Liberal arts professors in other states who’ve seen programs slashed warn Utah: You may be next

The first sign that troubled David C.K. Curry was when his university stopped hiring new philosophy professors to step in as peers retired. His department whittled from five to three to two.

The next was when his university’s leadership started talking about “realignment.”

They brought in a consulting firm to address budget deficits and suggested certain departments weren’t meeting the mark for “efficiency.” Not enough students were picking those majors or graduating and finding jobs. If they did get jobs, they weren’t paying enough. The target metric, Curry recalled, wavered so much a marksman couldn’t hit it.

“They never justified those numbers,” the professor said. “They were just a bunch of buzz words.”

After that came the cuts. Nine programs at Curry’s school were eliminated in one sweep, including philosophy, leaving him the only professor still teaching the subject — but with no formal major that students can elect. Art history was out, too; dance, theater and music performance had their curtain calls; French and Spanish terminé.

It turns out the target wasn’t so much a number, Curry has come to believe, but a specific field of study: the liberal arts.

And after seeing it play out at his school — the State University of New York at Potsdam, as well as other four-year schools in the system — he recognizes the same signs showing up at colleges across the country. Including in Utah.

Fears have spread here among faculty after a recent state audit recommended that the presidents of Utah’s eight public colleges and universities start cutting “inefficient” programs. The language is almost identical to what Curry saw.

The report said decisions should be based on the same data that his school used: program enrollment, graduation rates, students acquiring high-paying jobs or landing high-need jobs that contribute to the state’s workforce. Engineering, nursing and business were held up as the gold stars. French and art history were the “low-performing” examples.

To the liberal arts professors who specialize in politics and rhetoric, what’s being said between the lines is that arts, humanities and the social sciences don’t “measure up.” At least not with metrics that value money and instant careers. Philosophy doesn’t necessarily land the same kind of salaried gig as a business degree, if that’s how it’s being counted, which one professor told The Salt Lake Tribune was “narrow and short-sighted.”

They’re scared the numbers will be used to make Utah the next state to cut back or cut out its liberal arts degrees — without regard for what will be lost.

“There should be more fears about what this will do,” Curry warned. “This is a playbook. It’s a playbook that’s being sold to institutions nationwide.”

The art of this war is expected to dominate the coming legislative session in Utah, led by a Republican-majority that has already made clear its plans to cut the budget for higher education and has applauded the audit’s findings as a way to save money. It’s the latest front in the ongoing dismantling of public colleges they have deemed too progressive, last year squashing colleges’ diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.

House Speaker Mike Schultz has said he wants Utah’s system of higher education to operate like a business and repeated the phrase “return on investment” three times in a statement to The Tribune.

“We’re working to optimize our higher education system to maximize the return on investment for students and taxpayers,” Schultz said. The speaker is a graduate of Roy High School and did not attend college.

He has announced his intention to reallocate the budgets for “low-performing” programs to other areas he views as more successful, largely those that are technical — and career-focused. The speaker said the goal is “not to eliminate one particular program or another” but, again, to ensure “the greatest return on investment” for the state’s economy. He wants “high-demand” jobs to be the outcome of higher education.

The ROI-driven agenda in other mostly red states has led colleges there to cut their liberal arts programs, including West Virginia, Nebraska and Kansas.

Meanwhile, faculty at Utah schools say the changes have started. The University of Utah has already hired a consultant group to look for “redundancies.” Utah Valley University said in a statement it’s pulling the data “to meet the Legislature’s call.”

One professor at the U. said the state’s flagship school hasn’t hired replacements when professors have left their department. Another said there’s been talk of their entire program being excised. Both were afraid to use their names for fear of retribution; The Salt Lake Tribune verified their identities.

They say chat groups have exploded with talk about packing up weathered copies of Plato and “The Lottery” and leaving for other jobs before meeting the same fate as the characters they’ve long taught about.

At his college, despite the changes that were supposed to bring it onto better financial footing, Curry says enrollment has continued to drop since the cuts. Public data confirms that. And that’s just the start, he believes, of what losing liberal arts will do — when schools become places for training instead of thinking.

“The public,” he said, “really needs to know what these decisions are going to do to the future of their community.”

What do the liberal arts teach students?

Most university students are introduced to the liberal arts in their prerequisite general education classes. Ranging from math to English to history, students are typically required to take these credits for a broader understanding of the world before specializing in their field of study.

When Jack Newell oversaw those classes as a dean at the University of Utah, he refused to call them general education.

“Liberal education was the name we chose for these undergraduate requirements, rather than general education, to make the point that these courses were designed to encourage free and responsible thinking in all students,” he wrote in a recent piece for a history journal.

The coursework has long been a part of a university education in democratic countries for that reason. And like American Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, Newell likes to also refer to them as “the liberating arts.”

The real goal, he said, is teaching students the foundational skills for academia as well as life: how to write, analyze texts, problem-solve, be curious, act ethically, collaborate and become informed citizens who value freedom.

