BY HELEN SCOTT
During this year of crisis, faculty and staff have mustered all our strength and resolve to ensure that the University of Vermont continues to fulfill its central academic and public interest mission. But the university administration is undermining these efforts as they pursue a short-sighted and reckless restructuring plan, justified by an accounting trick, that threatens to radically change and irreversibly damage UVM.
In December management dropped a bomb, or, as the dean himself put it, lobbed a “hand grenade”: the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences announced plans to terminate twenty-seven majors, minors, and programs; consolidate departments in languages and the arts; and close the departments of classics, geology, and religion. Right before the winter holidays, three highly credentialed and much-loved senior lecturers, whose combined years of service to UVM approach three-quarters of a century, were told they would no longer have jobs next fall. The board of trustees has indicated that more of the same will follow.
There is nothing strategic or rational about these cuts: this is a short-term, slash-and-burn attempt to “balance the budget” in the college: Dean William Falls was instructed by the provost, president, and trustees to find a way to save money, no matter the damage. When confronted by faculty arguing that these cuts would irreparably harm the long-term health of the university, the dean admitted that this was a “roll of the dice.”
The rationale is a so-called “budget deficit” of $8.6 million. Pointing to this so-called deficit, management repeatedly argues that the College of Arts and Sciences is “not sustainable,” that its costs are too high, and that cuts are the only solution.
But none of this is true.
The Incentive-Based Budget or IBB model was introduced in 2015 and has persisted despite a vote of no confidence from the College of Arts and Sciences, UVM’s largest college. Under IBB (also called RCM or Responsibility Center Management at other universities), colleges and departments are not viewed as integral parts of an organic whole but are instead treated as separate entities that compete for students and resources. IBB purports to be a neutral operator that, through objective metrics, rewards or disciplines each unit based on their success in raising revenue and decreasing cost. In fact, IBB is centrally controlled and highly subjective, with money allocated or withheld on administrative whim. One mechanism for doing so is the administration-controlled “subvention” fund.
Between 2016 and 2020, UVM’s other undergraduate-serving colleges contributed $111 million in net undergraduate tuition dollars (tuition after financial aid) to this subvention fund, while the College of Arts and Sciences provided the lion’s share, 44 percent. But although it contributed $88 million, the College of Arts and Sciences only received $54 million back. The rest was siphoned off to subsidize other “priorities,” including $23 million in salaries, benefits, and bonuses for the 131 top-earning executives. Far from being an “unsustainable drain,” the College of Arts and Sciences has been used as a cash cow—one that has been systematically starved and then punished for not thriving.
On top of this “academic fracking,” as one of my students put it, last semester the administration quietly eliminated the TRiO program, which provided essential support, including scholarships and a food pantry, to first-generation college students, low-income students, and students with disabilities. Yes, during a devastating pandemic they chose to cut off crucial resources to those most in need. Their justification for doing so—that a federal grant supporting the program had run out—is meritless given that UVM has received $45 million in federal CARES COVID-19 relief funding and is slated to receive close to $11 million more.
This is not a budget crisis but a values crisis. Far from being in a state of financial exigency, the university as a whole is remarkably well off: the 2020 year-end financial report showed a net increase of $24 million; there is an untapped $34 million “rainy day” fund; and an endowment of more than half a billion. And yet classics, geology, and religion are being shuttered to “save” a total of $600,000. Three outstanding senior lecturers, with combined salaries of around $170,000, have been fired by a dean who himself makes more than $270,000, while the head basketball coach was handed a bonus of $235,000.
The problem is that those in control are not prioritizing education or equity. They see the university as a corporation competing with other corporate universities for student dollars. That’s why UVM administrators, and university administrators across the country, are jumping on the same bandwagon of downsizing liberal arts to fund expanded technical training, expensive and ineffective consultant contracts, and vanity projects such as UVM’s planned $95 million sports arena. And, of course, they prioritize and protect their own excessive executive compensation.
UVM United Against Cuts, a coalition of faculty, students, staff, alumni, and community members, instead sees education as a public good. We aim to provide a quality liberal arts education and to make a positive contribution to Vermont, in keeping with our university’s land-grant mission. We want to nurture our students’ critical thinking and understanding of the world. The university’s wealth could be used to nurture and enhance academic programs, ensure livable wages for all who work on campus, increase antiracist and antisexist initiatives, and expand funding for TRiO and other valuable support networks.
Management has made it clear that they will not be moved by moral suasion or superior logic. We need to build solidarity between students, faculty, staff, and the community and increase our organizational power so that we are ready for an epic battle for the soul of UVM and the future of public higher education in Vermont and beyond.
