I’m a strong advocate for learning new words. It sounds incredibly simple, but I think specificity in language gives a clarity to the intent of our words in a way that simple words don’t. Sometimes you need big words to convey big thoughts! There’s one quote from a philosopher who I’ve read entirely too much of that really resonates with me on this topic, “We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom,” from Slavoj Žižek.
I am utterly decontextualizing this quote from its original topic and Žižek has a 50% chance to be profound in his clarity and 50% chance to be the most incorrect person you’ve read, but I think the quote still works in this context. Language provides the means to articulate our conditions: free and captive, happy and sorrowful, pleased and offended. Every word we choose operates on a specific axis of meaning.
It is with this belief that language is important that I’m saddened that I didn’t choose to apply to write for the Bulletin in 2022-23. I thought that there was a clarity in language and the meaning of the words the Bulletin’s writers chose to use surrounding restructuring that I found unclear and lacking. I still think the terms we use to discuss it, like “necessary” or “forward focused” are packed with ideological baggage that Emporia State failed to publicly unpack. I think a lot of us failed to articulate what we meant by our belief that the restructuring was good or bad.
The University of North Carolina Greensboro is undergoing a similar process of cuts, and with them similar threats to academic enrichment and their professors’ employment. This provides an opportunity to ask an important question about the language we use to talk about cuts, to talk about the future of a university, and to talk about how ESU and UNCG are approaching higher learning.
When we speak about the necessity of restructuring a university, why do we choose the language to describe it?
This is the second part of a series of articles I’m writing on the cuts at UNCG and using them as a comparison and lens to the restructuring at ESU. To get a better understanding of the situation at UNCG I spoke with three of their professors and their thoughts on cuts, the process, and the direction they see for the university. The first part covered how the cuts at each university were processed before they began and faculty input on the matter. Now, I want to focus on the cuts themselves and how we can view them as a language that explains their intent.
A large impetus for cuts at both universities has been both administrations’ position that they aren’t cuts, they’re just reallocations.
“They tried to put a lot of emphasis on reallocation to more efficient parts of the university. But, when you push them on what those are, they don’t give any response,” said Dr. Mark Elliott, Associate Professor and Associate Head of UNCG’s History Department. Dr. Elliott is also President of UNCG’s American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Chapter.
A similar argument was made by ESU’s administration, and a similar lack of language focused on the specific reinvestments ESU is making outside of the “strike zone”: biology, teaching, tech, business.
The communication from ESU on why the strike zone is important has been abysmal. UNCG’s communication on where it’s reinvesting is benefited by the recency of its cuts, but, if I had to guess, it’s not going to be great, too. A lot of the rationale for the cuts from both universities has been rpk GROUP data that both states’ university systems asked for to aid in figuring out how to progress their states’ higher education goals. This data too fails to communicate the rationale for cuts.
“If we go in [to the data] we can see we’re a small department, we produce a similar number to chemistry. So are you going to hit them too? I’m not trying to throw another department under the bus at all. But, they couldn’t tell us why the programs were on the list. They have yet to tell us what they’re going to save by cutting the [physics] program,” said Dr. Alicia Aarnio, astrophysicist and Assistant Professor at UNCG.
The lack of communication surrounding rpk GROUP data and the rationale for cuts has been similarly abysmal from Emporia State too, so much so there’s not really a track record of attempting to explain the data. You can view the Academic Portfolio and Workload Reports, but both universities have been sorely lacking in communicating the data’s importance and significance to all of its stakeholders. There’s probably a reason for that, but until UNCG and ESU explain each of their decisions, we lack the language to understand their decision.
We are instead left to parse data that is frequently misleading.
“I wanted to point out how good we’ve been doing with underrepresented populations and physics, but [data] only counts students’ first major. So, if their first major is math and their second major is physics, which happens a lot, they don’t count them for data considerations,” said Dr. Aarnio.
This is only one of the inconsistencies present in how the data was rubricked and evaluated.
“The way the data was collected made women’s, gender and sexuality studies look weak. That’s because the rubrics simply privileged large departments over small ones and women’s, gender and sexuality studies only has three lines, and but they generate a massive number of credit hours with those 3 lines because they borrow a faculty from other departments,” said Dr. Faye Stewart, Director of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Graduate Program and Associate Professor of German Studies.
I cover the communication for the decisions made prior to the cuts in the previous article; however, it bears mentioning that this lack of communication has both failed to occur after these cuts are made. Again, why do UNCG and ESU feel like they have so thoroughly failed to communicate their decision?
What is the vision of higher education that these universities have communicated through their lack of communication?
What can we glean from the statements made by the stakeholders of these universities surrounding the cuts?
“What concerns me about this is I feel like there’s some group of donors and their approach is to say we’re bringing business minded management to academia. This idea is that businesspeople are going to make this work better, but they’re slash and burn and don’t really know what they’re doing,” said Dr. Elliot.
“We’re a minority serving institution. I think there’s something particularly pernicious about the attack not only on three non-Western languages, but also on anthropology. It looks like a devaluation of global awareness, intercultural literacy, and engagement with people that think differently than you. It looks like the university is trying to close off that access to other cultures to a huge population of students of color and first-generation students,” said Dr. Stewart.
“I don’t think it is innocuous,” said Dr. Michael Smith, professor of political science at ESU. “I think that the current board is working hand in hand with the state Legislature to enact political goals of a conservative nature.”
“It’s clear to me that no one in administration asked alumni if their degree helped them or if they valued it. Decisions were made on assumptions and bad data,” said Jessica Haynes Titlebaum, alumna of UNCG’s now-cut anthropology program, and Deputy Operations Chief for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. When speaking to YES! Weekly on this topic, Titlebaum made it clear she was speaking as an alumna and not as the voice of her employer or position.
I urge any of you to go out and read the quotes from each of these university’s administrations and contrast them with the words of the professors, alumni, students, and stakeholders of these universities. There is a moral and intellectual clarity held by the latter groups that the administration’s statements lack.
How will UNCG’s cuts “bolster our excellence” as the university’s chancellor Franklin D. Gilliam Jr. writes?
When ESU sends out memos on program reinvestments why do they lack explanations and justifications for vision beyond pithy appeals to a future whose inevitability they cannot articulate?
I believe it is because one position has a moral clarity in its vision which most people would agree with, and the other does not. I believe it is because most people value higher education and value the stability of the professionals who teach it. And I believe most people would be concerned with the idea that we’re cutting education programs, liberal arts programs in particular, because those cutting them place more emphasis on technical job readiness than the skills to think, learn, read, or be creative.
There are a number of articles you can find laying out the kinds of macro level changes that can occur to liberal arts education in the future which preserves them without being stuck in the past. I’ve never met a professor who is stuck in the past on how to approach the field. However, I do not see the kinds of comprehensive and forward-thinking ideas coming from UNCG or ESU administrative communique on why cuts are occurring and how restructuring can maintain the value given by programs that are being cut.
Instead, I see language which is lacking in explanation. I see language which seeks to deprive its listeners and readers of the ideological background which is being used to justify poorly explained and rubricked data.
I see language which is lacking in moral clarity, instead couching it in rhetoric of a supposably inevitable future which is reinforced by the decision that these cuts make. And fundamentally, I lack the language to describe the completeness of my exasperation at the decisions being made.