“It is often those who teach English, languages, history, philosophy, anthropology who introduce students to ideas that open their minds and imaginations, help them see the world from the perspective of peoples very different from themselves and, therefore, create public-spirited humans,” Newell told The Tribune.

Now a professor emeritus, he served as dean of liberal education at the U. for 16 years, starting in 1974. By 1980, the U.S. Department of Education named the program one of the top 10 for undergraduates nationwide in championing liberal arts.

But the reforms he put into place began to erode as soon as he returned to teaching in 1990. And by last year, Newell said, the last of his efforts had been erased, “including changing the name of undergraduate requirements back to general education.”

All public universities in the state, including the U., were recently instructed by the Utah Board of Higher Education to cut back their coursework for general education. Now, students cannot be required to take more than 27 or 30 credit hours for those classes. The U. had previously had 39 hours.

That amounts to about a semester less of coursework that Newell sees as essential to helping students be better humans.

Like Curry, it’s a trend he’s seen spreading across the country. And he’s afraid of what it will mean for humankind.

If the liberal arts are about freedom, then not having them, Newell worries, will create citizens who aren’t really citizens — people who can’t stand up to authority or question what they’re told.

“The last thing authoritarians want is citizens who think for themselves, who think critically about social values and speak truth to power,” he said. “This is the reason why higher education is under such pressure from the political right today. ‘Don’t let your biases come under question! Don’t think about our checkered past! Don’t read disturbing books.’ You know — all the stuff we’re not just hearing but seeing every day now.”

Newell has spent decades defending liberal arts — including running Deep Springs College in California — and the beauty he says the study brings to life is also vital for a well-rounded workforce. An engineer, he said, is better if she knows how to communicate her plans for a freeway expansion and if she can think about what communities it will impact and how to avoid harm.

“To embrace life fully,” he said, “students must learn to live well, as well as to work.”

The plan for calculating cuts

The Legislature’s plans to roll back programs continues to speed forward — without any firm decisions on what specific metrics will be used to make cuts.

“We haven’t quite figured it out yet,” acknowledged Geoff Landward, Utah’s commissioner over higher education who majored in social work, a liberal arts field, in college.

The state audit outlined certain measurements to use, but then acknowledged that most schools in the state don’t track them. At this point, many college leaders haven’t looked at degree completion rates, job placements, employment demands or future graduate earnings for their programs.

“I do think that’s a problem, honestly,” Landward said, particularly about colleges that also don’t currently budget at a program level. “It’s justifiable that taxpayers ask what they get in return for their money.”

Over the past month, with support from the Utah System of Higher Education, that information is beginning to be compiled. And Landward said, as the audit recommends, it will be used to start data-driven discussions.

Legislative leaders have made it clear they want funding to go to programs that show quantifiable outcomes. Taxpayer money is otherwise being wasted, lawmakers have said. And so in a bill passed last session, they gave university presidents the power to unilaterally make cuts and be more financially nimble.

“Good data drives good decisions,” Schultz added in his statement. “We will look at the data to determine which programs are generating a high return on investment for students and which programs are under-enrolled or producing poor workforce outcomes.”

Landward said it’s his intention that any final calls for programs will be nuanced. The audit was helpful for “setting the basics,” he said, but decisions have to be based on more context. It’s why he’s working to determine a map of factors to guide schools as they move forward, such as the jobs that Utah needs.

“If you look strictly at wage outcomes, we probably wouldn’t have any social workers or certified nursing assistants or teachers. It can’t just be wage outcomes,” the commissioner added.

The audit made a similar case. Low enrollment in a program alone, for instance, might not be enough information. “It was reported that although one program at an institution produces few graduates each year, that program contributes to a significant portion of the industry’s national workforce,” the auditors wrote. “We note nuances exist.”

The report also added that certain fields may see lower pay or lower job placement, but “we acknowledge that some programs may provide a social good that transcends pay considerations.”

That hasn’t eased fears. And it isn’t to say there won’t be cuts. Landward said those have to come and won’t be easy.

“I think it’s naive to think it’s going to be painless,” he told The Tribune.

He doesn’t think the changes will mean total extinction for the liberal arts. But those programs might not look the same.

For instance, he doesn’t think every degree in the humanities has to be offered at each of the eight public schools here. The audit noted that four institutions had the same French language program and graduated 14 students total in 2022. Art history was also taught at four institutions and graduated a total of 20 students that same year.

The auditors called that unnecessary duplication when money should instead be spent on computer science or accounting, which have a higher demand. One solution, Landward said, is partnerships where one college teaches the subject, but students at every school can still access it, maybe online.

He also would like to see the liberal arts remain in general education for all students to benefit from, like learning to communicate effectively in writing. But he questions if all of the options will remain as full programs that students can major in beyond that — like what happened at Curry’s school in New York.

“The program may be cut, but we’ll keep it in general education,” Landward said, mentioning English as an example.

For the majors and programs that remain, he suggests they cut down on the electives they offer. That matches a suggestion from Schultz, who wants students to take fewer courses for a degree so they can finish college faster and with less debt.

“Graduating students faster, with coursework better aligned with today’s workforce needs, will benefit students, employers and universities alike,” he said.

