The debate over the recent departmental cuts seemed to be waning – that is, it was until President James Wagner's ill-fated letter came to light. Many voices in the conversation have tried to link the President's ill-fated analogy between compromise (using the Three-Fifths Compromise as an example) and the realization of "higher ideals" to the debate over departmental cutbacks.
I completely agree with these critics that the effort to make the department cuts appear to have been obscured from public view and closed to external input. However, I do not – and cannot – hold Wagner solely responsible for the recent departmental cuts, just as I cannot hold Dean Robin Forman responsible. While they are indeed responsible for executing the decisions that are made regarding the cuts, they are in no way the final authority. They both respond ultimately to the Board of Trustees, and as such have their hands tied in very significant ways.
Further, both (more specifically, Dean Forman) are victims of longer-acting economic and institutional forces that have been pushing us toward this point for years.
I first entered the Emory community in the summer of 2005 as a scholar at Candler's Youth Theological Initiative. At that point in Emory's history, the campus looked very different. Few and Evans Halls, for example, did not exist. A parking deck stood where the new Medical School building stands. Gilbert and Thomas Halls were still at the bottom of Dickey Drive, where a power station and the new Psychology building now stand. There are a dozen other small and large construction projects that now stand complete on campus that I do not have the space to write about here.
My point? The millions of dollars required to fund all those projects was likely mobilized well before President Wagner joined Emory in the fall of 2003. These construction projects were all part of Emory's ongoing efforts to modernize and improve their facilities as a part of boosting their competitive rankings against peer institutions like Johns Hopkins, which has been a University goal for years.
In 2009, courtesy of a friend in the Student Government Association, I had the privilege of seeing a copy of one of the first Campaign Emory brochures sent to large donors. (Regrettably, I was unable to actually keep a copy.) This document listed many detailed projects including expanded research, even more construction and support for certain athletics program. All of this funding was devoted towards shaping Emory to be more competitive with its peers and relatively little was devoted to reinforcing the liberal arts tradition.
The academic changes on campus, consequently, are related at their core to the effort to make Emory more competitive. And they are in no way isolated. The current General Education Requirements were first instituted in 2009, replacing the 2005 GERs. At the time of those changes, I was one of several voices critical of the new format.
The 2005 GERs were criticized for being too large and restrictive toward which classes counted toward their completion, as compared to the current tagging system which allows departments to identify their own requirement-satisfying classes. They were, however, very robust and very useful in ensuring that students would be both immersed in the liberal arts tradition and exposed to a wider range of academic departments and ideas.
The numbers demonstrate the effects of the change: apart from the removal of a redundant senior seminar requirement and a single Physical Education credit, the ONLY areas that bore the brunt of those cuts were the social sciences, history and culture-focused departments. (I have the numbers and am willing to share them with whoever asks.)
These changes, like the more recent department cuts, are also a part of larger economic forces. As I wrote in the January 25 edition of the Wheel, we have reached a point in society where we are being over-saturated by college degrees. This is particularly pronounced in traditional liberal arts fields, where students have frequently earned degrees without being encouraged to make them professionally viable and, consequently, have a higher risk of being unemployed in their field. Cutting departments from more traditionally liberal arts oriented areas is, from this perspective, arguably responsible because it pushes students to enroll in more highly demanded and employable STEM courses of study.
In the context of those larger historical, institutional and socio-economic factors, I don't think that the current approach to resisting them – which has come across as very focused on mass action and blaming key figures like President Wagner and Dean Forman – will succeed. Not only are forces entirely not under Emory's control involved, but also the forces that are at play at Emory are very entrenched and powerful. The push to transform Emory and make it more competitive has been operating literally for over a decade, far longer than most students have to put the picture into perspective.
Opponents of the cuts must speak to those core issues for there to be any real improvement in the situation. Resources on campus like the Career Center have to be leveraged to demonstrate just how graduates in those fields are valuable and play important roles in the modern society and economy. Some work has already been done in demonstrating how the loss of some of these departments, in particular the Economics graduate program, actually help improve Emory's competitiveness against peer institutions, but more needs to be done.
Ultimately, opponents of the cuts will have to try to play by the institution's own rules rather than trying to overpower it from the outside. The energy is there, but the commitment to follow through will be key. Without focused effort to improve the situation, within just another four or five years the students will all be new, and the board will be reset so that even more changes – whether good or bad – can be put into effect.
David Giffin is a second-year Masters in Theological Studies student at the Candler School of Theology from Charleston, Ill.
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