Higher Education Funding Cuts Are a Collective Punishment

Should people suffer for the sins of their colleagues and leaders?

No way to please everyone…except herself, of course! Article from the WSJ

The costs of running a university bear little relation to the tuition rates; that amount is influenced largely by an out-of-control student loan system and the decisions of peer institutions to raise their rates each year to the unsustainable levels that people are still willing either to shell out or indebt themselves for. Also, institutions have the ability to discount (or waive entirely) the full tuition rate for certain students they deem worthy of it, thus ensuring that the net revenue from tuition does not approach anywhere near what full-paying families think it does. Elite colleges and universities are running a market where scarcity (signaled by the selectivity of the institution) and cache (the brand name) are the selling points. As long as students still apply for admission and families will pursue any avenue to get their kids accepted up to and including committing fraud, these institutions have no reason to change their practices.

The main costs of running any college or university fall into the following general categories:

• Salaries and benefits (i.e. health insurance) for faculty and staff. This category is by far the largest budget item of any institution.

• Maintenance of buildings, grounds, and labs.

• Administrative services, such as counseling centers and IT departments, that have expanded greatly in the last 20 years both by law and by trend.

As Trump’s funding cuts for universities go into effect, it’s important to keep in mind that certain departments are far more expensive to run than others. Science labs and STEM programs in general are expensive because they require a lot of equipment and tend to rely heavily on external funding for their research functions. Humanities departments on the other hand tend to be less expensive because standing in front of a lecture hall to teach about gender normativity in the works of Homer or the queer feminist tropes of critical jihadi freedom fighter theory doesn’t cost much monetarily, in the grand scheme of the budget. The students even pay for their own books!

Shuttering entire departments for cost-cutting purposes isn’t a new thing. To provide one example, universities around the United States have shut down entire language departments (and laid off their faculty) after ridding their curriculums of foreign language requirements. Much of what motivates the existence of any academic department is manufactured by the institution’s degree requirements. If every student must take English 101, then the university will need a certain number of English professors to teach the courses, although nowadays that’s increasingly being done by part-time, no benefits employees on semester-by-semester contracts (a topic for a different article). The rest gets dictated by simple supply and demand—if students think that majoring in biology has value, for example, then the biology department will likely have enough students enrolling in their courses to justify their costs.

When the Trump administration announced that they were pulling $400 million of funding from Columbia for not dealing with antisemitism on campus, my immediate thought was, “okay, but for which programs?” We all know that the worst faculty offenders of the last year and a half represented the following disciplines:

• Women’s and gender studies

• English

• History

• Middle Eastern studies

• Social Work

With a few exceptions, the faculty from those departments who openly participated in the anti-Israel demonstrations are still employed. Here’s the sad truth: most of the programs suffering as a result of the cuts at Columbia did not have faculty participating in the nonsense that prompted the cuts. Just this year, more than 200 Columbia faculty signed a letter demanding a more forceful response from President Armstrong to address rampant antisemitism. The cruel irony is that the majority of the faculty who signed the letter were from the medical school or other STEM disciplines—the areas most affected by the cuts.

Here is one healthcare researcher at Columbia whose lab activities have stopped as a result of the cuts:

Dr. Lipkin seems like a good guy and a dedicated researcher. Why should his important healthcare research get axed because his gender studies colleagues had nothing better to do than act as overseers for an encampment for domestic terrorists that the university administration had the power to dismantle at any point? He and his lab buddies are genuine victims in this situation, to say nothing of the patients whom his research would have helped.

Of course, we could discuss how Columbia has a $15 billion endowment while still charging $90k/year for students to be taught by the professors whose jobs are threatened by the cuts. Or how Columbia already gets hundreds of millions in foreign money, largely from oil-rich Arab dictatorships, to fund research. Or how President Armstrong, whose literal job it is to handle the situation, rakes in a seven-figure salary that does not appear to be affected at all by the funding cuts.

But who cares? None of what I just listed is going to change what’s going to happen to some lowly researchers due to their university higher-ups’ failures. President Armstrong’s overall response is to lament “the extreme uncertainty” forced on them by an unhinged lunatic whose re-election she and her friends are partially responsible for facilitating. Rather than take some ownership for it, President Armstrong and the other executives instead seem desperate to maintain the status quo that has made them rich, which in this day and age requires acting like a victim. And if it means that dedicated people like Dr. Lipkin lose their jobs and their life’s work, well, sacrifices must be made.