If you don't build it, no one will come

Universities are difficult to build and expensive to maintain, but we'll miss them when they're gone.

Two years ago, Jennifer Frey moved across the country. She and her husband, a fellow philosopher, were taking up positions at the University of Tulsa. Frey’s appointment was particularly exciting: she was going to be the new Dean of the Honors College. From the outside, the project seemed exciting. They would emphasize the classics, providing their honors students with a Great Books education involving small seminars. In just two years, Frey helped to build the program, hiring new faculty and attracting new applicants (many of whom would not have considered Tulsa without the Honors College).

Frey has written about the Honors College experience at Tulsa in a recent piece for The New York Times:

At Tulsa, we invited our students to enter “the great conversation” with some of the most influential thinkers of our inherited intellectual tradition. For their first two years they encountered a set curriculum of texts from Homer to Hannah Arendt. These texts were carefully chosen by an interdisciplinary faculty because they transcend their time and place in two senses: They influenced a broader tradition, and they had the potential to help our students reflect in a sustained way on what it means to be a good human being and citizen. Our seminars were led by faculty members who did not lecture or use secondary sources. Rather, the role of the faculty members was to foster and guide conversations among our students that allowed them to think through these questions for and among themselves.

To help guide the program, they had assembled an academic advisory board from other institutions, like Robert P. George of Princeton, Zena Hitz of St. John’s College, and Cornel West.

But now, just two years into this revival, the University of Tulsa has decided to, to use the dreaded euphemism, ‘go in a different direction.’ The new leadership of the university (the president and provost both departed this year) has decided to eliminate the position of dean (along with staff positions). I know that several academics had moved to Tulsa to take positions at the Honors College, but I haven’t been able to make out exactly what their future looks like. (At least one has taken a new position, but I do not want to draw any inferences.)

Like many administrative decisions at universities, the reasoning is opaque. ‘Go in a different direction’ can mean many things, after all — that is the kind of tactical underspecification that administrators love to employ. At the very least, they will be increasing class sizes. Will the Great Books curriculum be preserved? It is unclear, but I am doubtful.

There is at least one example of Tulsa’s leadership acting dishonestly. As Frey tells Anchored, a podcast associated with the Classical Learning Test, Tulsa released a statement saying that she had resigned from her position. That is untrue, and that is why she went public on Twitter (called X by some).

What does education look like at Tulsa for students who enrolled two years ago, applying to Tulsa specifically for the Honors College? It is hard to say, but I think they’ve been shammed.

If you build it, they will come — it’s a corny phrase from a corny movie, but there’s some truth to it. There’s another phrase we need to keep in mind: If you don’t build it, nobody will come. If you don’t build programs of academic excellence, programs that offer promising young students a truly excellent education, then they will have nowhere to go.

Indiana University was forced to eliminate roughly 20% of its majors (affecting about 4% of its students) due to low enrollment. This is in line with new state regulations. There is no reason to think that a major, once it has been introduced, must always remain available; many universities’ degree catalogues are overgrown and would benefit from some pruning. But these are extreme cuts, justified in the name of making student choice easier. Inside Higher Ed reports:

According to a list posted by the commission, among the 400 degrees to be nixed or combined into others are many foreign language and teacher-education programs. The list also includes undergraduate and graduate degrees in fine arts, English, business, economics, philosophy, history, anthropology, sociology, journalism, public administration, social work, labor studies, political science, American studies, Africana studies, women’s and gender studies, religious studies, and classical studies.

You can find the link to these cuts here (warning: it is a PDF). Many language programs, including in classical studies, are planned for suspension. In fairness, many of the particular majors could be merged: you don’t need separate majors for Classical Civilizations and Classical Languages, and Computational Linguistics could be a specialization within the broader Linguistics major. Reasonable consolidation can and should be part of university governance.

