Philospher David C.K. Curry, the last philosophy faculty member at SUNY-Potsdam, comments at CHE; an excerpt:
At Potsdam, a few facts are indisputable. We face a $9-million annual operating deficit. Enrollment has fallen from 4,224 in 2012 to 2,501 in 2023, a decline of around 40 percent. “There will be no bailouts,” President Suzanne Smith announced last fall, explaining that the SUNY system refuses to help. Personnel costs account for the vast majority of Potsdam’s expenses.
But focusing on the fiscal tree, as the administration wants us to do, causes one to lose sight of the forest. Echoing Gordon Gee, Smith aims to restructure the academic programs offered. Potsdam’s “Financial Stability Plan” is meant to “close the gap and focus our finite resources toward those programs that are most in demand in today’s marketplace.” The rhetoric unsurprisingly echoes that of higher-education consultants like the rpk Group, which focuses on “maximizing Mission, Market, and Margin®.”
But who decides what the employment needs of the future will be, and which courses will be most relevant? In a humanizing moment, Smith teared up while announcing the cuts. While I have no doubt that her news was genuinely difficult to deliver, it was more difficult to receive...
Years of state disinvestment have laid the groundwork for these cuts. Frederick E. Kowal, president of United University Professions, argues that SUNY’s financial crisis is “manufactured,” and the real crisis is that the State of New York has failed to fulfill its obligations. In 2004 New York funded the SUNY system at just under $1.9 billion; in 2023 the funding for SUNY was just $1.34 billion. If you factor in inflation, SUNY received almost twice as much state support in 2004 as it did in 2023. Similar funding cuts have occurred nationwide.
That decline in funding combined with the pandemic-era enrollment declines created the perfect opportunity for authoritarian administrators to impose their increasingly corporate visions of higher education onto their institutions. While faculty and staff members scrambled to educate their students during a pandemic, administrators sharpened their knives, shamelessly seizing the opportunity to gut programs, the faculty, and faculty governance.
Witnessing these bloodbaths at college after college leads me to think it's time for a different approach. New York is a fairly liberal state, yet its legislature is not motivated to fund the universities (or raise the tuitions--at Potsdam, in-state tuition and fees are less than $9,000 per year). No one, it appears, is convinced by the argument that the humanities are good training for many different careers. And the Humboldtian ideal of educating the whole person for a meaningful life: who in capitalist America has time (or money) for that?
Firing faculty with 35 years of service, as has happened at Potsdam and elsewehere; firing tenured faculty more generally: these are violations of contractual commitments of workers, and they should be approached the way workers in other sectors of the economy approach them: through organizing, unionizing, strikes, and lawsuits. Only when it's too costly for universities to balance budgets these ways, will there be a change in approach. Or so it seems to me. If others have ideas for other approaches, please share them.
