents and leaders advocating STEM while the pursuit of liberal arts was silently downgraded. This was undoubtedly the mission of the corporate agenda. I would not be surprised if this trend grows to the point of endangering our democracy.
13
When are "the people" responsible for anything? Presidents and leaders are voted for.
@Peter
Wasn’t STEM Obama’s emphasis?
2
The administrative bloat in higher education is astonishing. Now that every school feels the need to have a VP of Diversity, plus a staff, there’s another $250k in payroll. Title IX is another boondoggle in terms of budgeting. Once you’re on staff it’s the gravy train no private sector company could provide. Fact - 401k programs that start at 10%. All funded by tuition dollars. Each state school should have to show how they can do more with less, not more with more tuition dollars.
4
They are making more with less. What is your opinion then about diverting $200 million in taxpayer dollars away from the UW system to build a new arena for the private, for-profit Milwaukee Bucks? I prefer important university jobs over a billionaire owner and millionaire players for tax dollars' use.
3
@Midwest Josh So is this something they tell you to say on Fox? Diversity staff are crashing the budget? Because this is the third time I’ve heard it. You’re talking about salaries totalling $200K, including the shared admin staff, in a university budget of hundreds of millions of dollars. I kinda don’t think that’s the problem. But please, tell us more about the “administrative bloat” at universities. (Profs: relax, I know what you’re thinking about admin. I want to hear what Josh has to say besides “but diversity officers!”)
Also, universities already use the public-sector version of 401(k)s: 403(b)s.
Not that I expect mere facts are going to make any kind of a dent in your repeating what the head on the screen tells you to say.
2
It makes basic sense: for low-demand major programs, a state university system should concentrate its resources in one or two flagship campuses. If Stevens Point students were interested in majoring in History, then its History major wouldn't be on the chopping block.
The goal of a rural branch campus of a state university is to provide educational services to its population, not to be a mini mirror-image of the flagship campus. Students who want to major in History or ancient Greek or baroque music can go to Madison or Milwaukee. They'll learn more in bigger departments with more specialized faculty and wider course offerings in those subjects; as a consequence, their humanities degrees will be worth much more after graduation than a degree from a tiny, bare-bones Stevens Point program would be.
One thing getting lost in the hand-wringing here is that Stevens Point is discussing eliminating the History *major*, not eliminating history *classes*. Stevens Point is responding to its population's demands for more practical, career-centered education, and it will still be requiring its aspiring nurses and businesspeople to fill humanities requirements in order to graduate. Many will choose one or two history classes. But they have no interest in taking a dozen history classes. Which is fine.
I don't see the problem.
14
Is it really that the students are not interested in studying History or that they are concerned about their ability to gain employment after graduation with a degree in History?
There is a larger picture to consider.
Not every job actually requires a STEM degree and there are many which specify a STEM degree as a prerequisite needlessly. A liberal arts degree is not something that should exclude a job candidate from many, if not most, jobs which require an aptitude but not the specific degree focus. The problem is that we are not hiring properly.
3
@rumplebuttskin
US history and world history should be a breadth requirement, because education is not just to serve the economy, but to have a citizenry educated for life in a democracy in a complex world
1
@Margo
You're right that an American in 2019 doesn't need a STEM degree to be successful. But it's also true that most college humanities degrees aren't worth very much. College is mostly a cultural ritual now, and its output in practical skills is greatly exaggerated.
In this age of information, any motivated individual can learn almost anything for free, especially in the humanities. (Some science education does require clinical or lab experience.)
If a person is struggling on the job market because they're no good at reading, writing, or critical thinking, they shouldn't blame Scott Walker or Stevens Point for not offering a History major -- they should blame themselves. There's a free public library down the street, and entire civilizations of knowledge on the phone in their pocket. If they use it to play Angry Birds instead, that's on them.
In reading this story, I am reminded of the quote by Derek Bok, former president of Harvard:
“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance!”
38
@Andy McIntyre: But that quip from the former president of Harvard really means nothing.Author refers to the trend away from liberal arts and towards technology.I know the cities of Durham and Raleigh, having been a volunteer with the first Clinton campaign in 1990 and "los arts liberales"are not on anyone's urgent list of priorities in those cities!
Here, here!
Republican legislatures see the demise of these schools as a feature, not a bug, of their intent to keep Americans dumbed-down. They rant about "liberal" schools brain-washing young people. They cut funding, try to suppress votes and moan about "elite" (read: educated) liberals. Compare to the idiocy that many spew out in congress and pressers. Their own dumbing down scale from Bush (W), to Palin, to the rocket scientist in the White House today. This is their plan and they are good at implementing it.
27
@Ejeanbob1
Republicans have the highest level of academic success on average.
Have we learned nothing from recent events? We have failed to teach our citizens the importance of history, as well as how government works. Without understanding how we got here, people and nations do repeat the mistakes of the past. The Great Depression and the rise of Nazi Germany are two events from the past which come to mind. While some who elect state officials are sadly ignorant of this, you would think government officials in charge of public funding would know better. Shameful.
23
The liberal arts is the foundation of mankind... As adjunct marketing faculty, my first ever course to teach was the marketing capstone course... What a joke! Harvard case style, the 4th year students had no clue, essays were atrocious, as most couldn't put a sentence together... I disagree disagree w/undergraduate business degrees, everyone needs a liberal arts education for humanity's sake then if you want a Masters, go for an MBA... Too many stupid undergraduate business majors out there...
24
Actually, don't just blame the Republicans, state legislatures, or demographic trends for the fact that history majors went down the tubes. Republicans have been trying to defend history for thirty years while academics dismantle it as a discipline. Senior academics have been attacking Western Civ survey courses for decades , without offering much in return except 'critical thinking, DWEMs, and 'Hey Hey, Ho Ho.' Of course, without introductory courses, you don't really have a major anymore, do you? But I guess nobody thought of that before deconstructing everything. Apparently, these 'leaders of the historical profession' were actually pretty stupid. Who knew? So sad what they did to history. Alas, they won't ever suffer the consequences of their horrible decision-making. They'll be emerti Faculty somewhere, retired on comfortable incomes while the historical profession they ruined goes down the tubes. Other than that, they were great professors.
3
You are wrong. Under GOP imposed financial stress (highlighted in the article) the first majors to be eliminated are those attracting the fewest enrollees. Today's non-privilaged students realize they won't be able to support themselves on a history or french degree.
This doesn't mean that history courses are, well, history. Students majoring in subjects such as computer science, physics and engineering still need to complete course work in history, foreign languages, english and other general education disciplines.
This is very similar to the situation that SUNY Albany experienced some years back. I'm reminded of the open letter to the President of SUNY Albany from Professor Petsko which was published in Inside HigherEd about the real consequences of cutting these programs, and the effects on students in their future, which is instructive. The URL is attached below.
https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/11/22/open-letter-suny-albany
5
@jw
Great letter by Prof Petsko of my alma mater. As a premed chem major, I was forced to take all those distribution requirements-history, music, writing, etc. And 50 years later, I'm very glad I did.
If the university wants to or economically has to become a technical school, that's unfortunate. Then call it a technical school. But you can't have a liberal arts university or even college without the liberal arts. And that means not just a few introductory courses, but majors.
3
Training is the process of learning how to do something; education is the process of learning how to think. Leaders need to know not only how to build a bridge, but also know enough of the world to understand the impact of that bridge on society. A knowledge of history, art, and the other humanities gives a person the tools to understand how the world works on a human level and how to avoid the mistakes of the past. Training without education results in the kind of dysfunctional society we have today.
13
I imagine a large part of this problem (of which all higher educational institutions are guilty of) is the significant rise in tuition costs, much of which went to administrative expansion. The market eventually made long term tuition debt reasonable to only those career paths that had a higher ROI. When it became more business than education, the old rules no longer applied. Another sign of the effects of a society that emphasizes capitalism over humanity.
11
@Mike
Tuition debt can be tracked as inversely proportional to state funding.
1
If the more rural colleges/universities wanted to be a bit more creative in their approach, they might offer tuition credits, and/or housing relief for liberal arts majors, for rural students who would face a hardship if they had to travel to a larger, more urbanized university experience.
If the only local higher education available is voc/tech oriented, the message we give to our youth is that a well-rounded education is not important, implying there is nothing else in the world important enough to know or understand. Our lives become more globalized every day. It is vital that young people look beyond a narrow reality shaped by a small geographic boundary.
11
When I went to college in the 70s the states generously supported their colleges. But with the Reagan revolution college tuition exploded as support eroded. Universities now are operating on business models that promote the idea that a college degree has to be directly related to a person future career. Of course a history degree, of which I received an MA while I was in the USN, provides the tools to go into the law, foreign affairs, as well as teaching. Having a liberal arts degree provides a balanced exposure to the sciences and the arts. A rigorous training in history provides a knowledge of how politics work and in depth knowledge of the controversies that have shaped the world we live in.
18
@c harris
Surely Obama fixed this in his first two years with Democratic majorities in both House and Senate.
@Shamrock Really? Fixed State issues of underfunding at the Federal level? How does that work? What course did you take Political Science that taught you that? Speaking of uninformed voters...
I don't know whether someone has already said this, but the very notion of a "liberal arts" education--or even something more than a list of "general education" courses is dead (and I certainly grieve its death). Most STEM students are forced into taking pre-requisites during their first year, which are used to weed out the younger ones, and get almost no insights into the relationship between sciences and liberal arts in their general education courses. Most universities are now dominated by "market logic," which serves parents' and students' fears about post-graduate employability, and which expects faculty to become fundraisers to pay for the loss of state support and alums to pay back if and when they are successful.
