In a presentation yesterday, Stephen Kolison, president of the State College of New York at Fredonia, proposed the elimination of 13 applications on the faculty, together with philosophy.
Kolison cited monetary issues based mostly on inhabitants tendencies and competitors:
In New York, whereas census information exhibits that the general inhabitants of the state grew from 2010 to 2020, nearly 95% of that development was within the 65 and over demographic. In the meantime, the “25 and youthful” inhabitants fell by almost 260,000. This competitors over a smaller base of college-bound college students has contributed to our enrollment being down round 40-percent since Fall 2015. As a result of tuition is the one largest supply of direct income for our campus, enrollment declines have contributed to monetary challenges which have led to the structural deficit now we have been grappling with for greater than a decade. Briefly, our base expenditures merely far outweigh our revenues.
Apart from philosophy, the applications really helpful for closure are in visible arts, sociology, French, Spanish, overseas language schooling, math schooling, early childhood schooling, and industrial administration. The total listing and assertion are here.
Readers could recall that SUNY Fredonia is the employer of thinker Stephen Kershnar, who continues to be in litigation with the college over it at the moment banning him from campus due to a controversy regarding a philosophical dialogue about adult-child intercourse he participated in on the podcast, Brain in a Vat.
Kershnar is actually the one tenured/tenure-track school member in philosophy at Fredonia. (Neil Feit retired from the college this previous summer season.)
It’s unclear how a lot cash, if any, eliminating the philosophy program will save the college. However maybe together with this system for elimination is a method for the administration to jettison what it sees as a problematic school member.
Kolison’s announcement consists of the now typical rationale that pupil demand for the focused applications is low:
Low enrollment in these applications speaks volumes about what our college students need and want from us when it comes to tutorial majors. These 13 applications characterize 15% of all majors at Fredonia, however but at the moment have a mixed enrollment of 74 college students. That equals simply over 2% of the undergraduate pupil inhabitants, with a 3rd of these 74 college students set to graduate this spring.
I’m undecided what “want” is doing in that first sentence, until it’s simply getting used, disingenuously, as a synonym for “need.” For no matter educators may imply by college students’ “wants,” we all know they’re actually not an identical to their revealed preferences. This sort of rhetoric is proof of an administration that doesn’t understand how how or doesn’t imagine it could adequately lead its college students. It will possibly solely observe them. And merely following college students could take some universities down a path to their very own obsolescence. Universities are more and more outsourcing schooling to 3rd events, akin to Google, a development which can proceed as long as universities function as if educating college students is primarily about job coaching. Until universities provide one thing distinctive, increasingly they’ll be regarded as a 3rd wheel, and edged out.
Philosophy at Fredonia had been targeted previously, in 2017 and 2018. It survived then. Whether or not it can this time is unclear.