Guest blogger Helen Scott is professor of English and director of the Buckham Overseas Study Program and graduate program director at the University of Vermont. She is a department representative for United Academics, the University of Vermont’s unionized AAUP chapter. She is also on the board of Vermont State Labor Council, AFL-CIO.
The choice of departments to close is telling: classics; geology; and religion. Eliminating classics is eliminating most of western intellectual history; eliminating geology is eliminating the one earth science that prizes history and that is not fully in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry; dropping religion is dropping the awareness of something beyond the idols of corporate culture. It is shocking that a major university in a liberal state such as Vermont would make the Orwellian move of eliminating those programs that create frames of reference outside of the industrial establishment.
I like your point, but the UVM case reminded me that my own university is struggling to maintain its Classics department, which has very low enrollment in undergraduate courses — kids just don’t seem to want to take Latin or Greek these days, I suppose and had no applicants to its graduate programs for the past two years– The archaeologists in Classics are being shifted to anthropology. Philosophy and History pick up the intellectual history slack. It increasingly appears that Classics is a hold-over from a 19th century model of higher education. So I would not be surprised to find similar pressures at Vermont, though why Geology or Religion would be targeted, I cannot say.
Barbara Piper’s point is well-taken from the perspective of academic practicalities. Even though I consider Classics to still have importance, even in today’s society, low enrollments and other disciplinary priorities make it impractical to offer. (I was required to take a semester of Classics in my B.A. days and found it very enlightening. Reading THE ODYSSEY helped me understand James Joyce’s ULYSSES when I got to that paradigm of modernist literature.)
If the content of Classics courses — including mythology — can be distributed to other courses, then maybe that background can still assist students to understand more contemporary art, literature, law, and other subjects. Unfortunately, I am skeptical that that will happen, or that it will happen successfully. 🙁
Good morning, Barbara,
Why U VT have Geology pegged for elimination I too wonder. I haven’t seen their recent enrollment / majors trends so it may simply be a very undersubscribed program. U VT gets, or used to get, a fair number of out of state students, but how many of those came for Geology I don’t know.
Religion is however like Classics in that other departments and disciplines can and often do include it. Ours, Anthropology, is one of them. In many, maybe a significant majority, of universities and larger colleges, one can take a course on Religion in Anthropology, another in Sociology, another in Psychology, in Philosophy, …&c, and Departments of English / Comparative Literature sometimes have courses in Biblical Literature, and religious writings in other traditions as well. One of my courses for many years was the Anthropology Department’s course called Religion in Culture and its typical enrollment was around 60 to 80 students, a significant portion of them not Anthropology majors.
Classics is indeed a holdover from an earlier time and in the British-North American tradition at least has always remained pretty narrow and North Coast Mediterraneocentric. It has meant ‘Latin and Greek’, almost exclusively. Rarely if ever has it included Sanskrit, Avestan, and virtually never such things as Classical Chinese or Classical Mongolian, let alone Classical Aztec. Experience in “the Classics” made up a lot of the core of an educated European in the Renaissance and Enlightenment, but for an educated person today, Anthropology is a better candidate for the core — except that I suspect that a single pit fruit like a plum isn’t a very adequate model for a good education today. The pomegranate might be more appropriate.
Keep well.
Thanks for your reply, Joe, and good next morning to you. Your experience with religion as an academic subject parallels my own, at my university, and naturally I second your proposal that Anthropology is an appropriate subject for the core. You allude very diplomatically to a rich debate in the Academy on the core curriculum: to the extent that we — White, North Atlantic cultures — promote the notion that our values and traditions descend in a simple linear fashion from Greece and Rome, a focus on Latin and Greek made some sense, but a broader understanding of the roots of humanity would certainly invite the expanded range of peoples and languages that you mention. I remember, many years ago in my college days, that I signed up for an optional seminar on “classics”, and was delighted to find that the first two books we were to read were “Sources of Indian Tradition” and “Sources of Chinese Tradition.”
Stay well.
I wonder how much the budget balancing is real, even given the criminal shift of money to administrators. The university where I reside claimed a 200 million dollar shortfall, ostensibly because of COVID, but received 192 million in federal and state aid for COVID. Currently operating with an almost vacant campus with about 90% instruction online, the administration just installed a factory in the library. Yes, this is a for profit factory with large machines for churning out education? scholarship? No, it is for making commodities. It makes even more pithy Bob Dylan’s “Twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift.”
Sometimes budget cuts are based on “projections” of shortfalls, not ACTUAL decreases in funding. Of course, the accuracy of one’s crystal ball is crucial in making such decisions and permanent harm to a campus can be done by making precipitous judgments or setting “emergency” priorities based on “projections.” Those predictions often start with “If present trends continue…” but those trends never seem to actually continue. Meanwhile, Classics departments and some languages are permanently eliminated.