11
@Ronnie, that is probably the most depressing report I've heard all year. Focus on STEM is making us into a nation of robots. I already know "smart" people who are dependent on their phones to supply them with any historical fact. But, boy, can they code! Are we on our way to becoming a society without a context? Everything is new for the first time?
Not with a bang, but a whimper.
2
Perhaps if UW-SP dropped all its remedial courses, accepted only students ready to succeed, let the sports go, and cut its diversity budget to 1980 levels, there'd be money for French and History. Not a bad idea, really.
18
Not surprising at all. The U of LA, Lafayette, lopped off its philosophy dept years ago. Other schools, I think Carnegie Mellon is one, changed their English departments into some indecipherable mish-mash involving cultural studies and “postcolonial” literature. The latter fields venerate, among other things, affirmative action for the canon (growing the canon to a ridiculous size and emphasizing writers of questionable worth; ask Yale prof Harold Bloom). The U of LA action, I believe, was taken during the reign of budget-cutting Republican governor Bobby Jindal. Ultimately, I suppose the current trend will continue until there’s a renewed interest, if ever, in quality liberal arts. In the meantime, if you’re thinking about a career as a professor in a liberal-arts field, you might want to forget about it for now.
7
Bloom? Who wore a beret and a cape in his dotage, which went on for some time? Who was primarily known for his work in the Romantic poets?
Please.
Anybody who thinks “the canon,” got worse after about 1975 is an ignoramus, an ideologue, a dope, or somebody with zero taste.
It is a good thing that Plato, Aristotle and other torch bearers for liberal education were not held captive by state budgets. If things continue along this unfortunate trajectory, people will ask, Aristotle who?
10
@Glenn
Federal dollars exceed state dollars. By how much, the Times will not tell you.
@Glenn
Plato offered his service for free and detested sophists and Aristotle touted the critical importance of practical wisdom - they would yawn at this action by WI
@Glenn, That would be Aristotle Onassis, a famous rich person who married a famous widow. Don't you know history?
Sounds right. We don't need more graduates with useless degrees where they can't find jobs. It makes no sense to get a history degree with 30k debt working for minimum wage because the skills you've acquired from your degree is not applicable in many jobs. I can look up the history of the world at my finger tips for a virtually free, so what do you bring to the table with that degree?
4
@Howard Z
I was a history major at a major private university in the mid-60s (with an English lit minor...). I learned how to think, read and write constructively, and most importantly, how to learn.
After graduation I enlisted in the USN and eventually was sent to a Navy school where I was taught computer operations, programming and data analysis. ALL of the enlisted students had a minimum of two years of college. I learned later that the Navy used level of education as one of the criteria for admittance.
When I became a civilian again, my Navy rating and college education were what got me a job with a young company ("startup" was not yet part of the national lexicon...) which led to an interesting, satisfying and financially rewarding career.
The point, and key, is I was taught in college how to LEARN. What I learned turned out to be immaterial.
USN 1967 - 71
Viet Nam 1968
13
@Howard Z, this is so wrong in so many ways that I can almost believe you offer it as satire. First the idea of a degree being useless because you can't use it to make money suggests that the only value in education is how well it prepares you to earn a living. While that is a factor, it's not the sine qua non of education. People going out into the world having only skills that are valued by the marketplace leads to a lack of perspective, and more importantly, the lack of a moral compass. Sure, you can look up the history of the world on your phone (should you choose to), but how do you know what to look up or when. What someone with that degree brings to the table is an awareness of context, an awareness of a larger perspective than simply the need of the moment. It's cliche to say that those who are unaware of history are doomed to repeat it, but that reflects the reality that as humans, we are involved in our struggle to make a living, but we are also involved in a struggle to understand the world we live in. When we narrow our focus to just "having a job," we are shutting ourselves off from growth. Just as the technical skills we learn become refined as we practice them, so do the thinking skills. Without the proper grounding in critical thought, we're destined to become lost in the complexities of the world. Even travel ceases to be broadening without a historical perspective of the places we visit.
Welcome to the neoliberal world of education.
Cut corporate taxes to nothing. Destroy and/or privatize all public institutions. Turn learning institutions into system manager training centers. Remove the work forces ability to think for themselves and learn from their own history.
Like the environment, justice, and health, education is a common good. Neoliberalism is a economic system of terror destruction that will ultimately destroy all our commons, including our democracy itself.
Both of our sold out political parties serve their corporate masters neoliberal vision with gleeful sociopathic greed for power and continuation of their own parties privilege.
This is just the beginning.
10
By closing our minds to the lessons of history, we only intensify the probability of repeating it.
13
This is the end result of Scott Walker and the Wisconsin Republican Party's attack on the public sector - including education, unions, and public health. As Kansas found out, cut the public sector to the bone at your own peril. Wisconsin used to be a progressive state with a first rate state wide university system. No longer. And, that is a shame.
25
This attack on the liberal arts is the latest assault by those--both Democrat and Republican--pushing neo-liberal economics on our society: the approach that only profit or opportunities to profit are valuable, with everything else (whether clean air that we can breathe, or education that teaches us to analyze and generalize) is worthless. Trump (who I disdain) is not the problem; he's the latest manifestation of this problem, initiated under Reagan. Clinton and Obama followed this nonsense, as did "old man Bush" and W as well. When it gets down to the state level, you get Scott Walker, et. al.
But because we don't get enough history in our society (including but going beyond college), most Americans don't understand that the US is not an individual country, but is the heartland of a global US Empire. And the "big boys and girls" are using our resources to promote the empire, while allowing our country to die for lack of resources--and since 1981, our National Debt has exploded from -.9 trillion dollars, to over -21 trillion dollars (an increase of over 20 trillion in less than 40 years). What happens when US creditors refuse to take any more of our "hot checks"? It's clear we need MORE history majors (and liberal arts majors) and fewer business majors--but media keeps telling students business is the way to go ... but if business is so wonderful, why is the country in this kind of economic situation?
8
@Kim Scipes, this dilemma is no more "neo-liberal" than it is "neo-con." It is nothing less than a corporate design to create a work force of people who have high technical skills and zero interest in questioning the status quo. It is always the dream of the ruling class to have a compliant citizenry with the skills needed to keep the trains running but without any desire to question their masters.
The other issue I take with your post – there is no global US Empire. The US is becoming (or has become) the enforcement arm of a global financial empire that owes allegiance to no state or political system – only to ever increasing profit.
Eliminate history and you get more politicians such as Donald Trump elected to public office. His base doesn't seem to care about history.
16
Question:
What is a university without a history major?
Answer:
A vo-tech school.
11
My advice: Stop being so indecisive about your major when it comes to employment prospects. Just graduate with any major with good grades and get out within 4 years. Or else, you are wasting your money and tax payer money.
4
Mixed into the economic argument that schools should orient themselves toward "practical" education is a hint of anti-intellectualism, a thread running throughout U.S. history, according to Historian Richard Hofstadter. When the University of Wyoming was established as a land grant university in 1886, the first board of trustees was credited by the Laramie Sentinel newspaper with recognizing "the fact that the world has more use for engineers, mining, civil, gas, electrical engineers, for architects, chemists and mechanics, than it has for men who can merely cackle Greek". The same strain of contempt for “intellectuals” runs through American history through the present day and, for example, is demonstrated by those who support Trump. The "them vs. us" attitude makes perfect sense for people who support America's ultimate, anti-intellectual. However, it seems ironic that they support someone who also represents the worst type of economic elite in this country. History does not repeat itself exactly, but it does throw up some warning signs like “dangerous curves ahead”. For that reason alone, not to mention the fact that good history is an art form, it’s important to require history in any type of learning curriculum.
8
No one reads historian Richard Hofstadter unless they take history in a college. By eliminating history from their curriculum (and foreign languages), Wisconsin (darn, I just realized I misspelled Wisconsin in my previous comment) is cheating their future students from receiving a true university education. More dumbing down of US citizens is not something this country needs to remain competitive globally.
If this trend continues, large parts of the US are going to become less relevant and even more backward. The US will turn into a has-been nation. As others have commented, the decline has already started.
As a European American is am often astonished how little even educated Americans know about history, geography, writing and many other routine subjects. English is my second language and I regularly have to correct native American English writer's spelling. If Americans learned history in high school at all, it ignores much of what happened in North and South America before European settlers came. They don't understand the history of native people, slavery or even their own history. Even the educated a clueless about geography, even of the USA. So now they want to limit liberal arts, which will set back the nation even more. It's insane. But there is pretty of money for war.
17
The history that US students are taught in high school is the fictional censored version. To learn what really happened, it is necessary to take history at a college and to pay attention in those university history classes. Trump may have gone to Wharton, but he went to the Business School at the University of Pennsylvania. He transferred after the years in which he would have taken general education classes not part of Wharton. He was, according to those who knew or taught him, a outstandingly lousy scholar. Wherever he took history (and other general education classes), he clearly did not pay attention.
I got a STEM degree in the mid 1970s at a public university. Before I arrived, I was horrified about being forced to take general education classes, mostly liberal arts classes, but also science outside my major. Once I was there taking them, I fell in love with the liberal arts as taught at a university level. The history was real history. The English classes actually taught one how to write well. They were not boring at all, not like high school classes at all.
What Wisconson is doing is dooming students in the future who attend their university to becoming second class inferior college graduates. It will not enhance their postgraduate employment opportunities. If the state wants to turn it into a vocational education facility, then they should change the name to reflect that it is not going to be a full university.
I am saddened to read that this is happening.
