Prof Watson to Yudof on Humanities in U Budgets

7/29/2019 Prof Watson to Yudof on Humanities in U Budgets

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December 14, 2009

Dear President Yudof:

Philosophy, Art History, English Lit, Musicology the whole Humanities family are

just quaint, elderly relatives that the real, serious, modern university (consisting of

technological researchers and the professional schools) subsidizes out of charitable

tradition, but can hardly be expected to pamper during difficult times. You made that

clear on national television a few weeks ago: Many of our, if I can put it this way,

businesses are in good shape. We're doing very well there. Our hospitals are full, our

medical business, our medical research, the patient care. So, we have this core

problem: Who is going to pay the salary of the English department? We have to have it.

Who's going to pay it in sociology, in the humanities? And that's where we're running

into trouble.

Lets leave aside for now the question of whether these core educational functions

are something other than an annoying peripheral obligation that a public university is

stuck with. However wrongheaded I may believe your remarks are about educational

values, you and many others are just as wrong factually about economic value.

According to the experts recently cited in the New York Times (September 4,

2009), An English student, however, is generally a profit center. Theyre paying for the

chemistry major and the music major.The little ugly facts about cross-subsidies are

inflammatory, so they get papered over.

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Papered over, for example, by counting what patients pay for treatment as income

earned by a medical center, but not counting what students pay for literature courses as

income earned by the Humanities. Then of course the hospital looks like a much better

business, and you will appoint those productive health-care administrators to a death-

panel on lost causes such as the English major.

If, however, you calculate by the latest UCLA student credit hours, fee levels, and

total general fund expenditures (as on the attached spreadsheet), you will find the

Humanities -- unlike the Physical Sciences, which come up several million dollars short

in this category -- generating over $59 million in student fee revenue, while spending

only $53.5 million. The entire teaching staff of Writing Programs, which is absolutely

essential to the universitys educational mission, has been sent firing notices; yet the

spreadsheet shows that program generating $4.3 million dollars in fee revenue, at a

cost of only $2.4 million.

So the answer to Whos going to pay the salary of the English department? is

that the English department earns its own salaries, and more, through the fees paid by

its many loyal students. These profits will only increase as student fees increase; and

they would be even greater if we figured in a share of the over-enrollment subsidies due

from the state.

This isnt an eccentric calculation. Of the twenty-one units at the University of

Washington, the Humanities and (to a lesser degree) the Social Sciences are the only

ones that generate more tuition income than 100% of their total expenditure (see the

chart below). The President of the AAUP recently cited a University of Illinois report

showing that a large humanities department like English produces a substantial net

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profit, whereas units such as Engineering and Agriculture run at a loss (http://www.cary-

nelson.org/nelson/corpuniv.html). The widely respected Delaware Study of Instructional

Costs and Productivity shows the same pattern, as does a 2005 volume from the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences called Tracking Changes in the Humanities:

Essays on Finance and Education.

In fact, in the 1990s, UCLA invested huge amounts of money setting up the RCM

system, used at many universities to evaluate all the real costs of different units and the

revenue they actually produce, to improve the fairness and transparency of the

budgeting process. When the initial run of these intricate spreadsheets showed that the

College of Letters and Science was the most efficient user and producer of money, and

the health sciences the least efficient, that accounting system was abandoned. I have

no illusions that the UC medical executives who evidently have your ear will be more

receptive to this inconvenient truth than they were then. However, you seem determined

to revive the worst aspect of RCM making faculty feel they are competing with each

other in a zero-sum business model for education without giving us its key benefit,

which is a recognition of how valuable the College and its teaching actually are.

We produce this profit despite the irreducibly labor-intensive aspects of much

work in the Humanities, where instruction must engage actively and progressively with

the particular attributes of each developing voice and mind in a classroom or in an

essay. Class-size therefore cannot swell in many of our departments without destroying

our essential pedagogical function, any more than the sciences could function without

laboratories.

