an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 7, November-December 2010,
ISSN 1552-5112
A Faustian Bargain[1]
Dear
President Philip,
Probably
the last thing you need at this moment is someone else from outside your
university complaining about your decision. If you want to argue that I can't
really understand all aspects of the situation, never having been associated
with SUNY Albany, I wouldn't disagree. But I cannot let something like this go
by without weighing in. I hope, when I'm through, you will at least understand
why.
Just
30 days ago, on October 1st, you announced that the departments of French,
Italian, Classics, Russian and Theater Arts were being eliminated. You gave
several reasons for your decision, including that 'there are comparatively
fewer students enrolled in these degree programs.' Of course, your decision was
also, perhaps chiefly, a cost-cutting measure - in fact, you stated that this
decision might not have been necessary had the state legislature passed a bill
that would have allowed your university to set its own tuition rates. Finally,
you asserted that the humanities were a drain on the institution financially,
as opposed to the sciences, which bring in money in the form of grants and
contracts.
Let's
examine these and your other reasons in detail, because I think if one does, it
becomes clear that the facts on which they are based have some important
aspects that are not covered in your statement. First, the matter of
enrollment. I'm sure that relatively few students take classes in these
subjects nowadays, just as you say. There wouldn't have been many in my day,
either, if universities hadn't required students to take a distribution of
courses in many different parts of the academy: humanities, social sciences,
the fine arts, the physical and natural sciences, and to attain minimal
proficiency in at least one foreign language. You see, the reason that
humanities classes have low enrollment is not because students these days are
clamoring for more relevant courses; it's because administrators like you, and
spineless faculty, have stopped setting distribution requirements and started
allowing students to choose their own academic programs - something I feel is a
complete abrogation of the duty of university faculty as teachers and mentors.
You could fix the enrollment problem tomorrow by instituting a mandatory core
curriculum that included a wide range of courses.
Young
people haven't, for the most part, yet attained the wisdom to have that kind of
freedom without making poor decisions. In fact, without wisdom, it's hard for
most people. That idea is thrashed out better than anywhere else, I think, in
Dostoyevsky's parable of the Grand Inquisitor, which is told in Chapter Five of
his great novel, The Brothers Karamazov.
In the parable, Christ comes back to earth in
That
single chapter in a much longer book is one of the great works of modern
literature. You would find a lot in it to think about. I'm sure your Russian
faculty would love to talk with you about it - if only you had a Russian
department, which now, of course, you don't.
Then
there's the question of whether the state legislature's inaction gave you no
other choice. I'm sure the budgetary problems you have to deal with are
serious. They certainly are at
It
seems to me that the way you went about it couldn't have been more likely to
alienate just about everybody on campus. In your position, I would have done
everything possible to avoid that. I wouldn't want to end up in the 9th Bolgia
(ditch of stone) of the
The
Inferno is the first book of
Dante's Divine Comedy, one of
the great works of the human imagination. There's so much to learn from it
about human weakness and folly. The faculty in your Italian department would be
delighted to introduce you to its many wonders - if only you had an Italian
department, which now, of course, you don't.
And
do you really think even those faculty and administrators who may applaud your
tough-minded stance (partly, I'm sure, in relief that they didn't get the axe
themselves) are still going to be on your side in the future? I'm reminded of
the fable by Aesop of the Travelers and the Bear: two men were walking together
through the woods, when a bear rushed out at them. One of the travelers
happened to be in front, and he grabbed the branch of a tree, climbed up, and
hid himself in the leaves. The other, being too far behind, threw himself flat
down on the ground, with his face in the dust. The bear came up to him, put his
muzzle close to the man's ear, and sniffed and sniffed. But at last with a
growl the bear slouched off, for bears will not touch dead meat. Then the
fellow in the tree came down to his companion, and, laughing, said 'What was it
that the bear whispered to you?' 'He told me,' said the other man, 'Never to
trust a friend who deserts you in a pinch.'
I
first learned that fable, and its valuable lesson for life, in a freshman
classics course. Aesop is credited with literally hundreds of fables, most of
which are equally enjoyable - and enlightening. Your classics faculty would
gladly tell you about them, if only you had a Classics department, which now,
of course, you don't.
