"All Things to All People"
Budget cuts and implicit missions in higher education
Here’s a familiar headline: “Delta State slashing budget after losing millions last year.” I am not sure I even needed to link to the article; you already know what it says.
A small, regional public university has a dismal fiscal forecast. In response, it is cutting staffing to save money. It’s cutting its athletic budget. It’s reviewing the academic programs it offers.
It says, and this is a quote, that it can no longer be “all things to all people.”
What do we mean when we use that kind of language to justify program reductions? If we are changing, what did we used to be? And if “all things to all people” is what we aren’t, what are we?
The fantasy land of yesterday
The use of this phrase gets stranger the more you think about it. It’s a common phrase in English, but its origin is Biblical. In his first letter to the church in Corinth, Paul of Tarsus says that he became all things to all people so that he might save some. He explains that he met everyone on their own terms and fit their expectations so that he could deliver his message in a way that would not turn them off due to a cultural disconnect.
But what do colleges mean when they use this phrase?
They appear to be gesturing broadly toward a past in which any student who wanted to study anything could do so. And more than that, the institution would provide faculty resources to any program, no matter how many students were interested.
This feeds into the “Ivory Tower” school of resentment. It is a common parody of universities to say that they are so removed from the “real world” that they don’t care about equipping students with a practical education. The idea is that the college is interested only in “book knowledge” and its utility ends at graduation.
Colleges using this kind of language are adopting the assumptions of an audience which is primed to resent higher education. What they are saying is that those resentments are well founded, as if to say:
“You’re right to resent how out of touch education was. But we’re not like that anymore. We are trimming the fat, firing those esoteric and impractical nerds, and focusing on practical things. So that means you actually don’t resent us. We’re not like those silly old colleges of yesterday; we’re a cool college.
So… when exactly was yesterday?
It depends on which yesterday you pick. As I mentioned in my last post, the addition of “majors” in American higher education is a relatively recent phenomenon. For much of the country’s history, earning a BA meant completing a standard curriculum focused on grammar, rhetoric, and a hearty helping of ancient languages. Students were beholden to an institution’s set curriculum. The colleges were so small that course diversity was not logistically feasible anyway.
Although the classical curriculum will sound absurd to many modern ears, it would be inaccurate to call it detached from reality. The colleges were small because they intended to serve a small subset of the population.
While college attendance was very uncommon nationally, it was socially expected for many upper-class American families. The most prestigious positions (political leaders, ministers, and “landed gentry” mostly) drew heavily from the small subset of college graduates. It was an education for gentlemen, a social credential.
This changed in two major waves. During the Industrial Revolution, newly wealthy businessmen wanted their sons to have the same educational credential as the elite. Some sent their sons to existing colleges; others started new ones of their own (Vanderbilt, Carnegie Mellon, etc). This influx of private capital opened up the sector to new demands from a new constituency.
The second wave was the Post-War bubble. The massive influx of public capital via the GI Bill, alongside an economic rising tide that was lifting lots of boats, led many Americans to seek the kind of academic credentialing that had been outside their grasp in the past.
With each of these waves of new students, the scale of higher education expanded and the scale of the curriculum expanded with it. Everyone wanted the same social capital that had long been associated with the college degree, but they didn’t want the same course requirements. This expansion led to a huge increase in business and engineering programs, the kinds of “practical” sciences most valued by new money families.
But it also led to expansions in the humanities and social sciences. There was a time not long ago when subjects we think of as core to education were peripheral. Subjects like history, English literature, and psychology were totally irrelevant for most of American higher education’s history. New kinds of students wanted to study new kinds of things, and these subjects were also seen as dynamic, new frontiers once upon a time.
What all these subjects have in common is that students wanted to study them. The colleges added these programs because they were responding to demand. At the same time, they eliminated requirements in subjects like Greek and Latin which no longer drew student interest.
Two points on contraction
1. How reductions happen
Let’s take a relatively minor example of program reduction from one of my alma maters, Drake University. They recently announced the elimination of the religion major, the East Asian studies minor, and the evidence-based medicine certificate.
