BY ADAM RZEPKA

A large public university is wiping out all of its humanities departments. It isn’t sure why.

As I write this, our Interim Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHSS)—a newly hired computer scientist who will soon be both Interim Dean and Interim Provost—is telling faculty and staff at the College what most of us already knew: the President has directed that all of its fifteen departments be completely eliminated and replaced by no fewer than four new Schools and three new Institutes, to be run by a new pantheon of senior administrators.

The Schools will host nebulous assortments of majors. They have provisional names like “School of Human Behavior and Well-Being,” “Center for Interdisciplinary Programs & Writing Studies & Services,” and, in some cases, wave-of-the-hand placeholders like “Institute for Y (e.g. Intelligence, Value, and Societal Structures).” The net cost of the many new senior administrators and their staffs will be huge, and annual.

The President has said that this massive transfer of governance and expenditures to the administration will “set the precedent” for the rest of our university. You can bet that it’s intended to set the precedent for yours, too.

Most higher-ed people I’ve told about the plan to eliminate all humanities and social sciences departments here think I must be exaggerating, or have it wrong in some way. Then they ask two questions in quick succession: Why would anyone do that? and Why isn’t anyone stopping it?

I’ve been taking the second question first, since it’s the easier one. Simply put, universities have reached a point where executive power—the President, with the invisible hand of the Board above—is absolute, except where there are unions. Suggestions and objections can simply be ignored, and the fact that they were made at all leveraged as proof of a “collaborative” process. Unions, particularly in New Jersey, where we are represented by the AFT, are often unable to act beyond what is currently subject to negotiation. In our case, that excludes nearly everything that the elimination of departments threatens: bedrock shared governance and scholarly oversight; standards in specific fields; faculty participation in larger disciplinary networks; coherent contexts for research and teaching; review of personnel actions by a colleague in the same discipline; hiring by and for specific disciplines; access to discipline-specific funding; the teaching of courses by subject experts; faculty control of course scheduling and curricula; and therefore the continued existence of majors with more than a gestural relationship to content, let alone rigor, depth, or complexity.

Not that faculty here haven’t tried to steer the ship away from this iceberg, but faculty everywhere know that goes these days. The Provost (who left in October) and the Dean (who left in June) hand-picked a Restructuring Committee back in March. The Committee oversaw a labor-intensive series of visioning meetings, surveys about eight different speculative structures, and consultant-led huddles where small groups of faculty and staff used big pads of paper and colorful post-its to maximize interdisciplinary synergies. Hundreds of pages of detailed feedback were collected, gentled, and included in further surveys (except where the responses were withheld from respondents because they “did not reflect positively on the college”). Most people assumed all this was mainly an effort to see if faculty and staff would somehow choose for themselves what had already been chosen for them. In a poll at the end of June, 79% of them voted “no confidence” in the planning process.

None of it mattered anyway. At our University Senate meeting in September, the President said that he still had “no idea” what the new structure would be. A month later, he said he’d decided on something like the polar opposite of the consensus points that emerged from the planning process (chief among those points: a commitment to departments, with Chairs).

For the first question, about rationale, it’s helpful to understand what the reason isn’t. It isn’t the budget, and it isn’t enrollments in the College or the University—the familiar twin shock doctrines for culling departments. We were told from the start that the aim was not to save money, which makes sense given how much eliminating departments is about to cost in new administration. CHSS’s enrolled majors have increased by 5.4% in recent years; its faculty’s student semester hours (teaching hours multiplied by number of students taught) are some of the highest in the university. And in any case, no argument or evidence has ever been offered as to why the replacement of departments with more administration might be likely to improve any of these metrics.

That means that this urgent order to clear away the entire, centuries-old idea of disciplinary governance in one fell swoop is both radical and without even a functional ideology—an especially pure plane of the empty-mind austerity satirized from Office Space to Severance.

In the Trump era, we’re familiar with the idea that Stage IV capitalism has collapsed satire into reality. This is easy to see in the provisional names given to the administrative units replacing departments (the “School of Human Narratives and Creative Expressions” is the one I’d be in), which cheerfully liquefy any solid content professors, students, parents, or future employers might be able to identify. But it’s even more striking in the mélange of partial justifications that were offered during the doomed planning process. In an announcement launching that process, our then-Provost explained that its success would depend on “people who truly ‘visioned’ the potential synergies and multipliers in opportunities” and who possessed “a mindset for new imaginings of function in important and more creative ways.” Born-old buzzwords fell through the following months like a grey snow: “synergy,” “multipliers,” “mindset,” “vision” (as a verb), “agility,” “impactfulness,” students as “clients,” “entrepreneurship,” “branding,” “future-proofing.” Every casual threat to standards was in pursuit of “excellence.” Every looming reduction of resources promised “thriving” and “flourishing,” and every degree of alienation fostered “belonging.” The Dean’s short readout of the October meeting in which the President shared his decision dropped “innovation” in three successive sentences.

Because so many of these keywords for epochal change in higher education come directly from the corporate world, and often from its stock of cringe euphemisms for austerity, they sound unhinged in rooms full of professional sociologists, linguists, literary scholars, historians, and poets. It’s not just that this rhetoric exemplifies the cruel optimism of a profit-ensorcelled managerial class that should be anathema to scholarship and art. It’s that it presents so starkly the vacuousness that would replace the exact—and exacting—values whose erasure they are justifying. Turning research, evidence, argumentation, depth, richness, clarity, and sense into liabilities, they are the rhetoric of a future world freed of rigorous inquiry.

None of this is new. And even at this extreme degree it is barely news, given the federal war on higher education as such. It may be a useful reminder, though, that it’s long past time for us to ask publicly, and loudly, why the constant administrative efforts to innovate away the endless “crisis of faith in higher education” only ever make it worse. I couldn’t agree more that radical structural change is needed if higher education is to have much of a future. But it’s excruciatingly clear by now that models drawn from corporate management are as bankrupt as their rhetoric. Until we hold those models up, in public, to the same basic standards that we require of our undergraduates, we will be visioning synergies and multipliers in opportunities until the words turn to ashes in our mouths.

Adam Rzepka is an associate professor in the English Department at Montclair State University, where he researches and teaches early modern literature and social theory. He aspires to join either the Institute for X or the Institute for Y, but for now has joined the AFT, the Coalition for Action in Higher Education, the New Jersey Mutual Academic Defense Compact, the AAUP, and Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine instead. His email address is rzepkaa@montclair.edu.