2
@Frank Matheis
I regret that I pushed send without noticing the auto-correct changes, which is particularly embarrassing
since I am claiming that too many Americans can't spell. Of course, I meant to type "...I am often astonished" and "..there is plenty of money for war." I know how to spell. It's just that I am not a good typist and this was sent too soon by error. My apologies to readers.
1
To my European American friend....if you are correcting native Americans spelling, then our school system is failing us. I teach high school history, and NY State requires four years of it and students in my school learn geography and about slavery and Haitian revolution and Indian independence and a host of other things. You apparently have no idea what people learn in schools.
So rural America will become even more clueless about American history and even less inclined toward critical thinking? It already gave us the most incompetent, most compromised and greedy president in our history. I never thought we'd get someone worse than "W." But here we are.
10
All part of the conservative scheme based on the electoral college. Keeping red on the political map relies on a sinister scheme to suppress ideas and argument, the bedrock of history, political science, philosophy, English and other liberal arts courses.
1
Oh my, does this sound like the scary music of my life, having graduated with a history PhD a couple of years back. But the reason I can't get a job has more to do with budgets than demand in Illinois. Still, for most students, you can't take history straight to the bottom line.
The valuable context of any other education is cut adrift without the basics of history. Traditionally, many history majors at the undergrad level provide valuable skill sets that add complexity and nuance to allow one to qualify for law school. Law schools are also taking a hit.
It's not just the supply of lawyers and history teachers that's impacted. One example given here leads to understanding that the environment around us, what is often thought of as "natural," is how much of it is shaped by human activity.
Science in general is shaped by a number of cultural and economic factors, not formed in a social vacuum.
Larger history programs are affected. At the big U here, new grad cohorts have shrunk to a third of just a decade back. Cuts at places like WIU further add to the difficulty of finding a job, on top of cuts at the community college level.
There aren't just economic forces at work, but ideological ones. Trump doesn't want people thinking about history. He wants a nation of sycophants who hang on his every word, as if there was anything there than a most tenuous relationship to the facts. When politicians can dictate distorted views of the past, it is a danger to our nation's future.
8
What is a educated person who knows nothing of history?--or philosophy, geography, anthropology, mathematics, the natural and social sciences?
"Liberal arts" originally defined the education of "free" people as opposed to the servile--serfs or slaves. That meant economically free--as opposed to subjugated dependents. Money alone doesn't make you worthy of admiration or respect (witness Trump)--except to the servile.
In the medieval European university the seven liberal arts were grammar, rhetoric, and logic (the trivium) and geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy (the quadrivium).
Of course medieval meant feudal--landlords and serfs. Democracy was supposed to free the serfs making them equal to the lords--at least in terms of education.
Yes--truth and knowledge can set you free. Ignorance can render action unfree--involuntary; regardless of how much money it costs, you might not know what you are doing. So it goes both way--the liberal arts set you free, and they define a free person.
Scott Walker is a vassal knight jousting for tips and party favors of the moneylords--landlords updated. He is the champion of neo-feudalism--whether he knows it or not.
Probably not--such is his ignorance of history and philosophy.
10
Do this and the university or college becomes a vocational school. Full STEM ahead. The arts, liberal arts, are going away. If that's the stated goal, the come all the way out and say it. Then there will be no history or English teachers in secondary schools. Are they to become vocational schools. As George Carlin said, "they [the Corporate state] don't want educated citizens capable of critical thinking (which is what liberal arts teaches), they want people just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork."
7
Believe me, a STEM education teaches critical thinking. In fact it practically defines it.
I live in Wisconsin and have wondered why so many state universities are so close to one another. Eau Claire, River Falls and Stout are practically next door neighbors. Whitewater and Kenosha are an hour and 15 minutes apart. It's a 2hr. drive from Stevens Point to LaCrosse, or Green Bay or Eau Claire. I'm not naive and I understand the politics of the state government giving something to each of these cities and if I lived in one of them I would definitely want a university there, but it's going to continue to be a challenge to financially support them all with the continuing population decline in these areas. Some will no doubt be closed.
6
States with several state universities in their system are seeing this all over the country and is a result of the pullback by our society and the government to fund education. Our last governor talked about programs in our 16 university system that were not directly related to skills and getting a job. A great state, a great university system needs to fully fund its educational system top to bottom, university to pre-school. But we've decided to selfishly cut taxes, provide for the wealthy, and forget about what made this country. Some of these system universities are all these rural communities have.
8
I spent my career in the science and engineering (S&E) fields. Most of the S&Es I knew were islands of brilliance surrounded by a sea of mediocrity. Yes, there were a few who could be subject matter experts in any chosen field, but they were rare. Liberal arts does have its place in the making of a well rounded individual. Universities should (and many times do) make efforts to incorporate history, literature, etc. into the S&E degree requirements. At a minimum, it makes for a more interesting conversation....
6
I have worked with many engineers. I have yet to meet one as smart and educated as I am--thanks to my excellent liberal arts education at a great public university.
3
@Mike
"Most of the S&Es I knew were islands of brilliance surrounded by a sea of mediocrity."
I guess it depends on how you perceive brilliance. I've known a lot of S&E folks who had an enthusiasm for innovation, and were often very creative within their fields, but who could not be bothered with discussions about a broader context or historical, literary, artistic or philosophical implications of their inventiveness. It was always about: "can we do it?" and never about "should we do it" We need these people, but we also need those for whom the life of the mind is an inquiry into the things that make us human, and our place in the world. Trying to make one group more important than the other will leave us in a world where neither can realize their potentials in the most rewarding way.
1
An underlying problem is the upgrading of small colleges to university status, which has happened all over America, both in rural and urban areas. Universities require resources for research that small colleges do not, and therefore require larger budgets.
7
Universities have humanities, and the universalism is built into the term. Technical schools are something else, institutes, "Hochschule," etc. There's a place for all of it, but not confusing them.
Learning the critical skills built into humanism and studying the various canons is vital if you want to see the world in any depth--which can be an unpleasant experience as you, say read through a newspaper article rather than taking it for granted.
3
As the first person in my family to attend a university, UW-Stevens Point was a godsend for me in the mid 70s. The liberal arts electives I took there- sociology, anthropology, European history, etc. opened my world in ways I couldn't have imagined. Even though I wound up in a technical field, my life (and thus my children's lives) were enriched beyond measure by those "useless" liberal arts classes. It pains me greatly to see the UW system be transformed into a trade school.
17
If they focus on job preparation, I hope they make sure each student still has a core of liberal arts courses so they come out of college as an educated person prepared to be a knowledgeable citizen. No university degree should exclude History, Literature, Philosophy, because to do so is to weaken society as a whole and to cheat the student. I also think everyone should have at least one class in Human Development to help them better understand themselves, aging patents, any possible children, and the people they simply encounter in daily life.
8
My husband is from Stevens Point. He took classes at UWSP when he was in high school and then went to Stanford for his undergraduate degree.
UWSP had a specialization in forestry management. When the paper-making industry died in Wisconsin, there was no demand for people to manage forests. It’s a good example of the death of career opportunities. These days people can expect to have three or four different careers in their lifetimes. And liberals arts underpins successful career changes.
14
At the University of Southern Maine we created a program in Art and Entrepreneurship. Blending business with Art. The problem is not having history as a major but how and if students in such majors are taught to integrate those into professional tracks. In effect the answer to majors may be in the minors. Organizational Leadership, teaching/education, and entrepreneurship are a few broad areas that can be taught as minors that students of many majors can take to make their majors more economically viable. Not all majors are applicable to every track but most are. History majors with minors in leadership studies, pre law, museum studies etc
In the end however no degree will assure a job or career. Creativity, diligence and ambition will. College is a pallet students in the end handle the brush.
7
I wonder: will these remaining major tracks still have a core liberal arts requirement? A general education curriculum (that would include history for example)? This would assure at least that core of the college experience for all students, and if they want the history major they transfer to the flagship campus.
Seems like at some level, these changes should these schools to their original mission like teachers colleges... back to being a college not a university. There was a trend when every school wanted to be division one sports and a university. Not every place can support either aspiration. How many Masters and PhD programs are enough? How many D1 football teams? I know state systems have tried to build centers of excellence and eliminate duplicate programs, but I fear that work is not finished.
I notice the irony that UWSP has one PhD program in Educational Sustainability.
3
The lack of attendance is not a surprise. A certain portion of the population thinks of universities as "liberal propaganda machines." At the same time educated people are not selecting to send their children out to conservative strongholds for a higher education.
I agree that it's a problem, but rather than seeing universities dumbing themselves down to meet the desires of their neighbors, perhaps these universities need to start reaching out and assisting with the education of younger students; helping to save children from the indoctrination of fear that prevents them from achieving the academic levels required to enter universities (and the desire to go in the first place). Temporary sacrifices might be made for long term gains. U of W has multiple campuses... perhaps short-term consolidation while they focus on programs to increase university interest in the future might be in their better interest.
Don't react with fear, counter it. Because without history, humanities, philosophy, sociology, etc., these students will never achieve the primary goal of attending university: to learn to think. Without critical thinking skills, the next generation will become even more conservative. Universities stripping themselves down into trade schools will become part of the problem, when right now they are our ONLY hope for a solution.
By making this choice, they will be sealing their fate. And ours.
7
@Kay Rock
But you can’t deny they are liberal propaganda machines. When you give college credit for political activity you are a propaganda machine.
I am continually astounded by people not understanding how the world works. Decades ago I intentionally chose a state school with incredibly low tuition to pursue an engineering degree. I already knew how to think; I didn't need more education to become well rounded. I was there for the piece of paper that granted me entry into a lifelong career. As a result of that choice, I've had a very successful life and neither I, nor my parents, had to deal with college debt for my education. Let the people who have more money than brains enjoy the liberal arts majors. The rest of us need a path to a career so we can find our way in the real world. This university is making a smart choice which will be good for its students.
