I want to mark a tense, surreal moment.
This is the time in the academic year when past and future are all bunched up with the present. We plan courses for the academic year beginning next fall, based in part on our experience of last year. Meanwhile registration for the courses beginning in January has taken place, and some courses with low enrollments have to be cut. If a cancelled course was to be taught by a full-time or annualized part-time faculty member, they might be assigned to a course originally planned for someone more junior, though this rarely happens.
This year everything is different. The budget crunch caused by enrollment shortfalls means the threshold for course cancellation is higher (and a final cull of courses not at 75% has yet to take place), and course allocations for academic year 26-27 have been trimmed. But that’s only the tip of the restructuring iceberg. Planning for 26-27 is reeling from the pausing and merging of "duplicative" or low-enrollment programs. Last week we learned that the small undergraduate majors in history, anthropology and sociology have been shut down, their faculty enjoined to work out something more streamlined and attractive to students. Their work, we are told, will serve as a "model" for the rest of the "humanities and social sciences unit." Whatever 26-27 portends, 27-28 will be different again.
And that's not the last of it either. In the coming days, notification of budget crunch-forced "reduction in forces" for full-time faculty will begin, with letters offering "voluntary early retirement" and "voluntary separation." We don't know to how many people these will be sent; nor do we know how many of those offers would have to be taken up to forestall the "involuntary separations" which would otherwise ensue - or what determines who will be affected by each of these measures. Against the backdrop of the unmooring of many departments in the "humanities and social sciences unit," this left many of us heading into the Thanksgiving break not knowing if we were soon to be let go.
I'm not dwelling here on my own case, though I would be surprised not to be getting one or other of the kinds of letters promised for this week. I was already senior enough to be "eligible" for "special voluntary separation" when the university was in the throes of COVID five years ago, and my appointment has never been in a department. I expect wrenching choices in the coming week: leave or stay on a possibly sinking ship which might cast me overboard for ballast anyway? I'm far from the only person contemplating these grim questions, though those of us also responsible for curricular planning are experiencing this uncertainty at two levels. Who will teach in 26-27, and who will be designing the curriculum, if there even is one?
The particularly surreal thing is that I'm drafting the syllabus for what is to be Lang version of the core course for the soon-to-be approved major in Individualized Studies (formed from the coming together of the university's two self-design Liberal Arts majors). A pilot was supposed to run next semester but - ha! - is likely to be cut for low enrollment.
But it's the content of the syllabus that's making me rub my eyes, as I imagine acquainting students with the history and philosophy of education, broadly understood, and more narrowly construed "liberal arts" in its various forms - all in the context of the charmingly quixotic school in which they're designing their individualized course of study. I'm more sympathetic than many of my colleagues to the direction the university is heading (explicitly and intensively bridging liberal arts, design and performance), and can narrate it inspiringly as a new chapter in The New School's storied history... but will I be the one telling the story?
More anon!
