Is the UW Now (Just) a Vocational School?
UW stopped investing in a broad-based liberal arts education long ago and most
of our programs in the traditional liberal arts fields are
now not competitive with our peer institutions
Many posts in the AAUP Listserv discussion have tried to compare the liberal arts education available at UW with the Ivy League, with major public research universities, or with some golden age in the past. Those comparisons are misguided, not because there’s something wrong with the humanities (or arts or social sciences) in general but because UW stopped investing in a broad-based liberal arts education long ago and most of our programs in the traditional liberal arts fields are not competitive with peer institutions. To take one personal example: I’ve been at UW for ten years, and I’ve never taught an undergraduate seminar here. When people hark back to a wonderful seminar from their undergraduate days, they are describing an experience that simply doesn’t exist for most students in my program. (My current “small,” “discussion-based” class has 64 students.) The main cause of this neglect is not the budget per se but the distribution of resources on campus. The College of Arts and Sciences doesn’t receive a penny of state support even though it does almost 70 percent of the teaching at UW, and it has been run as a fee-based enterprise ever since the dark days of the financial crisis. A&S budget documents from 2010 pointed out that it was essentially operating as a “fee-based service” even at that time, and that was before the more recent double-digit tuition hikes. Today 37 percent of the tuition paid by students in A&S is skimmed off the top to subsidize other units on campus. A&S is still the only unit to “receive” a “negative supplement” from the General Fund ($11.5 million in the most recent budget). This arrangement would seem to be a clear violation of the letter and spirit of ABB and its 70/30 formula for returning tuition to the units that do the teaching and generate tuition money, but the university would not be able function without the tens of millions of dollars in surplus tuition generated by English and History majors and used to replenish the General Fund after the state budget cuts. Students in the traditional liberal arts fields are being required to take out larger loans or find a second job (and miss out on those cherished “Husky moments”) in order to subsidize the education of future software engineers and doctors and to fund research in the STEM fields. We are a technical school first and foremost, and nobody is more aware of that reality than the faculty, staff, and (especially) the students in the Humanities.
For the record, it’s also worth pointing out where the money goes. The Medical School is the most heavily subsidized academic unit at UW. It receives a $41 million supplement from the General Fund in the 2014 budget, along with $12.5 million for the medical centers, $10 million for Dentistry, $5 million for Public Health, and about $13 million more for Health Sciences Administration and Medical Affairs. Only the College of Engineering ($25 million) and the College of the Environment ($19 million) come close. And those figures don’t take into account additional unrecovered indirect costs related to sponsored research, again mostly in medicine and engineering. (For the budget data see here https://opb.washington.edu/sites/default/files/opb/Budget/Budget%20Letter%20and%20Tables%20FY14.pdf.)
James Tweedie
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature
Program in Cinema Studies
University of Washington
Tags: Academic Standards, UW
Posted 07 May 2014 by theaveeditor
in Schools & Colleges, The Ave Scene