5
@Another Human
"I didn't need more education to become well rounded. I was there for the piece of paper that granted me entry into a lifelong career. As a result of that choice, I've had a very successful life and neither I, nor my parents, had to deal with college debt for my education
And let automatons who think education is about money and institutions of learning are just vocational high schools on a big campus"
And let automatons who think institutions of higher education are just fancy trade schools and the purpose of education is to earn more money by serving the corporate elite lead their small lives of comfort and fade into trash can of history.
8
So society doesn't need museum curators, high school teachers, social workers, musicians? Just engineers? Or are you saying these "lesser" positions should be filled by people from privileged upbringings? Wow, that doesn't sound like an equitable or meaningful society.
2
Barring physical defect, all humans have virtually the same brain. We distinguish ourselves by what we do with it. As soon as we abandon the humanities, we become less human.
1
Online learning also competes. You wonder when deals are struck where certain classes are done online through other institutions to focus on specialty competencies.
1
"The proposal was especially bitter for liberal arts professors, who have viewed their disciplines as the backbone of the college experience but now fear losing their jobs."
These disciplines are also the backbone of our democracy. Part of the playbook of economist Buchanan (see Democracy In Chains, McClean) of the 60's for moving into oligarchy--a less educated society (some might say serf) abets this power/weath shift.
9
What is left out of this article is the increased need for better access to trade and apprenticeship programs. Not everyone is interested in a liberal arts education. I teach at an expensive private university and I can’t tell you how many of my students have NO interest in getting a broad, liberal education. They often do not engage and treat their non core classes like a necessary evil they must get through. Ok, that’s their choice.
What puzzles me is why we don’t do a better job of teaching history, English and analysis in high school? That is where we can access ALL of our citizens. Then let the truly committed liberal arts students study the liberal arts in college and those on more “applied” tracks earn shorter, more focussed degrees? This could save us all a lot of time AND money. Understandably, liberal arts instructors will be adversely affected (I am one of those), but we may need to accept that new ways of thinking are needed.
7
Show me an individual with a thirst for knowledge and I will present to you a thoughfful citizen and a capable employee. A liberal arts education is the glue that forms the bulwark of our democracy. Further separating into craft guilds with singular interests and perspectives will marginalize our productive capacity, reduce our cohesiveness and make us easier prey to demagogues. Cliche: "Those that fail to understand history are condemned to repeat it".
7
Like it or not everyone wants a job after college. No doubt a liberal education offers certain skills of thinking and broadens ones outlook but having a marketable skill is much more valuable as a career. You work hard to get into a college, you and your family sacrifice a lot and when you graduate you need to have some return. It maybe that these smaller colleges give a good and solid education but when it comes to hiring a corporation puts value on the Big Names. The other consideration is what subject? Sociology, Psychology, even teaching all pay poorly. It is the STEM types that are rewarded. Most students begin preparing for college in the 1st grade and continue. Many areas of our country do not value education and when the student gets to the 12th grade they are often totally unprepared for college.
1
Maybe the problem is more based on demographics and geography. Fewer high school graduates in the home county and 5 other University of Wisconsin campuses within a two hour drive. The best solution may be limited specialized programs such as the forest and fisheries one mentioned and abandon a fruitless attempt to be all things to all people
4
@Rick
Finally! Someone who can actually read a newspaper article and respond accordingly.
Along with devaluing many of the skills that businesses actually want such as the ability to read and write, these short-sighted responses actually make towns and small cities increasingly less desirable to the young people they are losing. The response makes the problem worse on all levels.
2
This is all deliberate, and part of Scott Walker's toxic legacy. The last thing he wanted was historically informed Wisconsin voters.
14
`“If you want a career-focused program, I think then you could look at a community college or tech school,” said Madeline Abbatacola, a senior studying history and wildlife ecology. Universities like hers, she added, “have a different lane.”' This is a more thoughtful comment about the purpose of her school in our higher educational system than any of the comments by the university administrator. And studying what she is, I am guessing she will do fine in life.
6
Liberal arts major are trained to think critically and broadly and to adapt successfully to disruptive change. If we are only training people for very specific careers, what happens when these careers no longer signify? Kurt Vonnegut understood the conundrum long ago, envisioning a post-modern world of managers and laborers. Perhaps Higher Education should be renamed Lower Education.
4
The penalty for downplaying the liberal arts and undermining them by restructuring university curriculums is apparent in the condition of the country today. How do you think a person like Trump got elected? Not by truly educated people I am sure. If you think that I am wrong, talk to a Trump supporter and listen carefully to what they say. You will discover a lack of critical thinking beyond measure and explanation, critical thinking that is at the heart of a liberal arts education.
15
Yes, the rise and fall of the population served; that’s it in a nutshell. State Universities, as well as small colleges, struggle because of declining population. Rather than adjusting to the needs of the population, they tend to struggle to carve out a demand where in fact, there is none. Who ultimately pays the price: tax payers. It’s time for Instiutuons, like SUNY (64 campuses in a shrinking state?!) , to come to terms with population shifts. Don’t believe the education jargon about recruiting international students and out-of state students. Those are just the desperate moves of extremely over paid administrators who fear the lose of $300,000+ saleries, plus housing, plus country club memberships, plus international travels for “recruiting.”.
3
Gotta give those corporations their tax breaks. More important than educating people, definitely.
6
I would like to see a comparison with similar Canadian Universities. I doubt they are cutting majors.
1
Some reactions:
Post-secondary education has always been about money. Early texts in rhetoric, for example, show students how to write home and ask for more money.
However you cut the history of “liberal arts” from Aristotle on, one of the main meanings focused on “learning for its own sake”, when one is “free” from worldly concerns - hence the “liberal arts”. When one is not free from worldly concerns - and needs An income - then what is wrong with concerns about employment?
Stevens Point was founded to train teachers, making it a job training project from the start. Graduates were largely female and paid ess than men in the local area, whose work was more valued in a growing economy. So as part of the “history” that is the focus of the piece, job training has been important from the beginning.
The history here is a steady progression away from the liberal arts as the dominant focus of study. Applied majors, such as nursing, education, engineering, and business have long been popular and have collectively outnumbered liberal arts majors.
The US university system has been at overcapacity since the end of the 1970s when the last of the baby boomers moved through.
Sorry, but over-expansion tends to lead to retrenchment. While giving local campuses the ability to raise tuition is very reasonable, what else could be done to make retrenchment less painful? At some point bills need to be paid, even when the state is exiting the higher education market.
1
The University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point is probably like a lot of universities who after year upon year of budget cuts keep hiring more and more administrators and paying handsome salaries. Clean out the debris at the top and you might save enough for the actual professors to teach.
6
@Jacquie Oh geez.Perhaps you can come up with a more original thought? It's the Republican governors and legislatures that decimated university budgets for decades. I am an administrator - I know.
3
@Srini The Business Model has taken over universities and are paying presidents of universities and administrators exorbitant wages.
2
$100-200K in crippling debt for a history degree and meh job. Yes, folks will vote with their feet. Economically it makes no sense. The history departments need to reinvent themselves to stay relevant.
1
As a guy who majored in political science and minored in history on the way to a life in foreign and national security affairs, I would remind readers that those who don't learn from history are likely to repeat it. Not quite true -- history is not a repeating decimal -- but the sort of hubris that mired us in Vietnam, infected the George W. Bush administration's imperial adventure in Iraq.
President Trump, for example, is not Mussolini but he is like Mussolini, a braggadocio intent on amassing power. If his base had learned from history, at least some of them would have realized Trump posed a danger to constitutional democracy.
Arguably. colleges in such straits must concentrate on something but ridding themselves of history is throwing out the baby with bathwater. Students need a liberal arts foundation, not to be successful, but to be informed citizens.
544
@Frank McNeil
Well...the problem is: whose history could Trump's base learn from. History is not some kind of static, objective set of "truths;" rather a messy amalgam of constantly changing, opposing, contradictory and usually subjective "truths."
Not saying that all higher ed institutions should drop history, but maybe Stevens Point should. Maybe history, like writing, should be taught as part of and within a student's individual major rather than separately. Such a move would do two things: impress upon students the relevancy of learning good writing--and history--skills, and providing them with a context for what they are learning.
9
@Frank McNeil History can be misapplied as well as applied, after all, they are stories, and most of the history taught to me in public school was biased, incomplete, and often boring.
Much basic history could be taught during the 12 compulsory years, but somehow it's not.
But somehow more money for administrators would fix it all, I presume.
6
Actually, Doug, there are indeed truths worth learning from the past, in history as in life, which is also choppy and subjective. Paying attention is essential in both. For example, what happens when fascism takes a nation into its mythical quest for purity is a rather predictable series of events, in the main. Not one appealing to students of history, most likely. Wisdom is elusive, but more common in those who seek it. And know how to communicate well. And that helps more than pretending we are helpless straws in the wind. We aren't that.
34
The article didn’t mention online courses, which also allow urban schools to compete with rural schools. No need to go to a campus at all, even though the learning and social experiences then become completely different.
2
As a teacher who serves mostly immigrants, refugees, and lower income students, I am disheartened by disinvestment in higher education.
In Iowa, state support for regent universities, adjusted for inflation, decreased by 40% from 2001 to 2016, from 63% to 34% of U. of Iowa's budget. To compensate, Iowa's universities have increased tuition by 72-75%. If you graph funding cuts over tuition increases, you see a perfect X. Students and families are increasingly burdened with debt. Inability to pay tuition and living costs is the primary reason for dropping out. Our universities have cut programs and closed research centers.