Finally! A blog that contains facts and figures to make a relatively airtight case. Usually, these kinds of blogs contain lots of heated rhetoric — especially when dealing with ““balance the budget” cuts. Sometimes such cuts ARE necessary and priorities have to be made. In this case, though, Helen Scott outlines other alternatives rather than merely cry “foul!” Brava!
One nitpicky comment, though: often critics mention a college’s endowment as a source for funds in tough times; those funds are frequently targeted for specific purposes, not part of some general piggy bank. I do not know the details of UVM’s endowments nor of its “rainy day fund,” but if there ARE available dollars in either, maybe they should be used in this supposed crisis. Reversing administrators’ raises, even if they amount to only a few thousand dollars, would be a good-faith gesture to show that “we’re all in this together” — even if they aren’t.
UVM was at one time a classic New England founding university, with a fine array of functions, including law. I would point out that the state of Vermont was recently rated among the least financially transparent states in the nation. Its corruption index is very troubling: it is the single most corrupt state in the US: see https://bestlifeonline.com/most-corrupt-state-america/. Part of the problem is the City of Burlington, and the Sanders hegemony, and the capital, Montpelier, under incapable management. UVM suffers, like many state higher education institutions, due to weak state leadership, poor financial controls, budgeting and priorities. The Boards of Trustees at many of our universities are also largely of simple corporate culture, and the concepts they bring are often counterproductive. Some blame however has to rest with a larger phenomenon of university growth; debt obligations; administrative wage costs and tuition escalation that combine to handicap the institutions. In many ways they have been subject to a “hostile takeover” by an administrative and bureaucracy class that fancy themselves corporate executives, and with little oversight.
You argue, rather self-righteously, that your logic is superior, yet you neglect to fully explain the university’s logic. While it’s true they are cutting programs to save money, there is a specific reason they chose those particular majors, and it’s not because they are racist or sexist, as you imply. Of the nearly 10,000 students at UVM, these cuts will affect less than 50. They aren’t cutting liberal arts, they are cutting majors that, in some cases, haven’t graduated a student in 3 years.
But how much of the only 50 graduates is due to administrators’ ordered steering away from certain majors? Incoming students depend on advisors who can steer them away from certain majors, especially those less valued by the neoliberal business model administrators who seem to have bred like rats in recent decades. Universities have a responsibility to educate students as citizens, not to pander to the workforce needs of big business.
“Right before the winter holidays, three highly credentialed and much-loved senior lecturers, whose combined years of service to UVM approach three-quarters of a century, were told they would no longer have a job next fall. The board of trustees has indicated that more of the same will follow.”
Mr. Wood above points out some presumably relevant missing pieces. Possibly another relevant one is embedded in this passage excerpted from the post original.
Why if these lecturers are so highly credentialed and that senior do they not hold professorial rank?
To answer your question: class. Today our choice is between the medieval hierarchy (a bit long in the tooth by now) and the business model. Time for a new university.
“Between 2016 and 2020, UVM’s six undergraduate-serving colleges contributed $111 million in net undergraduate tuition dollars (tuition after financial aid) to this subvention fund, with the College of Arts and Sciences providing the lion’s share, 44 percent. But although it contributed $88 million, the College of Arts and Sciences only received $54 million back. ”
Unless I have missed something, 44% of $111 million is $48.84 million, not $88 million. Consequently, if the CAS got $54 million back, it made a profit from this system.
Barbara Piper, please note that the author revised the sentence you quoted above. It now reads, “Between 2016 and 2020, UVM’s other undergraduate-serving colleges contributed $111 million in net undergraduate tuition dollars (tuition after financial aid) to this subvention fund, while the College of Arts and Sciences provided the lion’s share, 44 percent.”
That helps, but it would be better if the sentence stated what the 44% was of….. Presumably it was 44% of $199 million?
The recent discussion of the asymmetry between the economic contribution and the reciprocal level of funding received raises a host of worthwhile secondary questions. First, and most obvious, is the problem of selective release of information or uneven transparency when it comes to budget matters. Universities generally avoid disclosing information like that concerning the UVM Arts-and-Sciences money stream, in part because the liberal arts faculty members who help create that stream might than ask for greater compensation. An even more startling question relates to the reasons for that money stream. Why are so many students taking liberal arts courses at a time when both UVM and academe generally are stressing career-related study? Is this owing to obligatory general education courses, or are students more interested in the liberal arts than might seem? If the former, which influences within the university are keeping those general education requirements in place, and what is their motivation? A situation in which the humanities continue to exist because (a) students are forced to take courses for (b) reasons that the management boards of universities do not believe in so as to (c) prop up universities financially is, I should think a precarious one.