Across the country, public universities are trimming their budgets in a response to lagging economies and budget shortfalls. In some cases, that's resulted in cuts in one specific area -- the humanities.
Most recently, the State University of New York-Albany announced in October that it planned to suspend several of its humanities departments next year, including classics, French, Italian, Russian and theater, because of inadequate state funding.
UC Merced associate history professor Ruth Mostern said the cuts these universities made aren't necessarily an attack on the humanities, but more of an attempt to cut back on small, isolated departments.
"As administrators in tough budgetary times have been seeking ways to reduce administrative overhead, small, isolated departments have been vulnerable," she said. "The crisis in the humanities isn't about the humanities ... It's a question of how to integrate those activities effectively into universities that are facing new budgetary challenges."
Even if UC Merced wanted to break off into tiny departments, it couldn't because there are not enough faculty members to do so, Mostern added.
Unlike some universities, however, UC Merced is keeping its humanities offerings, and it plans to increase them in the long term.
Reginald McGinnis, Western Humanities Alliance president, said UC Merced is in a unique position. "It says a lot about the UC Merced community and the university administration that they are committed to offering students a quality education across the disciplines, from the humanities and the arts to the social sciences and the natural sciences," he said.
"One often hears how it is necessary to cut programs in light of the current economic crisis. And this is, in fact, a very difficult phase in terms of university budgets. At the same time, it is essential to believe in the intrinsic value of what a university is offering to its students and the community it serves. In the long run, and even in the very near future, building the humanities will benefit everyone at UC Merced."
Humanities essential
Mark Aldenderfer,, dean of the UC Merced School of Social Science, Humanities and Arts (SSHA), describes himself as an ardent defender of the humanities and believes they are an essential component of a college education.
"There's no sense that on this campus or within the UC system there will be any attempt to reduce the range of the course offerings in the humanities or the nature of the programs," he said.
"There are individual faculty members who will say 'Why do we need courses in the humanities?' " he said.
Aldenderfer's response is that the humanities are essential because they offer students many ways to look at the the world and explain what it means to be human.
"The world is a complex place, and in order to understand that and all that complexity you need to be exposed to different languages," he said. "You need to understand that art, literature, music and studies of other cultures provide insight into the human condition and how we live in this world."
Another argument that favors keeping humanities programs is that they are cost-effective, Aldenderfer, said. Compared with science and engineering, social science and humanities professors are less expensive because they don't require large labs and don't need large numbers of graduate students.
A long-term plan for the university is to have 50 percent of the faculty in social science, humanities and arts programs and 35 percent in the sciences, he said.
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