When I graduated from the U of I in 1991, I was paying $1250 per semester for full-time in-state graduate tuition and fees. To support myself I was a part-time TA and waitressed one night per week. That's it. I paid 100% of my school and living expenses without borrowing money, dipping into savings, or getting aid from my family. I had my own apartment, a car, pets, and good health insurance. I also had a social life.
Fast forward to spring 2018: my daughter took one 3 credit graduate class at U of I. Her cost for that class, taught by a graduate student assistant, was $1780, $600 of which were fees.
The amenities (fitness centers, fancy dorms etc.) are consequences of cuts in state support as universities compete for the dollars of those who can pay. Amenities are not the cause of rising costs.
Higher ed should not be an elite pursuit.
9
@Mary fees also cover "immigrants, refugees and lower income students", do they not?
1
@rexl I don't understand your question or your point. The fees portion of the $1250 I paid per semester for FT grad tuition in 1991 was about $30. Today they are about $600 for PT (more for a FT grad student), a 1900% increase.
Fees at Iowa are for technology, fitness center, student health, student union, student services and more.
The university has cut back on tuition breaks and aid to low income students, which is the case in many universities across the US as they grapple with disinvestment from the state. They are seeking out more $$$ students and international students.
I teach in the K-12 system. I know that for most of my students, their path to lifelong success and independence is through higher ed. But this path will be unattainable for many of them.
1
@rexl Now I understand. You were assuming I taught at the University. I did not make clear that I am K-12.
I was a foreign languages major at UW Stevens point 50 years ago. At the time the liberal arts were taught, but most of today's majors did not exist (we had a foreign languages department, but not separate French, German, Spanish and Russian departments). The question which most of the people discussing this issue ignore is not the symbolism of the majors, but which classes will continue and which will disappear. If a few department secretaries no longer have jobs and a few under-occupied department heads have to go back to full-time faculty work, so long as the liberal arts courses are still taught it is not the end of the civilized world.
2
An alternative for declining regional campuses is to provide only the first two years of university education. That's what the University of Wisconsin did when I was a student, taking my first two years at extension divisions in Kenosha and Racine. Students got a decent liberal education education for two years and then went on to the Madison campus to specialize in the remaining two years. It is the opposite of turning the regional campus into a technical college and preserves rather than eliminates the liberal arts. A win-win—at least it was for me.
2
I have zero tears for this article. I was in college when the economy collapsed, pursuing either a political science or art degree, when it hit me. I don’t know what I’m doing or where I’m going, but I do know I’m acquiring debt incredibly fast, so I left. I pursued art and did pretty well for myself as far as that goes. Being an artist without a degree I taught, had my work in shows and galleries, all well and good for my 20s. But when I realized I may not want to be constrained by this occupation in my future, I went back to school. Other friends of mine did too, frequently for nursing or construction management. As for me, I’m at the University of Washington studying economics, international studies and French. I couldn’t break away from the liberal arts but I needed one foot in the technical door to justify all the debt I would take on.
I returned last week from a semester abroad in France where the attitudes towards such degrees is quite different. First of all, to answer a question in the article, in France only liberal arts universities offer history. Medical, business, STEM, and law schools offer only what pertains to their subject. Cultural rifts exist between the studies as they do here but there is not the pressure to justify studies with money making attitudes towards education very different in both good and bad ways.
In short, this little school should be celebrated for waking up and making some much needed changes.
5
I teach in a management graduate program. My own degrees are in sociology with a lot of history classes thrown in. My students are mostly graduates in “career”- focused programs, and frequently have achieved their B.A. or B.S. degrees by attending part time. None have had the opportunity to be full-time students. As someone who did have that opportunity, to be full-time as both an under-grad AND grad student, I feel sorry for their loss. And as someone who has to fail graduate level students for being unable to write even simple declarative sentences, I am angry at how much they have paid for poor educational programs. Is a bad college experience better than no college experience? Perhaps. But as I see modern universities add layers and layers of administrators, while cutting faculty positions and depending on adjunct faculty to teach an infinite number of phony business-jargon-laden courses to a frightening degree, I wonder just how low can we go?
10
If a school eliminates the liberal arts and focuses on career-oriented curricula it should call itself a career institute or some such thing, not a university. False advertising!
6
Two words: Scott Walker.
5
Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. And viola, you get what we have in the White House now.
5
@Frank Collins Trump plays the viola? Wow, who knew?
1
you are correct sir.
It’s hard to believe the author of this article didn’t mention Governor Scott Walker - he set the fire.
4
@A lawyer The article did mention Scott Walker
As a mere math major, I found his name in the 11th paragraph.
They need to focus more recruitment from Asia and India. Then they’ll be rolling in dough like Berkeley.
1
"money from states has dropped'
The second item in a list in the fourth graph
Might have deserved a more prominent mention.
1
I'm a tenured faculty at an RI. I strongly believe in a liberal arts education for all the reasons articulated below, but we also have to be realistic of the financial burden a 4 year BA degree now imposes on our younger generation and the fact that to be successful in today's job market most will need. a professional focused MA degree. So my solution would be to consider reducing the BA to three years. This is not uncommon in Europe,
2
I feel this is one of the many changes our educational institutions are making to appeal to their broader international student body who pay much more in tuition and endowments, and are making up majorities of student rolls in certain graduate programs like medicine, engineering, CS and AI. The concepts of a classical liberal education aren’t appealing to this population so it’s being replaced by more profitable programs. It’s a sad time as we cede our leadership in education for some quick cash.
My Liberal Arts degree in Political Science prepared me for a career, not a job and for that I’m thankful. My education provided me with the critical thinking, creativity, and analytical skills that have allowed me to thrive. I started out thinking that I would become a lawyer only to find myself in the world of IT where I’ve excelled. It turns out that the engineers and other technical staff that I work with often lack the soft skills that allow Liberal Arts majors to excel in customer facing roles.
7
The fancy liberal arts colleges sell social prestige as much as they sell education. That is why a place like Harvard doesn't want to admit students based solely on achievement. Small colleges lose to a great extent because they do not provide paths to top social contacts and thence to top jobs. The solution? Make that college a destination stop by going the opposite way. Pay for top name professors to draw in the elite from everywhere. That would take up-front money that is very hard to come by. A vision plus philanthropists is needed. Otherwise, forget the university and become a community college. That is the path the university is taking. Community colleges perform a great function, but they are no longer universities.
One question remains: where do people who want to study the liberal arts find those subjects at a price they can afford? That is the loss, because I am one who believes no wealth is greater than the learning that has been accumulated under the heading of "liberal arts." I find the love of art, music, literature, and history sustains me in the fulfilling idleness of my retirement. If my mind had never been shaped by such thinking, I personally would not know how to happily fill my days. There is wisdom, and people need it as well as knowledge.
4
I understand the school's reasoning, but it's sad. At elite schools like Harvard, everyone majors in liberal arts. Students are constantly asked to evaluate and judge big ideas, in the expectation that someday they will be in charge of government and business, or be leaders in culture/the arts.
Career-focused colleges train their students to be the employees of the big thinkers -- as if they think rural students aren't capable of more.
6
There is not more of a need for "historically" black colleges, or women's colleges. They should just close, or merge, especially when you look at universities today and they basically save half the seats for minorities, low income LGB folks, etc...Women make up more than half of the seats in professional schools like law & medicine. The days of needing these minority schools is over.
1
Every year we slip further down toward becoming a Third World country or something similar to a Latin American autocracy with gated rich and poverty for everyone else.
3
In Wisconsin, Gov Scott Walker (who dropped out of Marquette and does not have a college degree) has done what he can to diminish the state university system. Another angry white man with a severely limited view of the world who was in a position of power.
10
A university without history is a factory whose only produce are automatons.
Thank God I don’t have children.
6
The more a University tries to botch it's pivotal role in helping students become truly human citizens of the world, and able to think for themselves, and promote not only science and math ant technology, but the highest levels in literature and the arts, music and philosophy, and politcs (as the art of the possible), the less relevant it will become. And if so, Universities might as well change name to, you said it, career-focused programs. Are we this stupid, and give more power and money to 'intelligent weapons' to bomb, and destroy, others...instead of a rational disbursement of our taxes towards education, given that the best investment any country can make is in developing human talent, it's beneficial effect translated in a happier, and more just and productive society?
2
Useless degrees like English, film studies, psychology, etc should definitely be dropped.
They lure kids into easy subjects and when they graduate with no job but 200k in debt they are mad.
2
No where in article is Scott Walker mentioned. He is responsible architect for demise of education in Wisconsin.
4
@Mo "But in recent decades, troubling signs cropped up. Young families left rural Wisconsin for Madison and Milwaukee, which had their own University of Wisconsin campuses. Fewer students graduated from high school in the area around Stevens Point, including a 14 percent drop in its home county from 2012 to 2016. And under former Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican whose term ended Monday, state funding declined and a mandatory tuition freeze made it hard for the college to make up the difference."
A Liberal Arts education teaches a person how to think multi dimensional rather than linear.
4
@Sarah Bishop Or even 'linearly'. Apparent what a 'Liberal Arts education' doesn't confer is a knowledge of grammar.
The money needed to fund necessary programs in the liberal arts can be found in the money wasted in gender and ethnic studies programs.
2
Forget about studying History. Repeat.
4
If they eliminate any classic humanities programs (French, World History) and keep even a single "studies" program (Womens, LGBT, Transpatriarchial heteronormativity) then they have nobody to blame by themselves.
5
Liberal Arts teaches critical thinking, an important part of any future career.
