Picture this: you’re a liberal arts major at an engineering school, a land grant university, deep in the farmland.
Things are already pretty tough. If you’re not an animal science major hoping to fix million-dollar quarter horses -or wanting to sell your soul as a petroleum engineer- you’re already ignored by the administration, especially when it comes to the all-important funding.
But you make due! Even though you’re not the priority, you still have a nice campus, you love your professors, and you’re still learning a lot. Even though you don’t get the multimillion-dollar learning stairs or the corporately sponsored rooms, you’re enjoying school. Your college looks out for you, has great programs and faculty who care about your success.
But then, a villainous new shadow appears. Talking about “streamlining,” “centralizing,” and “ineffectiveness.” People who have questionable motives and knowledge about your school come in to shake things up.
Now, I’ve got to say that I’m not one to oppose change, but perhaps the ones implementing the change should consider how it feels for your school to cut a 600,000 check to have random strangers tell you your business.
What do they propose? Structural administrative changes, cultural initiatives, a new arts program, but MOST IMPORTANTLY, combining not two, but THREE colleges into one pile of what they consider to be second-rate degrees.
When I think of Liberal Arts, Geosciences, and Sciences like chemistry, biology, and astronomy, I don’t think of them having similar goals and needs as academic institutions. Why should a Spanish language major share their academic area with a Meteorology student?
Geoscience degrees need research funding, small classes, and the opportunity to work with technology specialists who know how to make the weather machines work.
Science degrees need lab space, multiple professors to cover the big general courses -like BIOL101 and CHEM101- and advising to make sure students know their options in what they can pursue after a degree.
Liberal arts degrees don’t need labs or technology specialists. We need faculty. We need to be respected by the university -who else will write your pretty little emails? And we need to keep our courses focused on the humanities and social sciences.
They claim that they want to unite the three groups to help “advocate” for social sciences at a “STEM university” doesn’t add up for me. Notice how you just lumped in over 20 majors that have your beloved STEM? How does throwing history and geology and physics and journalism into one pile advocate for STEM?
Lumping these groups, thousands of students into one college, with limited resources, particularly advisors and staff, doesn’t seem like a good call if you want to keep the paying customers, I mean students, around.
While I may not be the next Aggie billionaire with my groundbreaking distribution techniques, at least I’m not going to sell the decisions on how to run my school off to the highest bidder.
But hey, I’m only an English major.