So, what was the rationale? It’s a pretty simple one: there were only 14 students total enrolled in those three programs. Additionally, there were no tenure-track faculty removed as part of the change.
This is representative of the calculus present whenever you read about program reductions. Programs with small groups of students will be the first to go. And if an institution can avoid cutting tenure-track positions, it’s likely to go through without faculty opposition.
These become bigger news when they entail major faculty cuts. Often, cuts will target faculty who do not bring in external grant funding and who have low student enrollment in their courses. Those scholars are seen as a “drain” on institutional finances.
2. What institutions can’t say about reduction
In any news release about program cuts, you’ll see language about budgetary constraints, student enrollment, faculty cost, or broader economic forces. You’ll see an identification of the “problem at hand” and how this reduction addresses it.
The institution may also say that they’re still committed to the liberal arts. Or they’ll say that they want to provide a robust experience for the students. They’ll try to assuage concerns that they’re going to change the “essential character” of the school. But what they typically won’t say is what that essential character is.
The issue here is mission.
Drake University can’t contextualize its cuts within its institutional mission because, like almost every higher education institution, its mission is aggressively ambiguous. Just as an example, let’s take a look at Drake’s official “mission and inspiration statements”:
Drake's mission is to provide an exceptional learning environment that prepares students for meaningful personal lives, professional accomplishments, and responsible global citizenship. The Drake experience is distinguished by collaborative learning among students, faculty, and staff and by the integration of the liberal arts and sciences with professional preparation.
Our inspiration is that together we transform lives and strengthen communities.
This is very similar to most institutional mission statements, but what are they actually saying? Behind the education newspeak, the mission statement could be summarized as:
Drake’s mission is to be a good school and also have its students become good workers and good people. We like to work together. We want to make the world better.
There’s not much meat on that bone. They want to be good. They don’t want to be bad.
Really inspiring stuff.
A mission that shallow can include or exclude almost anything. They want to maintain some curricular breadth to be defensibly “liberal arts,” but there’s no sense of exactly how broad they should be. They cannot point to these curricular changes as an outgrowth of their mission because the mission just wants them to be good and nice and productive, but it won’t say how.
The elimination of the religion major may seem like a small thing because it’s a small program. What’s interesting is that Drake began as a Christian college, supported by the Disciples of Christ denomination in Iowa to form future clergy and leadership. That was their mission, and every part of the curriculum was relevant to it.
It’s been over a century since the college broke with its denominational affiliation, and it has made its mission increasingly ambiguous in the interim. I am not saying that Drake needs to be a Christian college again. But it had an identity, a way of justifying its curriculum and unifying its student body around some idea of purpose.
If its purpose today boils down to “Be good. Don’t be bad,” then it will not just have trouble justifying its curriculum. It will have trouble justifying its tuition, its hiring practices, its financial aid, and its admissions policy. It will have trouble justifying itself.
Institutional missions have become ambiguous because the only thing the college stands for is continued existence. Its mission is to persist. They only talk about the budget in their press release because it’s the only thing they’re sure about.
When I look for Uncommon Colleges, I look for institutions that have a concrete sense of themselves, a mission to do more than just exist.
One final note on growth
The funny thing about the narrative of curricular cuts is that there are more distinct degree programs today than there have ever been. Especially in growing fields like computer science, business, engineering, and health science, there are thousands more programs today than there were twenty years ago. Even disciplines associated with contraction like English have more programs now.
This is a product of a few things. Some colleges are adding subjects like computer science for the first time. That would count as a new program.
But the biggest factor is that institutions are sub-dividing their curriculum. So they won’t just offer a biology major. They’ll also offer biotechnology and biochemistry and human biology and microbiology and neurobiology.
Institutions add these programs to attract every niche interest, satisfy every student demand. As long as students register for these programs and the costs of adding them are feasible, institutions will add them. They simply must respond to demand. They do it to survive, to fulfill their mission.
The university may not be all things to all people. But it will try to be as many things as it can be if a fiscally sufficient number of people want it to be those things.
-Matt