4
Universities deserve whatever they get. They've wasted huge sums of money building facilities that have nothing to do with the life of the mind, and providing cushy jobs-for-life to a professoriat and a bunch of administrative bureaucrats, many of whom are now retired and weigh like a financial stone around their necks. Solution? Enslave the (now much smaller) new generation of students with enormous mountains of debt that they'll never be able to pay back, while successive governments, both Republican and Democratic, look on approvingly. So the new generation pays for the sins of the old. And the country gets stupider all the time. And the NY Times continues to cry its crocodile tears, to its customary, and puffily bourgeois, sentimental audience.
7
“Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it” --attributed to the American philosopher George Santayana.
1
‘What Is a University Without a History Major?’
A breeder of voters happy with Trump.
13
Not all small remote colleges should be "saved".
"clear career paths"
I was a history major and love history. It is essential to understanding who we are. Many of our problems can be attributed to a lack of historical knowledge by our leaders. That said, the liberal arts students need more technological and science based courses so they can earn a living, and the engineering and science students need more history, poli sci and literature so they can understand society.
6
If all colleges and universities require two years of traditional liberal arts courses the loss of some liberal arts majors would not be too mad. The problem is that most colleges and universities don't even require a few liberal arts courses. The result is that most college graduates took such a narrow selection of courses that they don't know anything about History, Literature and Science.
3
A civilization that does not study history is doomed to repeat its mistakes. Dropping history as a major is the first step in this direction.
Can the school still require some basic history classes, thought not offer it as a major? I worry that eventually those classes would quietly be dropped.
What does this say about our collective support of history professors and how we value their work in continuing to re-evaluate and document our collective human history? Even if there are fewer students in history classes, that is sad enough, but having no scholars focusing on and developing our historical content dooms not just current history students, but the ability of those who wish to be enlightened by looking into their history in the future.
2
there it is! as if ignorance of history hasn't already nullified debate, nay turned it into the kind of school yard taunting
that memory reminds would not be tolerated in 9th grade civics (when the elements of debate was still taught)...slogans and talking points repeated in the best "big lie" fashion; "immoral wall," on one side (the faux left) and "sanctuary snowflakes," on the other are an insult to we the people and the charter (see the preamble to the constitution) we elected this lot of over-privileged and under-worked bloviators to attend.
term limits (one to a customer) please, before it's too late.
3
If our colleges fail to educate students in American history and culture, philosophy and ethics, and the language and culture of other countries, we will wind up with a country of Donald Trumps, ignorant of anything but self-interest.
12
Rename it a "Conservative Arts" program. Problem solved.
13
Answer: It’s not a university. It’s a trade school/technical institute.
8
@William Carter...you nailed it precisely. I've often thought how hard it is for a 17 year old with no experience with the world of higher education to distinguish a local beauty school calling itself a college from an elite liberal arts school which also calls itself a college. They perform two very different missions. And now many places calling themselves colleges and universities are not requiring their students to study literature, philosophy etc in a rush to provide STEM-centric and other vocationally oriented programming. Can their graduates be called college graduates?
1
"Some longstanding liberal arts degrees, including those in history, ... would be eliminated."
As if American's aren't already ignorant enough of American history. We need high quality teachers of American history that teach every high school student the true (as objective as possible) history of our country- warts and all.
How can citizens understand what is possible and how the rest of the world sees us while being completely ignorant of where we've come from and how we got here?
How did fascism rise in Germany? How did Jim Crow affect black Americans and their abilities to rise to their potential? How have the politics of the Republican and Democratic party's evolve in the last century- what was the reasoning behind anti-trust laws.
When have our foreign policy entanglements stifled democracy in other countries at the behest of corporate interests?
Knowledge of these issues should be embedded in the minds of Americans before they leave high school.
8
Eliminate the likes of history degrees and you are no longer a university - you are a business school, and your graduates will be even less broadly educated than they are now. Ask one of your business school people when the War of 1812 was and see what answer you get.
7
Yet another article about rural America and why we should care. We don’t. Trumpland can fall into a swamp of ignorance for all I care. Ooooops, too late.
My advice to any young person in RA who is interested in education is to get out and go someplace where there are opportunities for you to become what you want to become.
4
@Bailey T Dog
With respect, that's a very naive viewpoint. First, rural America is not a swampland of ignorance. National statistics show a higher rate of high school graduation among students in rural areas than in cities or towns. Second, I'm sure the people of rural America are aware of how to pursue their life aspirations. If that means moving elsewhere, I think they can figure it out.
1
If we drop history, we will repeat history.
3
Good lord, who designed the monstrosity of the building (see photo) with no windows? And they wonder why enrollment is down.
4
I understand most of the commentators passion. Dismissing liberal art programs reflects on one own individual feeling of self worth. But I dare to ask....how many of you Alumni have given back to your own programs that you value?
5
Bryan Caplan, an economics prof at George Mason summed up the conservative position below in last January's Atlantic, "What Is College Good For?" I took it as a you're-not-paid-to-think message. Critical thinking gets folks to get out of the box and sometimes ask uncomfortable questions in addition to writing a crisp memo or analyzing a balance sheet. Can't have that, can we?
"First and foremost: From kindergarten on, students spend thousands of hours studying subjects irrelevant to the modern labor market. Why do English classes focus on literature and poetry instead of business and technical writing? Why do advanced-math classes bother with proofs almost no student can follow? When will the typical student use history? Trigonometry? Art? Music? Physics? Latin? The class clown who snarks “What does this have to do with real life?” is onto something."
1
Depressing. Rural America needs more education, not less.
5
@exmilpilot
Urban dwellers need more education. That’s where the poverty and homelessness exists. I read every week in the Times there is no investment in our cities. That’s where African Americans who have the lowest percentage of undergraduate degrees live.
Isn't if funny how - from reading these comments - it seems that so many who went to university in the US in the 1970's took liberal arts classes, no matter what their major, and had an affordable degree yet this same generation are now eliminating these prospects for young people today? Who is voting for these legislators to axe funding of public universities? Those 70's students:
Age Group Registered Voters 12/01/2018 in Wisconsin
18-24 300,070
25-34 488,163
35-49 762,780
50-64 975,916
65+ 869,655
Grand Total * 3,396,584
(https://elections.wi.gov/node/6323)
The reason that history and foreign languages are being removed from the university curricula is because of the drop in state funding for state universities. Of course the university leadership has to cater to what business and industry want them to teach - they are the paymasters!
Isn't it bizarre how much higher university tuition is in the US compared to all other advanced countries? Why? All that tuition money coming in and still it's not enough to provide basic cover for key liberal arts subjects and any foreign languages to be taught.
Your reporter needs to examine who's proposing, who's voting for and who's controlling this expensive, inadequate educational system. I feel very sorry for young people in WI.
14
As a country, you ignore history at your own peril. If you believe that it's no longer important or relevant enough to teach, then you're part of the problem. Don't believe me? Look no further than a president who lies like a carnival barker and 40% of the country believes everything he says.
4
Wisconsin got what they voted for.
5
Can you only be an informed person and a good citizen by what you learn at a university? How did we ever sustain democracy when for 150 years most people did not go to college and many didn't even graduate from high school?
1
Being all to everyone is over. Why not having universities specialized in liberal arts paid for by the federal government. Sorry. It's awfully socialistic!
1
I majored in American History, graduated in 1973, and spent a long career applying the skills learned while pursuing that degree. What are those? How to research primary sources, how to sort fact from opinion, how to collate and assemble information, how to focus, how to distill information, how to collaborate with other researchers, how to write effectively, etc. In essence, the key skills learned by a liberal education is how to think and solve the unique problems that evolve over time.
These skills are critical to having an educated and informed society.
And those who have studied history understand the erection and construction of walls to solve problems has never worked. Just ask the Romans, Chinese and former Soviet Block Nations.
445
@Coolhandred
If I tried hard enough, I bet I could find some history majors who support Trump's wall. It's not just knowledge gained by majoring in history that determines if one supports or rejects building it. It's a lot more complicated than that. A lot of well educated people are susceptible to political discourse that appeals to fear reduction, racial prejudice, etc.
Why can't students learning how to be plumbers, dental assistants, engineers, or welders also learn how to think and solve "unique problems that evolve over time" within their own fields of study?
8
@Coolhandred Perhaps they could ask Israel. Or some of the countries being flooded by refugees. That you can breach a wall doesn't make it ineffective as most will not.
That said, better than worrying about walls, how about we allow free travels throughout the Americas, complete with the ability to do work for 6 months? In history, they failed to teach that socialism and authoritarianism are abysmal failures, but students are graduating thinking western civilization isn't even an established good thing.
7
Yes Doug, skilled trades people and those in professions such as health care, IT and other fields can and should learn these skills. That's why we need knowledgeable, competent teachers in fields such as history, philosophy and languages to teach them throughout their schooling, K-12 and beyond. We get these teachers from the liberal arts schools.
19
There is a name for schooling that does not teach liberal arts and concentrates on marketable job skills:
Vo-Tech
If they drop the liberal arts they should lose University status.
5
The reporter needs to follow up with an article showing the legacy costs of faculty health care and retirement. Those are the real factors pushing colleges to the edge of bankruptcy and student loan costs to the stratosphere, not declining enrollment.
2
@Conservative Democrat I don't think so. Cut out all the deans of deaning and deans of sub-deans if you want to cut costs. Most courses at many institutions are taught by part-time faculty with little to no health insurance/retirement plans and paltry salaries.
What is a university without a history major? A job training center.
2
@Emma Horton It seems history is often a fictional course. many schools, depending on their administration and backers, teach any and all history they want. Liberal, conservative, religious etc. all have their own stories to try and propagandize. I look back at my "history" that i was taught and realize so much was fiction and misinformation and propaganda.
