It would be fair to say that the headline of, “a university is proposing massive cuts to the humanities” it not exactly breaking news. For the past few decades, it has been exactly the opposite: so routine as to be unremarkable. Some news items do hit closer to home than others, though, which may explain why I at least noticed that the University of Chicago is planning a “restructuring” of its arts and humanities programs. It will come as no surprise that what is meant by “restructuring” will be more accurately, “destruction.” The U of C has always had a flair for the ironic.
What these changes will actually involve is, to put it shortly, much less language instruction and fewer discrete academic departments. The existing 15 departments in the division will be condensed to 8, and while the U of C may view this as a means to “envision new kinds of structures and organization,” I suspect it will mean fewer academic support staff, reduced hiring (if any) within consolidated departments, and increased class sizes. It would almost certainly mean, per the article in the Maroon, that highly productive and impressive departments such as the Department of South Asian Languages and Cultures will be forcibly absorbed into new conglomerations.
As far as languages, students going to what is supposed to be one of the most prestigious and cerebral universities in the country will have to temper their expectations with regard to serious language work in anything deemed too obscure (as it were):
According to the languages working group’s charge sheet, members were asked to discuss what criteria to use when determining whether a class should be offered, whether there was “no longer [a] need to teach” certain languages, and if “partnerships with corporations or other organizations”1 could support language instruction at UChicago.
“Language instruction at this extraordinary scope is also expensive, and cannot be treated in isolation — investments in language instruction must be balanced with other divisional needs and opportunities,” the document stated.
This should be shocking coming from the institution of James Henry Breasted: languages, which require a lecturer and a chalkboard — too expensive? If there is any University that would be open to, no, demand, the teaching of obscure languages for the advancement of the humanistic enterprise, surely it must be the U of C? But this argument for the broader vision of human civilization is no match for whining about Trump:
Financial pressures driving the reorganization efforts include a “proposed endowment tax,” “policies around international students,” and “changes to graduate student loans” from President Donald Trump’s administration, [Dean of the Division of the Arts and Humanities, Deborah] Nelson wrote. She also expressed concern about “volatility in the American economy, the impact of a recession, and its cascading effects on philanthropy.”
One might think that the whole point of an endowment reaching certain esteemed amounts is to not have to worry about month-to-month changes in the S&P 500 (remember what I said about the U of C and irony), but this is not the real issue. Perceptive readers of this Maroon article will have noticed this important qualifying sentence:
Along with these new financial challenges, the University is still dealing with the effects of the $221 million deficit it acquired while trying to assert itself as a peer to older and better-funded universities through expansive financial aid offerings and large-scale construction projects.
In other words, the University is blaming current events for longstanding trends of irresponsible spending in pursuit of quixotic goals which are now bearing bitter fruit for the segments of the University least involved in such projects.2
This is not to say that the U of C has been immune from scrutiny from the current administration, and it is highly likely that continued uncertainty in NSF funding will have major impacts on the University’s research goals. If said scrutiny proves to be less intense than that being leveled against Columbia or UCLA, it may be at least in part because the University’s trustees were not completely asleep at the wheel when it came to hedging their 2024 bets. Credit where credit is due: if you are doing research that is a matter of extreme medical or civilizational importance, you have a responsibility to think beyond the next 2-year political cycle and do what it takes to maintain your work for generations.3 One thing that also makes it easier to weather short-term disruptions is not attempting to radically change the nature of your institution and take on massive debt in the meantime, but I am repeating myself.
On that note, when thinking of Columbia, UCLA, or the other institutions dealing with more federal oversight than they might like: were the universities really not prepared for this outcome? Think back to the 2024 election: in the lead up, though Joe Biden was able to claim a number of legislative accomplishments, his approval ratings were stubbornly low. With his candidacy collapsing after the June 27th debate, Kamala Harris was given all of ~4 months to develop a compelling pitch to voters. The polls throughout 2024 were tight; the Trump movement continued to have genuine support. Trump had selected as vice presidential candidate and possible successor a young, intelligent Midwestern politician who had discussed his feelings about the state of American universities in no uncertain terms.
Set aside however you feel politically about all of the parties above, because it doesn’t ultimately matter. If you were part of a university’s leadership team over these months, can you possibly imagine making no contingency plan for a Trump/Vance victory? For universities — who have an incredible responsibility to this country, who really do carry out a great deal of fascinating research,4 and who (despite their protestations of their own powerlessness) have a major impact on public discourse — the obvious short-term imperative was to establish or further develop a relationship with the GOP to ensure continuity of operations in the event of a Trump/Vance administration. This becomes complicated if (and this is institutionally dependent) you have staked a claim as being fundamentally opposed to the Trump vision of the world, but the upper reaches of university of administration should, if they are worth their salt, have the sort of political operators who can overcome such minor inconveniences.
As the universities continue, in various ways, to accommodate the demands of the administration (justified or not), we are going to be treated to a succession of pieces about the imperative of the universities to forcefully articulate their vision for their role in society and refuse to capitulate. I am afraid I am a bit of a pessimist when it comes to their respective futures, because if these universities have the smartest people in the room [I know, I know, “sic”], you might have expected their leadership teams to have considered before the spring of 2025 that the opposition party in the United States might win an election (just as the parties’ fortunes might well reverse two to four years later). You might also expect them to have resisted over-extending themselves beyond their core missions so that temporary disruptions to one area of funding would not hamstring the institution as a whole.5 While there is a certain schadenfreude in seeing ever-high-handed academic administrators apparently not realize what Congressional inquiries actually do and prepare appropriately, it also does not bode well for those of us who would like to see the major engines of human knowledge production in this country continue to hum along in any recognizable fashion.
