“There always has been pressure for departments that have a large influx of students to have more faculty,” says Wilt Idema, chair of East Asian languages and civilizations, which had 40 concentrators in 2008. “If I were the chair of economics, I would push my dean to have more faculty.”
Since faculty salaries are a considerable investment for FAS, the likes of the Celtic department have less recourse for claiming the additional dollar if budgetary streamlining is driven purely by efficiency and practicality.
VALIDATING THEIR EXISTENCE
Harvard, some argue, should not base its course and program offerings on the areas that students decide to frequent. “We shouldn’t choose [what to offer] simply by relevance or by popularity or by modernity or by what’s trendy,” Government Professor Harvey C. Mansfield says.
For now, the University is falling into line, standing by its smaller departments even amid high fiscal pressures.
“Just because a department has a small number of faculty or small number of concentrators taking their courses—that’s not a good reason for getting rid of it,” Smith says. “Take something like Sanskrit—it might be small on campus but India is huge.”
The cuts to smaller departments have been proportional to those of larger departments—to the tune of 15 percent in the fiscal year that ends this coming June.
“We serve many constituencies in both graduates and undergraduates,” Slavic Languages and Literatures Chair Julie Buckler says. “We feel that the University continues to support us robustly in that.”
As Smith says, “It was not high on my list to go cutting activities out of the FAS that have been fundamental to what we’ve been doing and have been wonderful on campus.”
WHAT IS PRAGMATIC?
Departments that have the fewest concentrators tend to teach subject areas that have more oblique connections to current affairs and fewer obvious paths to the job market.
In an opinion piece published in The New York Times, University President Drew G. Faust wrote that in the face of pressure toward preprofessional undergraduate educations, “we should remember that colleges and universities are about a great deal more than measurable utility.”
In deciding to support the smaller departments at Harvard—both financially and intellectually—Faust and Smith have been bucking the national trend by defying what Ziolkowski refers to as “American pragmatism”—the emphasis on studying subjects relevant to one’s immediate environment.
Some administrators and professors argue that there is distinct value to teaching courses not in step with current trends for the sake of preserving knowledge and perpetuating intellectual thirst.
“Let’s say that you take care of crisis in the Mideast and that you cure tuberculosis,” Ziolkowski says. “You still have to make life worth living and enjoying for people. And that’s where the humanities come in...things that will bring us solace, bring us self-knowledge, increase our understanding of others as well.”
As Mansfield says, “A university is not an institution that is directed toward practice but is meant to cherish the life of the mind.”
—Staff writer Elyssa A.L. Spitzer can be reached at spitzer@fas.harvard.edu.