Yet, this will severely damage Indiana’s reputation as a center for languages; it may be surprising to hear this, but Indiana University was known for its robust language programs! These programs would likely never attract hordes of students, but they are relatively cheap by university standards and show that Indiana is a serious university. There are also pragmatic reasons for a state, and a country more generally, to want some citizens to speak Mandarin or various Slavic languages given the geopolitical situation of the early 21st century. Having your flagship university offer those programs is a relatively affordable way to reach that end.

If you don’t build it, and if you don’t preserve it, nobody will come.

Maybe more universities will follow this model. Make everything practical and cut the humanities down to the bare minimum. Cut the theoretical sciences while you have the knife out. Eliminate math, except for the actuarial degree. Turn every university into a vocational school for jobs that may not exist in a decade.

The Ohio River Near Wheeling, West Virginia

I went to a middling university for my undergraduate education: Ohio University. Its reputation mostly concerns student life; it is a ‘party school.’ The reason I went, though, was because of a strange little program available to 1% of students at Ohio: the Honors Tutorial College. This college was founded when Ellery Golos, a professor at OU, proposed a tutorial-style education for the top students at the university. This college has now existed for over 50 years. Students in the HTC take tutorials, often one-on-one, with professors in their major. That meant that from my very first day at OU, I was taking one-on-one tutorials in philosophy.

We were a small and strange group. There are roughly 200 students in the HTC at any given time, and so each class is 50 students. We were scattered across majors: classics, philosophy, English, astrophysics, journalism, and more. We were given a lot of flexibility in our class selection and the general course of our studies. We would then spend our final year writing a senior thesis. It was intense, lively, and fun.

In my graduating class alone, I know that most of us went on to get graduate degrees. Some of my cohort became professors; one was a Marshall scholar and now has his own astrophysics lab at UT Austin. Some became tech founders. One of my closest friends from my class is now a successful psychiatrist. Another is a high-level congressional staffer. One poor soul became a YouTuber.

Not bad for a party school — but it was because OU decided that the HTC was worth maintaining. They built it, and we came.

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The University of Tulsa and Indiana University are fine schools, but they may not spring to mind if you are asked about ‘elite’ education in the United States. The University of Chicago, however, is a clear example of an elite university. And sadly, they’re undergoing some major (negative) changes, too.

In an email to division faculty in June, Dean Deborah Nelson announced the formation of five advisory committees tasked with identifying areas to reduce spending. Among the considered changes are the consolidation of the division’s 15 departments into eight, fewer language courses and minimum program sizes, according to documents obtained by The Tribune.

“University leadership is looking across the entire institution for ways to significantly reduce costs and increase revenue, while continuing to fulfill our mission,” Nelson wrote in the email.

Chicago cites budget problems as the primary motivation; last year, it had a deficit of $288 million. (It should be noted that Chicago has a $10,000,000,000 endowment. Billion, with a b.) If student loans are restricted for graduate students, and if endowments are taxed (as some in Washington want to do), and if the number of international students declines, then they will see a decline in operating revenue. They’ll need to find some way to make up for the loss.

So, they are looking to reduce programs and consolidate departments. Their highly-regarded Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, which includes a Sanskrit specialist, fears they won’t be able to justify their existence due to low enrollment. But what’s the alternative? You’ll never have high enrollment for Sanskrit. It’s Sanskrit! And yet, we do need and want a university like Chicago to be able to specialize in these areas of study. Where else can these scholars go? Where else can this knowledge be preserved?

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A story you will read everywhere – including here on my newsletter – is that modern college students can’t read books. Or, at least, they don’t want to read books. They’ve been trained on summaries, excerpts, and microcontent, and they never developed the taste or the ability to sit down and read an entire work. Professors struggle with their students (I certainly did as an instructor); they lighten the load to get their students to participate at all.

It is a serious problem. But I think these stories of university decline show us that the decline is now merely do to a decline in student quality. Students don’t want to read books — but it seems like administrators don’t want them to read books, either.