The Little Things Do Still Matter
Here is an observation that may seem like a bit of a reach, but which I think is at least tangential to this topic: I feel that a lot of the universities have stopped sweating the small stuff. What I mean by this is that they have begun to consider day-to-day concerns — smooth running of low-level administrative procedures, core college teaching responsibilities, appropriate operational support staffing — fundamentally low priority and not worthy of attention. These pale in comparison to major fundraising initiatives, acquiring large federal and private grants, and construction projects to quixotically pretend to be Harvard or Yale, you see.
Some of this is built in to how large the universities have become: if you are a major administrator of a multi-billion dollar university, you are going to be more concerned with multi-million dollar grant opportunities than the concerns of low-level staffers. Perhaps we can say that these issues are structural, that the universities have simply grown out of their charming pasts and we should treat these large and hierarchical operations accordingly. But I would argue that a situation where structural issues demand that so much attention is focused on high-profile fundraising and grant procurement that daily, operational, on-the-ground matters are neglected is a good way to lose focus of core priorities in such a way that you suddenly find yourself unable to justify the existence of large swaths of your own university. This would seem to pose a problem when political representatives begin to ask you to justify the existence of large swaths of your university.
A strange thing that you may notice if you are an undergraduate or graduate student at a prestigious university for enough years is how shabby the daily operations can be. It is an odd experience to be at one of the guiding lights of American intellectualism and hear, for example, that many of your colleagues’ paychecks during the previous pay period were completely inaccurate. I have had colleagues who have applied to administrative positions at Ivy League universities and received emails back littered with typos. These are the sorts of things you might reasonably expect a prestigious, polished university to be able to handle. But while there are many cases of individual administrators who maintain a high level of professionalism (of course), I am really talking here about a trickle-down culture of carelessness.6
To put on my “high school athletic team assistant coach” hat for a second, I think it is a risky thing to start saying that relatively “minor” parts of a large operation can be treated carelessly because they are less important than the main event. Anyone who has participated in competitive sports knows that, short of being a true prodigy, you do actually have to practice each motion as though it is the game. It is actually very hard to cut corners day-to-day and then suddenly act differently when the stakes are high. It is a corny cliché to say that you play the way you practice, but like many corny clichés, it also happens to be completely true.
Of course, the rebuttal would be that the issues I’ve raised in this last section are minor, irrelevant, or petty,7 that my experience is too limited, that the higher levels of the University are rightly more focused on higher-level matters, that faculty members who raise doubts about the stewardship of the universities don’t have the whole picture. Maybe so — maybe this is too much of a focus on the little things. But the severe financial pressures facing the U of C would seem to suggest that the “big” things have not been handled competently for some time — not remotely. And I wonder if this experience is shared by those who have deep experience at other institutions.
After all, looking around at things now: how has not worrying about the little things been working out for the universities?
An institution with the legacy of the University of Chicago exploring private outsourcing for language instruction is truly a sign of the times. Who needs a skilled instructor who has been teaching for years when you have Duolingo?
One might wonder if, had the University maintained their original goal of being a graduate-focused institution with a smaller, intense, and quirky undergraduate college — and hence less debt-laden by virtue of not spending beyond their means — they would have been less exposed to the political repercussions falling upon the peers they desperately hoped to emulate. Ironies abound.
I can think of other wealthy, long-enduring institutions where this has been the case.
There are critics of the universities who tend to speak about all professors as a uniform body, but I don’t think this is quite right. Certainly there are tenured or tenure-track professors who carry out frivolous and self-indulgent research projects, or who seem to view their main responsibility as carrying out bizarre political (re-)education projects. But there are many people in the field who are committed to the charge of academic work and who do very serious and rigorous research and teach at a high level. As with any professional field, we are not talking about a monolith.
Not only was a Trump victory perfectly predictable, but short-term economic disruptions at regular intervals should really be expected, regardless. If it wasn’t Trump, it would have been something else. He was the expression of an inevitability.
I once had a delightfully Kafkaesque experience near the end of my graduate work related to the graduate student unionization efforts at U of C. Near the end of my time there, a union election was to be held. I was largely checked out of the whole thing by virtue of a) myopically trying to finish my dissertation, but more importantly, b) not actively teaching, and hence being sure that I was not eligible to vote in said unionization effort given the way the union drive was organized. In other words, I was not exactly an activated political being at the time.
This made it a particular surprise when I received an email from the University indicating that not only was I eligible to vote, but that I ought to, given how important such a vote would be to the University’s future. Setting my own political incoherence aside, I do believe in maintaining a certain civic duty, so I promptly arrived at my voting place at the day of the vote, spurred on by the University stating that I was an eligible voter. At the voting station, the University’s observer promptly challenged my vote as being one of an ineligible voter. K.’s attempts to enter the Castle unsuccessful once more.
I am sure there were some who would say this was all a grand scheme by Machiavellian administrators. I prefer to take a simpler tack: Would you trust an institution that can’t figure out how to run a mail merge?
If you have ever worked in functional and successful professional environments, you know that even the higher-level leadership not only do not neglect the “small stuff,” but recognize that it is extremely importation to maintain an institution-wide expectation that no task is considered too small to do carefully and correctly.