Interesting the case was made about UW Stevens Point. Wisconsin, of all states, had a governor who slashed funding to education at all levels. Fortunately Scott Walker is gone now, but the fruits of his disastrous administration will last a long time. He made sure to succeed in making Wisconsin dumb and ill-prepared for the future.
5
@BWCA was a doctor for 40 years and many of my fellow doctors were lucky to be in Calif during the 1960's. Thats when Pat Brown and others made college available to all who qualified. I was the first to go in my family as were many others in my medical class.There is no way i could have done this today. Meanwhile I am sure that myself and others have paid back millions on the original investment through taxes.
1
In the rush to please the fickle and clueless American business community, administrators, many of whom know nothing about education and come from the business community itself, deal-make to advance their own personal financial interests. Like Trump, they are immune to information and ideas from the professionals to whom they dictate and at whose expertise they sneer. They are supported by boards packed with"business leaders" who were brought in to raise money but have failed. Instead boards and administrators are complicit in the destruction of our education systems at many levels. When another level of failure becomes public, these business cronies tell everyone they'll"fix" things by further disempoweeing educators and bringing in more business people, who will OF COURSE be better at managing things than those fluffy arts, sciences, and humanities people. Scholars are only there to take the blame for inept, unethical people. Colleges are there to help boards and administrators rake in contract money and protect one another's business interests. At this point, just like the Trump administration, boards and administrators have cut off access to information to all but their own inner circle, blame people who scramble to keep the ship afloat, and bilk, bilk, bilk with impunity. Trump hates government. College administrators hate education. Neither group is knowledgeable. Both are corrupt. Both are seemingly immune to their own failure.
Do these struggling colleges still have football teams?
1
Liberal Arts teach people to think critically and obtain a better sense of the world. History, in particular, gives a true understanding to what happened in the past and the connection to the present as well as the future.
When you look at the Constitution, you can see the systemic use of racism that still affects us today. Yet, those that have not studied history will vehemently disagree with you. Ignorance is not always bliss!
1
@Audrey Hannifin Sorry but history is dependent on where you learn it. Most history are storied designed to sway opinions. Example- our founders were supposed to be anti slavery but actually they were for importing slaves since they had many to sell and it would increase the value with less competition. Slaves, Indians, women could not vote. Then there is the killing of most Native Americans and stealing of any land they had of value.And it goes on and on. Sometimes ignorance is better then brain washing.
@RichardHead
If you read my second paragraph, you would see that I talked about systemic racism that was put into our Constitution. I also am very much aware of the issues that you brought up.
Not all of us that have studied history and have a degree in the same have been "brain washed."
“What is a university without a history major?”
A trade school. It's not a university.
3
Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. - George Santayana
Liberals have alt facts too!
Way too many kids get liberal arts degrees without a clue as to what their career trajectory is/will be.
I earned my Economics degree from a most competitive school. But, I work in IT.
Would’ve been a smarter move to invest that 6-figure sum I spent on my four year private education in the stock market (and attended a trade/tech school instead ), I’d able to retire by now. The times are a changing.
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” George Orwell. New course of study and job security, rewriting history. Apprenticeship under Winston Smith?
1
For republicans in power, a university without the study of history is the next best thing to no university.
3
@Howard64
It is their goal: keep the peasants ignorant.
Just look at the students wearing heavy winter outdoor clothing in their biology class.
"Don't know much about history" will sometime again get the country in trouble deep and open wider a bigger threat to our democracy.
There's so much you can write about the benefits of the humanities. Instead, I'll just say we're becoming a nation of ignorance and brutishness, the Lennie of the world, if you will. The US will be irrelevant if this continues.
1
How big is the football stadium and how big is the administration and how much do they get paid?
Colleges, apparently, have become businesses, only interested in the bottom line. Who wants to live with only people who think like this? Can you imagine social conversations only about whether the Dow has risen or fallen? Stevens Point should be ashamed of themselves, considering eliminating French, History and German (having grown up Wi I would hope the German ancestry would revolt.) Will English Literature be next? I attended the U of Wi - Oshkosh and received a lot of my critical thinking skills from my French (Polish origin) teacher, Madam Litka de Barcza. Priceless education. (Lois Hoffman Lettini)
The reporter failed to mention the irony that Provost Greg Summers, architect of the plan to gut UWSPs liberal arts curriculum, is a US environmental historian who earned his PhD at UW-Madison.
https://www.uwsp.edu/acadaff/Pages/Staff/gsummers.aspx
Members of his own profession have raised concerns about the plan:
https://www.historians.org/news-and-advocacy/statements-and-resolutions-of-support-and-protest/aha-president-expresses-concerns-about-proposed-elimination-of-the-history-major-at-university-of-wisconsin-stevens-point
In this context, Greg’s comparison of the budget cuts to climate change is specious.
At the University of Southern Maine this semester a class on economics and public policy is being taught by statistics faculty, for want of an economist. Statistics professors are lovely people, but economists they are not. When the campus was gutted recently, professors made an outcry but the public was little moved. (And I notice that even the Times can't be bothered with details.) Now I want to work on a PhD while I continue to live in the home I own -- will this mean I must expect a substandard education?
Schools of higher learning, and the critical thought they engender in citizens, pose the biggest long-term threat to the future of conservative authoritarian America. It’s no surprise then that this news is coming out of Wisconsin, which has served for years as the conservative’s test-tube version of the new American Russia.
1
Ignorance of history already affects the well-being of our nation. I despaired during the Bush admninistration that the military and executive and Congressional leaders had so little understanding of the history in the MiddleEast; we live with their folly today. The current administration is not only ignorant but also considers history irrelevant. This is not the time to further weaken the liberal arts in favor of purely vocational programs that will be obsolete in a decade. Students need to learn to think, evaluate, communicate, write, and adapt to new circumstances - skills that come with the liberal arts. Vocational skills can be developed within such learning.
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Any institution with 'university' in its name must enable students to acquire a broad intellect. That necessitates departments such as History, modern foreign languages like Spanish, French, German, Russian and Mandarin, and classical languages like Latin and Greek. That Stevens Point would drop German in a state like Wisconsin, where that is the most common ancestry, is negligent. Outgoing Republican governor Scott Walker and his higher ed budget cuts are partly to blame. Walker himself didn't even finish a bachelor's degree.
A university without history courses is no longer a uiversity. It is a Trade School Such may b e a better option for some but should not be confused with a University degree.
The Liberal Arts are what makes a culture and a society.
Without them, a University/College is just a place to get a training certificate.
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Simple.
Vote out the Republican legislators who cut the education budget.
Vote in new legislators who believe in education.
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My daughter, a college sophomore, had a doctor’s appt. last week. The doctor, who she has only seen twice before (each briefly) asked her what she was majoring in. She told her she was thinking of changing her major to Anthropology. The doctor expressed disapproval and said she never would have allowed any of her children to select this major. She further added, in regard to finding a job, “What are you going to do with that? Study rocks?” I must admit, part of me was glad the doctor said what she did, only because it showed my daughter the often ignorant attitude many people have toward liberal arts degrees, and the reality of the job market. However, the doctor was a terrible persuader and did not use good critical thinking skills as someone with a liberal arts major would have. If anything, what the doctor said just angered and embarrassed my daughter and made her want to dig her heels in more to the idea of majoring in Anthropology. And she said she will find a new doctor.
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Trump exists because 30% of the country is incapable of distinguishing obfuscation from fact, lacks a historical perspective and the intellectual tools to critically analyze what's happening and is being said. Instead these people yield their citizenship responsibility to opportunists including trump, hannity and the Fox crowd. Drop humanities and you may as well close the university.
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Sadly, the demise of liberal arts may also have to do with the perceived indoctrination of left wing ideology by college campuses.
Good overview. Just a specific comment. Why not combine a poly sci major (that they are keeping) with a history major. Both are somewhat dependent on knowledge of the other, and by merging the two any graduate might have double accreditation (state laws might have to be tweaked), double the job opportunities. To say nothing of a broader knowledge base.
There is grave danger in removing liberal arts from curricula.
Example: Our current administration.
Without a knowledge of history, all the business acumen in the world is worthless. As John Dunne so succinctly put it:
"No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were:
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee."
Globalism is not a new concept. Success cannot be measured in dollars alone. And if EVERY business major were required to balance their lust for profit with the side effects of their actions, perhaps our humanity would not be lost in greed.
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Question- "What's Is a University Without a History Major?"
Answer- Trump University
(That was easy.)
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Check your facts re: Maine’s university system. There are 7 campuses by law. It would be a huge deal to do what this article said was done.
The spiritual head of the Republicans throughout the benighted States is none other than the Prnce of Darkness. Don't expect anything but sinister emanations from that source, events and initiatives that are invidious to human life in all their forms and manifestations. Reliance on the base worship of money has blinded millions of adherents to the pernicious effects of the GOP's true spiritual leader who resides in an abode far more tropical than Wisconsin...
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Why do American liberal arts graduates dismiss the creativity required in STEM fields? I received my engineering degree in UK and did not observe the same arrogant and biased opinion in the UK university system that "you need a liberal arts degree to be creative" that is prevalent in the USA.
Because I am an engineer, am I unable to appreciate art, discuss history, enjoy music? Of course not. Am I, and the many engineers I work with, creative in our professional careers? Absolutely, despite not having liberal arts degrees.
Are liberal arts graduates failing to understand science related subjects? The article in today's NYT would suggest that may be an issue https://nyti.ms/2H5TmqK. Should liberal arts degrees in the USA be required to pass some science courses for accreditation?