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University budgets are so immensely complicated a whole ecosystem of indirect

costs and fee remissions and infrastructures that my amateur perspective is limited,

and people in other fields would surely emphasize other numbers (Im sure Sociology

could show that you underestimate its cash-flow as well). Were all in this leaking, listing

ship together, and the Humanities will have to bear some of the pain of baling it out.

But, as Jane V. Wellman, Executive Director of the Delta Project on

Postsecondary Education Costs, observes, cutting humanities is penny wise and

pound foolish. Even though scientists bring in research money, research grants

never pay for their full costs, so they actually erode resources from the general

instructional program. And cutting budgets further in the courses that are already the

lowest cost is nutty.

Because the discretionary budget in Humanities goes almost entirely for teaching

staff, were facing an instructional loss far larger than the other units. We would have to

fire 67% of our lecturers and TAs, with a resulting collapse of everything an education in

the Humanities is supposed to offer.

Nobody would consider that an acceptable outcome unless they share your

unfounded assumptions. But the Gould Commission you appointed to plan UCs way

through the budget crisis reportedly did not include a single person from any Humanities

field until faculty protests compelled some additions. The myth that scientific

researchers always subsidize the Humanities was blithely repeated at this groups

public forum at UCLA just last week, without challenge -- and without a single humanist

on the podium; and your official UC budget-crisis website warns that A federal grant for

laser beam research cant be used to fund a deficit in the English Department

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(http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/budgetmyths.pdf). The top UC

administrative positions and planning committees are now dominated by people from

technology and medicine, who -- without any conscious bias or ill-will -- are naturally

susceptible to this complacent belief, this well-known fact that isnt true. These are

highly paid people, and a recent analysis shows that total compensation for people

earning over $200,000 at UC has increased 80% in two years; again, there is inevitably

a tribal tendency to believe that the costs of people like themselves are vital and

appropriate, while others (such as expository writing teachers) are welfare cases who

need to have their belts tightened. The chair of the UC-wide subcommittee on education

and curriculum is a law dean who has never taught a single undergraduate class, so the

costs of wiping out our lecturers and TAs may be practically invisible to him. The result

of all this, for students and faculty in the Humanities, is essentially taxation without

representation. The result for UCLA, if this goes forward, is a drastic loss of educational

quality that will soon turn into a net loss of money as well.

No sane citizenry measures its public elementary schools by whether they pay for

themselves immediately and in dollars. We shouldnt have to make a balance-sheet

argument for the Humanities, either, at least not until the balance-sheet includes the

value, to the student and to the state, of expanded powers of personal empathy and

cross-cultural respect, of communication through language and other symbolic systems,

of the capacity to tolerate and interpret complexity and to appreciate the many forms of

artistic beauty, and the capacity to contemplate morality and generate creative,

independent thought.

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That grandiose description surely reveals my own tribal loyalties, and I dont mean

to pick fights with my brilliant and dedicated colleagues in the sciences, when really its

the shared project of a broad and meaningful UCLA undergraduate education thats at

risk. And, youre right, the gravest wounds to this greatest of state universities have

come from the state legislature itself, which imagines it can continue to make massive

cuts in what it pays for educating Californians without hurting California.

But when you start talking about UC as if it were just another business rather than

a great collective legacy, by making English professors the scapegoat -- somehow the

sole cause -- for the universitys $500 million dollar operating deficit, you need to hear

some other voices. Your assumption that the Humanities are a vestigial parasite within

an otherwise self-sufficient institutional body is dangerously wrong.

Thanks for your attention.

Sincerely,

Robert N. Watson

Distinguished Professor of English, UCLA

Associate Vice-Provost for Educational Innovation, 2004-9Past Chair, Faculty of Letters and SciencePast Chair, Department of EnglishGold Shield Faculty Prize Winner, 2006-8Distinguished Teaching Award Winner, 2000Guggenheim, NEH, ACLS and UC Presidents Fellow

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Prof Watson to Yudof on Humanities in U Budgets