supply, demand, and Slavic studies

[Robert Mathiesen]

I am more pessimistic than either David or Ernest, but with a difference:
the fate of Slavic linguistics as an academic profession seems to me to
be tied up with the fate of small-sized academic professions in general.

If you look at the kinds of departments and programs that get cut, at one
university or another, you will see several things in common.  First, they
do not -- on the whole -- produce large numbers of wealthy alumni.  Second,
they do not -- on the whole -- produce much revenue from grants and con-
tracts.  Third, they do not -- on the whole -- form professional organiza-
tions that have substantial political or economic "clout."

>>From where I sit, most University high administrators seem to be primarily
concerned these days with the solvency of their institutions, which they
see as structurally damaged.  They do not see any good way to contain the
sharply escalating cost of running a University: salaries, benefits, lia-
bility, health insurance, hard-ware, soft-ware, books and especially jour-
nals, etc.  To put *one* full professor in the classroom for one year at a
gross salary of $50,000, they have to buy benefits at a cost of another
$50,000, more or less.  To generate that revenue from endowment, year after
year, at 5%, you need $2,000,000 in your endowment.  That's $2,000,000 per
professor.  Now multiply by the size of your faculty...

That assumes that the University pays for itself.  Of course, most don't.
Tuition can only be increased so far before it stops coming in, even if
there are no other cheaper providers of the same goods and services.

In the past, of course, higher education was often subsidized by state
or federal government, directly or indirectly.  The political will to
continue doing this, at least to any great extent, seems no longer to be
there, and it is not clear that it will return within our lifetimes.

Assume, for the moment, that you too are a university high administrator,
and you regard all of the above observations as true.  What way out do you
have?  The only easy way out is to greatly increase the number of students
taught by each faculty member each semester.  This you can do in part by
new technology which multiplies each professor's contact with students at
the cost of personal interaction.  In part you can do it by increasing
each professor's work load, but this only goes so far.  (Each of these will
diminish the quality of instruction, of course, but if it is diminished
at all universities more or less equally, one's own university remains
economically viable.)  But most of all what you do is put most of your
faculty salaries and benefits in to those fields which either have the
largest classes, or which bring in the most revenue from sources other
than tuition.  Of course, too, you have to worry about not offending any
professional body that had a great amount of clout with the sources of
funds on which you depend.

What this all may mean is that the kind of University we all know, where
one can study a wide range of topics in relatively small classes, will be
a thing of the past in another 30 years or so.

Here are some telling quotations from the last annual report of our own
University's president, Vartan Gregorian:

"... it is reasonable to ask why the University should not continue along
the roads it has recently taken, knowing that they have worked so well in
the past.  The answer, very simply, is that conditions in the nation, but
also in the world, have changed so substantially in the last decade that
what seemed reasonable in 1969 is no longer adequate today.  To put the
matter bluntly, while Brown, like a number of other American universities,
is flourishing, the nation is not."

"... the changes in the faculty will be no less great. .....  The teaching
role, defined essentially as a classroom role, will be significantly added
to.  It is not so much that so-called "teaching loads" of individual pro-
fessors will be increased, though some may be, but the functions and re-
sponsibilities defined as professorial will be reconceived.  It is very
likely that the whole system of faculty tenure -- introduced early in
the 20th century when free speech issues were of legitimate concern to
professors ... -- will have to be reviewed in the light of much that has
happened since.  Is it reasonable to assume that 21st-century universities,
and not only Brown, will remain accepting of the idea that an individual
appointed in his or her late 30's or early 40's should enjoy life tenure,
defined literally as guaranteed ewmployment until the age when senility
sets in?  May it not seem more just ... to guarantee something like five-
or ten-year term appointments ...?"

This from  a *very* intelligent man, who was NOT born to a life of power
and privilege, but rose to his present position from the humblest of
beginnings through his own education and merit in Iran, in Lebanon, and
eventually in this country, should give every one of us occasion to
think deeply and long about our unspoken professional assumptions and
about the foundations on which we are building or have built our careers.

The thoughts that they have led me to are absolutely chilling!

(Robert Mathiesen, Brown University, SL500000 at BROWNVM.BITNET)