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Proposed cuts to the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Vermont have sparked a backlash from thousands of faculty members and students. But with the university facing a budget shortfall of almost $28 million over the next three years, administrators have signaled that they’re unlikely to change course before those cuts become final.
The 23 programs slated for termination are mainly in the humanities, and include majors in religion, classics and some languages. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, UVM is among several research universities facing budget issues that are moving to cut arts and sciences programs.
Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, a religion professor and the associate director of the UVM Humanities Center, said humanities professionals have been discussing for years how to make their work more visible as institutions favor STEM — science, technology, engineering and math programs.
“One of the best metaphors I’ve heard is that the humanities are like air,” she said. “You don’t notice it until the wind blows. But if you didn’t have it, you’d be real, real unlucky.”
Morgenstein Fuerst said these programs help students think critically across disciplines and respond to current events, like this year’s wave of racial justice protests. “To say that you want to cut humanities departments, where that is where you learn about those issues broadly, I think you’re just destroying the university,” Morgenstein Fuerst said. “I don’t think there’ll be a university left.”
**Podcast transcript**
Katherine Brennan is a religion major at UVM. And last week she got an email during one of her classes that basically said in a matter of years, that class wouldn’t exist.
Katherine Brennan: And my professor actually stayed on our Teams call a little bit later after class for anyone that wanted to stay. Because he had just found out himself that the religion major and department were going to be cut. I remember when we were sitting there, and I was listening to him talk it out and explain it to us — because he had the same information that we did, so he was trying to answer questions without knowing much more than we did — I just remember seeing red. I was just so furious, and really disappointed with the university.
Katherine said she hung up from her class and went straight to change.org to start a petition protesting the cut.
Katherine Brennan: It was kind of a blur. It happened really fast. It was like, “this needs to happen right this second, I need to get this started now.” So I began the petition at that moment. And within an hour of finding out after my class, I had it up. And it began.
Why that reaction? Why was this so meaningful for you?
Katherine Brennan: The religion department, as with so many students, alumni, and just people, the religion department at UVM has been really fundamental in shaping who I am. I came to UVM as a political science major and kind of realized that that wasn’t for me. And I really wasn’t sure where to go from there. Because I was unhappy with what happened with the classes that I was taking. And I was a first year student. So I was thinking, “Okay, do I really want to be here? Is there another school somewhere else that can fulfill the needs that I have for an education program?” And that’s when I took a religion class just for fun, And that class was it for me. I almost immediately changed my major.
Wow.
Katherine Brennan: And I have been involved in the religion department ever since second semester, my first year.
What was it that resonated with you?
Katherine Brennan: What resonated with me most in the beginning was that with political science, it’s very cut and dry. It’s a lot of theory, and people aren’t really centered in political science. It’s more government and that kind of stuff. So when I took a religion class — it was a class on comparing religions — it was all about the people. It was the same study of politics, and sociology, and study of societies and why things are the way they are, but it was people-centered. I just absolutely loved that. Because it wasn’t depressing, or it didn’t feel hopeless, because people felt real. And like real actors of change.
Katherine’s graduating next spring. Right now she’s applying to law school and hoping to get into advocacy for religious minorities. She said without a religion major, this career path wouldn’t exist for her.
Katherine Brennan: I wouldn’t have stayed at UVM without religion. I don’t want a generic liberal arts degree. I don’t think anybody does. So when you’re taking the emphasis off the majors as being really important to students, it’s kind of confusing. Especially for somebody like me, who finds their passion and career paths within that study.
Do you think these changes are going to drive students away?
Katherine Brennan: I know that it would have driven me away. If the religion department had been cut before I got there, I wouldn’t have stayed at UVM.
I know from people signing my petition, when they leave a comment, some prospective students or parents of prospective students are discussing their discomfort with the direction that UVM is going in. Parents are commenting things like, “I don’t know if I want to send my kid to an institution that’s undercutting the humanities before my kid even gets there.” So yeah, I think that absolutely. And if there is anyone that was interested in religion beforehand, they’re not going to come.
Katherine’s petition is one of many from campus groups that don’t want to see these cuts go through. Religion is one of 12 majors on the chopping block, along with 11 minors and 4 graduate programs.
These cuts would all affect the College of Arts and Sciences. Administrators say this is not because UVM isn’t invested in liberal arts education — it’s because the university needs to save money. Our reporter Katya Schwenk has been following the story.
Katya Schwenk: The first thing that they’ll point to is what they’re calling a structural deficit. This coming year, the College of Arts and Sciences says it has an $8.6 million deficit that they’re contending with. And this has been a consistent thing even before the pandemic. That’s another line that the university is saying is: These cuts are not just in response to this crisis, they’re in response to years of budget issues.
The faculty union contests the specifics around why we have these issues. But it is true that they’re in a financial crunch right.
The second thing is that all of the programs that are being cut are seeing pretty low enrollment numbers. And that’s sort of a simple metric to look at kind of a complicated issue. The reality of how many students are taking courses is not always reflected by how many are enrolled in a particular major. But it’s true that all of the 23 programs have graduated, over the last three years, an average of less than seven students a year, and some of them an average of more like one student a year in the major. And so UVM is making the argument that the enrollment decline is because of declining student interest in these programs, and now it’s not sustainable anymore.