As
for the argument that the humanities don't pay their own way, well, I guess
that's true, but it seems to me that there's a fallacy in assuming that a
university should be run like a business. I'm not saying it shouldn't be
managed prudently, but the notion that every part of it needs to be
self-supporting is simply at variance with what a university is all about. You
seem to value entrepreneurial programs and practical subjects that might
generate intellectual property more than you do 'old-fashioned' courses of
study. But universities aren't just about discovering and capitalizing on new
knowledge; they are also about preserving knowledge from being lost over time,
and that requires a financial investment. There is good reason for it: what
seems to be archaic today can become vital in the future. I'll give you two
examples of that. The first is the science of virology, which in the 1970s was
dying out because people felt that infectious diseases were no longer a serious
health problem in the developed world and other subjects, such as molecular
biology, were much sexier. Then, in the early 1990s, a little problem called
AIDS became the world's number 1 health concern. The virus that causes AIDS was
first isolated and characterized at the National Institutes of Health in the
I
know one of your arguments is that not every place should try to do everything.
Let other institutions have great programs in classics or theater arts, you
say; we will focus on preparing students for jobs in the real world. Well, I
hope I've just shown you that the real world is pretty fickle about what it
wants. The best way for people to be prepared for the inevitable shock of
change is to be as broadly educated as possible, because today's backwater is
often tomorrow's hot field. And interdisciplinary research, which is all the
rage these days, is only possible if people aren't too narrowly trained. If
none of that convinces you, then I'm willing to let you turn your institution
into a place that focuses on the practical, but only if you stop calling it a
university and yourself the President of one. You see, the word 'university' derives
from the Latin 'universitas', meaning 'the whole'. You can't be a university
without having a thriving humanities program. You will need to call SUNY Albany
a trade school, or perhaps a vocational college, but not a university. Not
anymore.
I
utterly refuse to believe that you had no alternative. It's your job as
President to find ways of solving problems that do not require the amputation
of healthy limbs. Voltaire said that no problem can withstand the assault of
sustained thinking. Voltaire, whose real name was François-Marie Arouet, had a
lot of pithy, witty and brilliant things to say (my favorite is 'God is a
comedian playing to an audience that is afraid to laugh'). Much of what he
wrote would be very useful to you. I'm sure the faculty in your French
department would be happy to introduce you to his writings, if only you had a
French department, which now, of course, you don't.
I
guess I shouldn't be surprised that you have trouble understanding the
importance of maintaining programs in unglamorous or even seemingly 'dead'
subjects. From your biography, you don't actually have a PhD or other high
degree, and have never really taught or done research at a university. Perhaps
my own background will interest you. I started out as a classics major. I'm now
Professor of Biochemistry and Chemistry. Of all the courses I took in college
and graduate school, the ones that have benefited me the most in my career as a
scientist are the courses in classics, art history, sociology, and English
literature. These courses didn't just give me a much better appreciation for my
own culture; they taught me how to think, to analyze, and to write clearly.
None of my sciences courses did any of that.
One
of the things I do now is write a monthly column on science and society. I've
done it for over 10 years, and I'm pleased to say some people seem to like it.
If I've been fortunate enough to come up with a few insightful observations, I
can assure you they are entirely due to my background in the humanities and my
love of the arts.
One
of the things I've written about is the way genomics is changing the world we
live in. Our ability to manipulate the human genome is going to pose some very
difficult questions for humanity in the next few decades, including the question
of just what it means to be human. That isn't a question for science alone;
it's a question that must be answered with input from every sphere of human
thought, including - especially including - the humanities and arts. Science
unleavened by the human heart and the human spirit is sterile, cold, and
self-absorbed. It's also unimaginative: some of my best ideas as a scientist
have come from thinking and reading about things that have, superficially,
nothing to do with science. If I'm right that what it means to be human is
going to be one of the central issues of our time, then universities that are
best equipped to deal with it, in all its many facets, will be the most
important institutions of higher learning in the future. You've just ensured
that yours won't be one of them.
Some
of your defenders have asserted that this is all a brilliant ploy on your part
- a master political move designed to shock the legislature and force them to
give SUNY Albany enough resources to keep these departments open. That would be
Machiavellian (another notable Italian writer, but then, you don't have any
Italian faculty to tell you about him), certainly, but I doubt that you're that
clever. If you were, you would have held that town meeting when the whole
university could have been present, at a place where the press would be all
over it. That's how you force the hand of a bunch of politicians. You proclaim
your action on the steps of the state capitol. You don't try to sneak it
through in the dead of night, when your institution has its back turned.
No,
I think you were simply trying to balance your budget at the expense of what
you believe to be weak, outdated and powerless departments. I think you will
find, in time, that you made a Faustian bargain. Faust is the title character
in a play by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It was written around 1800 but still
attracts the largest audiences of any play in
Disrespectfully
yours,
Gregory
A. Petsko
an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 7, November-December 2010,
ISSN 1552-5112
Notes