American Thinker: If you are sick and tired of professors indoctrinating students in politicized classes that teach nothing of any use in real life, and hate the idea that tenure immunizes them from accountability, the next decade or so is going to provide some relief. The reckoning is coming, as shocked professors at a University of Wisconsin campus just discovered. The higher education bubble that Professor Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has forecast to burst has just popped in Stevens Point, Wisconsin.
It turns out that you can’t earn a living teaching subjects that students aren’t that interested in. Even if you have tenure. Colleen Flaherty writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
…the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point announced its plan to cut 13 majors — including those in anchor humanities departments such as English and history and all three of the foreign languages offered — and, with them, faculty jobs. Tenured professors may well lose their positions.
The plan is part of the campus’s Point Forward initiative to stabilize enrollment by investing scarce resources into programs Stevens Point sees as distinctive and in demand. Those include business, chemical engineering, computer information systems, conservation law enforcement, fire science and graphic design.
This is only possible because the GOP majority in the Wisconsin State Legislature passed and Governor Scott Walker signed a bill rolling back Wisconsin’s ultra-strong tenure protection in state-funded higher education, and the subsequent “rewriting of related Board of Regents policies on tenure and program discontinuance.” As a result, if a department is closed, the tenured professors in it lose their jobs. As a matter of fact, in most other colleges and universities, this already is the situation. Tenure does not protect professors when their department is folded up, usually due to poor enrollments. (Sometimes due to exposure as quackery.See the histroy of Phrenology, for instance.) more here
Stevens Point is pretty conservative, if this happens in Madison the pinko professors will raise hell….
Most of us have to put our best foot forward every day of our lives at work. Colleges should be no different cuz, hey! that’s real life!!
Sounds like a good plan!
Will teach Gender Studies for food
I’m actually sad about a lot of the departments getting sacked:
· American studies,
· art (excluding graphic design),
· English (excluding English for teacher certification),
· French,
· geography,
· geoscience,
· German,
· history (excluding social science for teacher certification),
· music literature,
· philosophy,
· political science,
· sociology
· Spanish.
Shakespeare? English and American and Russian literature? Political science theory through the ages? Geoscience…. because global warming is a settled science…?
I don’t know if feminist studies and transgenderism are subsets here of sociology, but I can only hope.
The government is not doing enough to support vocational colleges, working, even, to destroy them. Pay attention, Trump! ….Lady in Red
computer information systems
Funny. ha ha. I was enrolled in CIS at my college back in the late-90s. After 2 years the univerity discontinued all CIS classes. I was advised to go into Computer Science (CS), where the core classes were teaching COBAL-74 (language from the 1970s). Meanwhile I was working at an ISP programming in HTML, JAVA, and perl. COBAL-74, in the coming age of Internet, I just shook my head… and exited the university computer programs all together.
We no longer need expensive and obsolete brick and mortar universities in this country. With the advancements in technology, it would be far more efficient and immensely cheaper to teach courses online!
I’m frightened about what “English for teacher certification” could possibly be.
Horace….. Life is not always about efficiency. College used to be about two kinds of learning: intellectual and personal/sexual.
We’ve screwed up the first part, badly, but I’m not sure a kid will learn a whole lot about coping with life, people, situations from on-line courses in his mother’s basement. ….Lady in Red
Lady in Red – Not when those on-line courses in his mother’s basement are competing with all those left-handed shortcuts…
But then there wouldn’t be much need for football stadiums and basketball arenai…
Oh, the humanity!
P.J. O’Rourke
“The second item in the liberal creed, after self-righteousness, is unaccountability. Liberals have invented whole college majors–psychology, sociology, women’s studies–to prove that nothing is anybody’s fault. No one is fond of taking responsibility for his actions, but consider how much you’d have to hate free will to come up with a political platform that advocates killing unborn babies but not convicted murderers. A callous pragmatist might favor abortion and capital punishment. A devout Christian would sanction neither. But it takes years of therapy to arrive at the liberal view.”
Long ago Lazlo was listening to G. Gordon Liddy on that infernal radio machine, and one of his interns asked him what was the purpose of College.
He replied that there were only two reasons to go to college.
One: Train yourself to do a job you want, in a field you want to work in. This means you take classes that prepare you to perform functions and services that are marketable in the field of commerce and industry.
The above implies a person looking to better their financial station.
Two: Learn how to think about the world.
This means you take classes that will expose you to different cultural and ideological values and allow you to explore your philosophical identity.
The above implies a person of means that wants to enrich his life in non monetary ways.
The problem with modern college as I see it, is that there are gobs of people who will graduate with degrees that are meaningless unless they work in the Indoctrination- I mean Education field. I think this is by design, so they can raise a new crop of Marxist Zealots every generation that know nothing but that perverted world view that can only come with Tenure
Just watched a local news story about a High School student who is making artificial limbs on a 3D printer. I hope he stays in the Wisconsin college system.
Now THAT kid is going somewhere. Not all millennials eat Tide Pods
As long as white girls take exams for the Basketball team the college should be fine.
UWSP is a small off-shoot of the larger UW System. People up north go there to learn something for work. Kids go to UW Madison to learn how not to learn.
They should cut Economics because no school gets it.
I am a former “Pointer” as well as a graduate with an English degree. I understand the reasons UWSP made this move, after all, money is limited. However, my English degree has served me well. I was initially going to be a teacher. Then I found out how little teachers made (at the time). I changed my focus, and for 20+ years I earned six figures in sales and sales management annually before I retired.
I helped four start-ups to grow into multi-million or multi-billion dollar industries. In addition to sales, I wrote marketing materials, legal documents, advertisements, articles, and presentations that other “more practical” fields of study struggled to explain due to their unfamiliarity with the English language.
Many companies today are utterly unaware of how poor their correspondence and advertisements are, and how they reflect on the intelligence of their company. They may have the best product on the market, but lose that advantage when “linguistically challenged” people work in their sales or marketing areas. In today’s fast-paced environment, poor grammar or misspellings in communications scream “We’re pretty dumb”. They may not get a second look, and they have no understanding of why they may lose potential business.
I’m not opposed to the UWSP change. However, the ability to use my English degree has served me well. Remember the old saying “Nothing happens until somebody sells something”. You can’t sell if you can’t communicate.