They’re saying this is really just a data-driven decision. They’re doing this not based on evaluating effectiveness of these programs or anything, it’s just: this is what the numbers are telling us.
Katya Schwenk: Yes, the data part was a big focus of how they presented it initially. Talking to professors about this whose programs are being cut, they’re really frustrated that only one somewhat simple metric is being used to look at the impact or the reality of these programs. For example, the number of students enrolled in courses, even if they weren’t in the major, was not taken into account. Some of these programs, in their entry level courses, have hundreds of students enrolled. That’s the case in the religion major, for example. And so I think there is some frustration with that the use of that metric. But they did look pretty in-depth at these enrollment numbers, even if it was the sort of limited focus, and they looked at how they’ve been changing over the years, and that was how they made the call.
Patricia Prelock: We can’t devote a significant number of faculty to a major where we have less than five students graduating on average, over three years, each year.
You were on this conference call Monday where the provost, Patricia Prelock, defended these actions that they’re taking. What did she say that stuck out to you?
Katya Schwenk: I think the biggest point that she made was, this idea that even if, for example, a major in German is being cut, which is one of the suggested programs to be cut, that students will still have access to the language. They’ll be able to minor in German, they’ll still have access to the professors — barring potential faculty cuts, which we don’t really know about yet.
Patricia Prelock: It’s kind of the misinformation that’s out there — that we’re eliminating religion, we’re eliminating classics or eliminating geology, there’s no opportunity for you to have any of that content. And that’s not necessarily true.
That was sort of the line that she was giving us: Just because we don’t have a major, or even the department and these programs, doesn’t mean that the content is going away. But that being said, I think some faculty are still pretty worried about being scattered across the school, and what that could mean for their programs.
We’ve seen, over the past couple of weeks, the level of pushback here. A lot of students and faculty members and the faculty union seem to just not really be buying this rationale that the university is putting out about this. What’s their reasoning here? Why are they so forcefully trying to push back against these proposals?
Katya Schwenk: A few things. I think from the faculty and student perspective, this has been something that they’ve been fighting for a fairly long time. So this is not something that’s new. They see as a pattern within this administration a sort of disinvestment in the liberal arts. They’ve seen a hiring freeze across the college, and they’ve seen other suggested cuts to faculty and programming. So I think that they see this as sort of part of a sort of agenda around restructuring education at UVM.
The second thing is they contest the specifics of how the university is deciding this. For example, the faculty union has put out statements on their website saying the reason that enrollment is declining in the college at all is because at least partly, the university is accepting fewer students into the College of Arts and Sciences, that they’ve reduced that. I think they see the administration as having a little bit more control over these issues than they are letting on. It’s complicated, and I think that faculty also admit that in some of these fields, interest is genuinely just decreasing among students. But I think that there is this sense that the humanities have been neglected. And now on top of that the university is sort of cutting the humanities and saying that they’re cutting them because they’re unsustainable.
One of the professors speaking out against these cuts is Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst. Ilyse teaches in the religion department, and she’s the associate director of the UVM Humanities Center. Ilyse said she first got word of the proposal on a conference call with CAS Dean Bill Falls about an hour before the announcement went out to the full college.
Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst: We were really surprised, and hurt, and angry and upset. All of the emotions.
What do you do when you get off a call like that?
Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst: I mean, most of us just hung out on the call and kind of just stared at each other for a minute. And then we went into planning mode, right? Because this is a proposal — if we take the university at their word, that it is a proposal, then that means that there’s space for pushback. And so we’ve been working, frankly, nonstop on what a counter proposal, or a proposal 2.0, looks like, that preserves faculty employment, but equally important, preserves what we and we uniquely at the university offer students — which is namely religious diversity.
I wonder if you could tell me specifically how this proposal, as presented so far, would impact you? What would actually happen to your position?
Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst: It’s a good question. We are in the midst of all these questions about process, and what happens. I’m a tenured faculty member. And so contractually, the university is required to make every effort to rehouse or re-entrench me, which could look like switching departments or switching roles. It could also look like firing me and getting rid of that position altogether. Because the reason you eliminate departments is so that you can fire faculty. That is not a stated part of the game plan. But that’s the only way to get rid of faculty lines. And so it doesn’t take 20/20 vision to see that between the lines that are written.
I work on Islam, and race and racialization. Where does that get taught outside of a religion department? I think that’s a real question. I think there are places that could be taught. But what does it mean to not have sustained attention or methodology or a cohort of students who have taken an intro class and then can take an intermediate level class? All of that is concerning as I do my job — my award-winning job — on campus.
In my role as humanities associate director, it’s alarming to see that a number of these cuts that are supposedly data-driven are only actually targeting humanities and languages. So if you look at the data that Bill Falls provided, there are a number of departments that fall below the threshold of, say, number of majors on average. But the ones that are being targeted for elimination or consolidation — with the exception of geology, which is also a major loss — they’re humanities and languages departments.