I applaud Stevens Point for taking a difficult decision that is required to survive due to changing environment it finds itself in. I am sure the future students will still have an excellent university experience, despite the lack of a history department.
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Just because there is no history major doesn’t mean there are not history classes. It’s two different things. The article doesn’t make that clear.
No history? No liberal arts? That's not a university, it's a trade school.
Given the state of US society as reflected in its government, much more liberal arts education is necessary, not less.
Somehow dominant thinking has evolved to see education as all about serving the economy, and that a goal of a well educated citizenry is an extravagance the US cannot afford.
Serious rethinking of the role of education is necessary, but would need leadership that can convince the public that the strength of a country is not the military, but the health, wisdom and vitality of its citizenry.
Certainly not all students need to have four years of college.
There are many wonderul andrewarding career paths that do not require a for year degree.
Because the US attempts to be a democracy in a very complicated world, its citizenry needs better education.
Probably two years after high school should be free and required. Though it is almost laughable to imagine that the US would ever prioritize this.
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Taking the liberal arts, history, etc., out of rural education is going to drastically increase and solidify the cultural division in this country. Young people will come out of those schools with moneymaking skills, and no knowledge or interest in the world outside of their own communities. It will be beyond the wildest dreams of Steve Bannon and the worst fears of many of us.
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@Joe Because tech jobs and science are all insular?
Because learning that western civilization is bad may not be good for a country whose greatest successes were the focus on liberty, equal protection and hard work, not coercion, special interest and demanding free stuff as rights.
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@Joe
What else can many people in rural areas really do except focus on immediate moneymaking opportunities? Much of rural America is economically depressed and is experiencing cultural stagnation. The opiod epidemic is largely a rural issue, the loss of the traditional manufacturing base that sustained the middle-class in these communities has been hollowed out by globalization & automation. These people need vocation and they need it fast, because the depression of rural America isn't going to slow down as we continue to march into a more automated and globalized future.
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I’m not sure the Steve Bannon crowd is coming out of a school......
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Forty years ago while pursuing a degree in Business, I used my electives to take history, sociology, and psychology courses. The development of critical thinking skills is not limited to liberal arts courses. If eliminating history as a major removes all history courses from the curriculum, that is a problem.
Learning does not stop when you graduate from college. In recent years, I have read a number of biographies and history books focusing on the era around WWI, a subject that was rarely covered in my schooling.
A large portion of the problem with student debt seems to be the result of students selecting a major without an end game in mind. One example was a student incurring $100,000 of debt to obtain a degree in sociology. After graduation, the only jobs requiring a sociology degree paid $30,000 a year. The number one obligation a student has is to be self supporting as an adult and not to accumulate debt that ruins their financial life forever.
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With the cost of public education at every level as high as it is, we need to move past the idea that anyone who wants to partake of college should be allowed to self-select. There is no reason that we cannot turn education into an efficient platform to place the right number of capable people in the right tracks based on current and projected business needs. If 10% of jobs are in basic retail, then 10% of students should be in programs aimed at competency in that area. Testing and career assignments need to begin early and coursework should be limited to the amount of time it takes to become proficient, combined with the ability to actually perform the work. A fifth grader, for instance, might well be over educated to unload trucks but would likely be unable to perform such labor. My grandfather was pulled from school in a coal company town when he was 12 to work in a factory. It wasn’t until he was 16 that he was able to be moved to work in the mines. Same logic here. In addition, the economy needs the ability to relocate people based on need - think unemployed miners reassigned from West Virginia to a California farm or unemployed from Detroit to the BMW plant in South Carolina.
A good high school education should be sufficient foundation to begin training for specific jobs. Expecting the great public universities to replace liberal education by vocational training is a perversion of their historical roles, a gigantic subsidy to employers, and an incalculable loss to our society.
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It is absolutely possible to do both: get a good Liberal Arts foundation and also be prepared for a career. Look for a college or university that has a liberal arts general education core and then select courses, internships and practicum classes that allow you to develop skills.
I don't want a physician who knows nothing of sociology, nor an attorney who has no background in other cultures, nor an accountant who knows no history, nor a contractor who has no knowledge of art.
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Chancellor Bernie Patterson's salary is $260K annually. Provost Greg Summers, $180K. Google, "Who makes what at the University of Wisconsin?" and see the database at Madison.com if you'd like to see any others.
The dirty secret of higher education is that for the most part, we have replaced faculty and great teaching with expensive administrators and mediocre administrating. There are more programs and initiatives and task forces (and buildings!), but the same learning - at quadruple the cost.
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The most important part of the college curriculum is a firm rooting and understanding of the liberal arts: the humanities, sciences, social sciences, arts and physical education. A well conceivedt distribution requirement prepares students for their major, for successful pursuit of s career, for better decision making as a parent, colleague and citizen. It provides perspective and forms the basis of critical and ethical thinking. Dropping the options in the liberal arts robs the student of the very knowledge. we associate with being college educated. If anything, invest in the distribution requirement and build strong trade and community college programs for career training And you can clearly in our President the dangers when one severely lacks knowledge and perspective in history, Civics, art, English, science, well, you know, just about everything
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Almost every day I read a article in publications as warm and fuzzy as Harvard Business School and MIT that call for an increase in education in the humanities because business desperately needs the skills that a humanities education provides - writing, speaking, critical thinking, logical analysis, etc.
I had a 35+ year career in IT. My undergraduate degree was Comparative Religion. The highest complement I received in all those years came from a business leader who said " You are an IT guy who doesn't think like an IT guy. You actually listen to and offer solutions to our problems." I firmly believe that learning to decipher 20th century existentialist theology and neo-platonist philosophy made the analysis of 90% of business problems simple.
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"And under Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, state funding declined and a mandatory tuition freeze made it hard for the college to make up the difference."
In NY, SUNY faced the same exact situation. In its heyday, SUNY was funded at 80% from the state; now it's about 15%. Plus, tuition dollars generated by the small campuses are given to the larger university research centers; totally misguided.
They've forced small state colleges to act like private colleges, but also prevent them from raising tuition to support themselves!
Republicans don't understand that they've created a negative-feedback loop:
- They decry the fact that small towns are dying; but then they destroy the biggest employer in small towns! This also has a ripple effect on hurting other businesses in the area (e.g restaurants, motels, tech support, office supplies, etc.).
- They decry that people want to move away from small towns; but then they destroy not only jobs ain the communities, but also the institutions that bring cultural and sports events, makiing the area more attractive to stay in.
- The ripple effect then spreads to healthcare and eldercare; hospitals can't attract good doctors/nurses to struggling rural areas.
Etc., etc.; the downward spiral feeds itself.
In the rural area where I live, the two small towns (ca. 10,000 residents) that have colleges aren't exactly thriving; but they're doing a lot better than the surrounding smaller towns.
Republicans are incredibly short-sighted!
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The importance of a liberal arts education has screamed at us every day since Nov. 8 2016. My guess as a history grad is that few of my peers voted for the reality show "star" who now sits in the White House.
It's really fashionable among alt-right, Tea Party types to carry a copy of the Constitution around with them - kind of like evangelicals toting bibles. The thing is, few understand what they're reading.
The Constitution cannot be functionally understood without understanding 18th Century American and British history. It can't be understood without understanding who and what influenced the people sitting in that Philly hall in the summer of 1787. It can't be understood without understanding the circumstances of life, culture, in 1787 and the years leading up to it.
A third of Americans seem incapable of understanding the threat that Donald Trump and his enablers are posing to our constitutional republic.
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Let me guess: the fine citizens of the rural counties around Stevens Point have consistently voted Republican over the past 10 years, in which case, they are getting what they voted for: know your place, don't ask questions, fit yourself to capitalism's unyielding dictates, and keep the taxes low for rich people, so that there's no money to invest in your community. The dramatic plunge in state funds going to higher education is Scott Walker and the Republican legislature of WI's legacy. They ran on it! Stevens Point campus is doomed not because it offers a history major, but because the community around it doesn't value education. The communities in WI that do value education, Milwaukee, Madison, those cities to which "young families" have so predictably fled, have two tangible signs of their values: vibrant universities and Democratic representatives.
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How about cutting the waste of admin positions? How about not viewing these schools as money-making machines? I will admit that some of the woes the Humanities departments face are self-induced as they still struggle to slough off the abysmal farce of postmodernism (replacing it now with a variation of poststructuralism's newish historicist flavoring), but it remains that the Humanities are the core of the college curriculum. Actual interdisciplinary cross-pollination would be welcome and perhaps crucial, but Humanities scholars think that interdisciplinary means (for example) 'literature + cultural anthropology' which often share the same theoretical underpinnings. Anyway, who can afford to spend $100k for an English degree which will yield...? Which job? What career?
It's rural Wisconsin that needs to reinvent itself, not UW Stevens Point. The voters outside of Madison have been voting for their own backwardness and impoverishment for years, and shouldn't be shocked in the least that this is happening.
But at least they've helped some fabulously wealthy people maintain and expand their advantages over the lower classes. It would be a shame if they had to suffer.
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The liberal arts are based on critical thinking. Considering who’s in the Oval Office, we need more colleges turning out voters with degrees in the liberal arts otherwise you’re left with nothing but emotion as policy and politics as entertainment. The liberal arts is the antidote to Trump, it’s no accident there have been no concerts, recitals or readings in the White House during his pr side cry.
Lack of historical context is how we got here, with a con man in the White House and workers who forgot what created a middle class in the first place, organized labor plus a high tax rate on the rich post-ww2 to fund education, infrastructure, etc. Cutting history degrees is one way to keep the working class in the dark (ages). All workers need to know our history. And what we know is, when business tries to run anything besides business, only profit matters, not people.