NYT gift article expires in 30 days.
I will just say it has always been an observation that degrees in humanities and the social sciences augment math and acience and help us understand ourselves and the world. We need more imagination and introspection from the liberal arts so that we can implement the ideas in real life with nore technical math and science degrees.
This is so true. Although not popular with people in my field (Computer Science), I highly value my liberal arts and humanities education. Far from being “worthless mandatory classes” (like many in my major believed), I found thee classes to be the most enlightening. I learned to wield algorithms and build software in my major, but I learned why I should and how to think critically about how to do it to best serve people (not to mention just simple communication). If anything, there should be more liberal arts in the curriculum, not less.
Cutting the arts because they’re too liberal in the name of profits at a public institution. Reeks of the Stephen Colbert (the character) quote: “Reality has a well-known liberal bias”.
The Democratic party has lost the working class
What a colossal failure in marketing that is. Of the two parties, the Democrats do far more for the working class than the Republicans. The Democrats failure to attract the party that they directly benefit leads to questions about their ability in other areas. The Republicans have long been the party for the benefit of the rich.
The article also states that they want to cut liberal arts programs due to budgetary issues. The price of college tuition is 134-600% more than it was 20 years ago. Something is seriously wrong if they still can’t pull a profit on paper.
And how much is the athletics program bringing in vs. spending? That’s always my first question. The article isn’t specific, but it implies that it’s in the red.
It is. A lot.
Total expenses for Mountaineer sports exceeded revenue from ticket sales, rights and licensing arrangements, bowl games and investment income by $18 million in 2020, $19 million in 2021 and $15 million in 2022.
It’s a bit dated now, but the NCAA even says sports are money losers. https://www.ncaa.org/news/2014/8/20/growth-in-division-i-athletics-expenses-outpaces-revenue-increases.aspx
Just what we need more of in this state… brain drain…
Although I generally agree with the premise of the article, I don’t think the author does himself any favors when he points out many perfectly legitimate reasons that the cuts are happening (documented declining enrollment in humanities, a history of financial planning issues that affect all WVU budgets, humanities making up a minority of cuts, etc).
Are the humanities being cut due to political or ideological pressure? What is the actual evidence that the cuts are ideological in origin? After presenting lots of specifics around finances, the author is curiously nonspecific on that point.
Controversial opinion incoming: two things can be true at once: state legislatures are woefully underfunding public higher education and need to boost support, AND, in the meantime every state institution doesn’t need a full roster of humanities departments filled with tenure track faculty when enrollment is just not justifying the cost … and other departments with lots of undergraduate and graduate students to teach have to suffer to keep them afloat.
I mean, I’m not saying the author is wrong, but they don’t even point to a hot mic confession or a conservative e-mail that says “we need to scale back humanities at public universities, because it’s teaching our kids the wrong things”.
The idea that Republicans are specifically targeting liberal arts academics sounds truthy, and on brand for them, certainly. But it would be nice to see more evidence than angry assertion.
Conservatives do love their (fellow) low-education voters…