The Humanities Center put out a statement yesterday, Dec. 9, where we made it pretty clear how we feel about that. And one of the lines that we have in there is that budgets are not apolitical. That choice, a data-driven choice to then cherrypick from the data which departments should be consolidated, are not viable, are not worth investing in — that’s a values statement. And it’s our position that that shows us that UVM does not value the humanities.
You spoke to the Chronicle of Higher Ed this week in a story that talked about similar cuts that were happening at colleges and universities across the country. It seems like there is this broader trend of these types of programs bearing the brunt of cuts like this at universities that are dealing with budget issues. I wonder, what do you think are the reasons behind that trend? Why is this the area where these cuts seem to be happening? And what can be done about it?
Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst: This is a conversation we’ve been having in humanities for a really long time: How do we make ourselves visible? And one of the best metaphors I’ve heard is that the humanities are like air. You take it for granted. You don’t notice it until the wind blows. But if you didn’t have it, you’d be real, real unlucky. But it’s easy to not pay attention to the air because you’re in it. It’s easy not to notice it, it’s invisible until you need it. And then when you’ve underfunded it for years, and starved it, you can’t get it back.
I actually don’t think the humanities are anything but vital. And I think what we see now is where a lack of understanding of the humanities has really made for some problematic things. My very close colleague likes to say that STEM without humanities gets you Facebook. It gets you this place where the algorithm drives all, regardless of the content, the ethics, the morals. It erodes things that you trust in because it’s only looking at sales and algorithms, sales and clicks. And so how do you fix that? You don’t lop off the leg. Humanities aren’t gangrenous. You can treat it. And part of that treatment is to think critically across disciplines. But part of that is making sure you’re not starving out a part of your university that you need in really critical ways.
It is shocking to me, as a scholar of race and religion, that in a moment where we saw the largest protests in American history this summer around Black Lives Matter, where we’re seeing these unprecedented spikes in hate crimes against religious minorities, and where we’re seeing the erosion of our public discourse around Christian supremacy — to say that you want to cut humanities departments, where that is where you learn about those issues broadly, I think you’re just destroying the university. I don’t think there will be a university left.
Katya, what happens now? As we look towards the spring, when these proposals actually have to either be put into place or modified in some way, how does that process actually work?
Katya Schwenk: We are definitely not even near the end of this process. What happened, basically, is the dean of the college has put out his recommendations for programming cuts. They are not finalized. They’re not even really decisive. Contested program cuts need to go through a faculty senate review. It’s sort of a very complicated evaluation of lots of different aspects of the programs. That’s starting right now, but because it’s so many different programs, the faculty senate — I believe they said they could do one or two a month, something like that. So that could potentially extend this in a really significant way.
They’ll provide a recommendation on whether or not the program should be terminated to the president and the provost. It’s an advisory vote. So that won’t determine anything, really. But it’s sort of expected that that will be taken into account, and then it will be given to the board of trustees to vote on. So in the end, the board of trustees will have the final vote. And it is unclear — I think the faculty senate is worried that because of how the administration has announced these cuts, that they are pretty set in presenting this plan as-is. Technically, it should go through a pretty extensive review process before anything is decided.
Obviously this is a big deal for people in the UVM community. What about for people who are outside the university? Why is this significant for people in Burlington and people in Vermont more generally?
Katya Schwenk: Absolutely. There are so many ways in which UVM, especially being in Burlington, being such a big school, interacts with the community and provides resources to the community. They do lots of education and programming, whether it’s to public school students in Burlington or Vermont or just the community at large.
The state also works really closely with UVM researchers on a lot of different things. For example, the state leans pretty heavily on the UVM geology department to conduct a lot of research on water management issues, as well as some climate change work. The state has only a few people working directly on geology at the state level, so they are relying on huge teams of UVM researchers and their students and their interns, and all of this that a public university has to offer. That’s one of the programs being slated for termination. So that will mean not a loss just for UVM students, but also for the state itself. And that’s true not just in geology, but across different departments at UVM who are all pretty outward facing and doing lots of important research.
Based on what you’ve seen so far, and based on the process that’s coming down the line a few months from now, what do you think’s going to happen? Based on the pushback that we’ve seen so far, it sounds like it could be a pretty loud argument over the course of the spring semester.
Katya Schwenk: I think that the pushback has been really significant. Within literally 24 hours, you had petitions getting thousands of signatures, just about specific programs. I don’t know if the university really saw that coming. And I think that has to be at least changing somewhat how they’re looking at these cuts.
That being said, it’s really uncertain. And the board of trustees has not really indicated, at least to my knowledge, any sort of preference either way. I think it’s also unclear whether or not faculty are going to be laid off at any point. Apparently there have been sort of hints of that, and it’s hard to imagine how these cuts will be really useful, at least financially, if it doesn’t also incorporate layoffs and savings from that. That will also, I think, really change how people think about the cuts.
We might see other consequences even before the cuts are decided. For example, I’ve spoken with professors who say, if this drags on into a weird limbo for a couple years, they’re going to start looking at other jobs, and they’re worried that their colleagues might start leaving even before anything is decided. So I think that whether or not the program cuts go through isn’t even the only question here, and that might not be the only thing that we’ll see coming.
