Calls from the increasingly radical right wing to eliminate university programs in the humanities that can't "sustain themselves financially" make sense only if you imagine that, say, a Classics or History department is an incredibly expensive program to run.
Such programs generally aren't, in pretty much everything from the pay of humanities professors vs. salaries in business or medical school, to the cost of conducting research and classroom equipment. Seriously: my university buys me a new computer maybe every 6 or 7 years, I get maybe $500 per year in research and travel funds, a couple hundred to order books from the library, and... that's pretty much it. The extent of my fancy classroom equipment is whiteboards, a computer, and an overhead projector. True, my colleagues and I don't bring in big-dollar grants when compared to my colleagues in the sciences, but we don't have to in order to break even. And we don't attract as many students as, say, pre-med (although our numbers are quite healthy) but then again, we don't have to attract as many students in order to contribute our share towards the university running in the black. We're actually kind of a bargain.
Those calls do, however, make all kinds of sense if your goal is ideological right-wing purity, disguised under the laughably thin excuse of "budgetary constraint."
Shakesville is run as a safe space. First-time commenters: Please read Shakesville's Commenting Policy and Feminism 101 Section before commenting. We also do lots of in-thread moderation, so we ask that everyone read the entirety of any thread before commenting, to ensure compliance with any in-thread moderation. Thank you.
blog comments powered by Disqus