Landward similarly said students, in national surveys, have indicated that furthering their careers and earning more money is their primary driver for going into higher education. And he said schools have to be responsive to that.

He also believes that changes now are necessary to ensure the long-term viability of higher education in Utah. The state, like others, is projected to hit an enrollment cliff in the coming years. While Utah is farther off from that than most — and had a banner year for student enrollment this fall — it’s still coming, forecast for 2032.

Other states have already seen their numbers dip, and universities have had to shut down or merge programs and lay off faculty to stay afloat. Landward wants to avoid that.

“We have to go through this now,” he said. “We have to be prepared for it.”

How a liberal arts education can create better employees

If the goal is to improve workforce outcomes, Jessica Hooten Wilson said, students who take liberal arts classes are taught to be more flexible in the workplace, adapt when something doesn’t work, create and innovate.

That kind of thinking benefits employers, said Hooten Wilson, the Fletcher Jones Chair of Great Books at Pepperdine University in California: Work doesn’t come to a standstill if there’s a problem.

“Universities should not be called universities if they don’t have liberal arts,” she said. “Those are just training camps.”

A setup like that signals a return to the Industrial Revolution, she said, where people had limited jobs and were treated poorly in factories.

“We’re having our own version of it, but it’s technological,” Hooten Wilson added. “... And while that might be cheap labor, there’s a reason we moved away from it. It ultimately didn’t work.”

Jeffrey Bilbro, an associate professor of English at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, added that employees who are trained to do one specific thing are also more vulnerable to technological disruptions — which happen often in today’s increasingly online world.

If a worker is only taught to build a specific computer part, he said, and then that part becomes obsolete, the worker can also become obsolete. Bilbro, who lost his job at a previous college that started cutting the arts, didn’t face that fate.

Hooten Wilson and Bilbro edited the book “The Liberating Arts: Why We Need Liberal Arts Education,” which interrogates myths they say exist about studying the arts and humanities. Many of the arguments in favor of economic growth support the liberal arts — they just tend to be harder to quantify, they say.

Both cited a work study released this year from the National Association of Colleges and Employers that said managers have reported their employees don’t have the “durable skills” they need beyond their job-specific training, such as writing, communicating and collaborating with other workers.

“That’s the bread and butter of the liberal arts classroom,” added Richard Badenhausen, the dean of the Honors College at Westminster University in Salt Lake City. “And those translate directly to the bottom line for a company.”

A study commissioned by the Utah System of Higher Education and released earlier this month found similar results. Workplace managers in Utah said employees have great technical abilities coming out of state colleges, but they are lacking in things like work ethic and leadership — and it often leads to HR issues. That can mean extra expenses for a company, along with the cost to provide training to teach those skills or deal with turnover from employees who don’t stick around.

Landward acknowledged that study and said it’s why he values and wants the liberal arts to remain in general education.

Hollis Robbins, the former dean of humanities at the University of Utah, argues in a recent blog post: “There is no reason cultural formation and workforce development couldn’t go hand in hand. A plumber who has wrestled with Aristotle’s views on human excellence, an HVAC technician who understands Thucydides’ insights about human nature — these aren’t contradictions.”

But professors contend students should have the choice to major in them, too.

To slash programs, officials are often relying on metrics that don’t factor in the benefits of liberal arts, which admittedly are harder to measure, said Jeffrey Cohen, the dean of humanities and a professor of English at Arizona State University. Yet even things like job satisfaction, which is often asked in employee surveys, could be used to make decisions.

Most lawmakers, for instance, would likely say they picked their job for passion, he said, instead of money; and many of them majored in political science, a liberal arts field.

In fact, six of the eight public university presidents in the state studied liberal arts in college. As did Utah’s Gov. Spencer Cox, who majored in political science, and Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, who got her degree in history.

Cohen, too, said he’s had a career made possible because of access to the liberal arts, and he cherishes it.

“The Utah audit doesn’t capture that,” he said. “It is sad when someone uses something like an audit exercise to move toward actions that they’ve decided ahead of time. It seems like an insane move from an educational point of view.”

Meanwhile, his department in Arizona has boosted its hiring of humanities professors. As technology and artificial intelligence expand, he believes, there should be even more experts in philosophy and ethics to respond to that.

Hooten Wilson similarly noted that while colleges surrounding the private Christian school she teaches at are losing students, her university is not. And she believes that’s because it’s doubled down on providing unique studies that students are passionate about — not reducing choices.

“All of these schools are dropping the liberal arts because they’re hearing a false narrative,” added Hooten Wilson. “It is absolutely not true that these things are taking all of your money and not giving you a return on your investment.”

It just depends how you calculate that return, she said — and what is purposefully not considered in the metrics.

Calculating the benefits of liberal arts

There are still plenty of outcomes that can show the benefit of a liberal arts education, argues Badenhausen.

“It’s really important to dispel the notion that the liberal arts are not tied to solid career outcomes,” he added.

He noted a philosophy student who is now a revered doctor — and better for it, Badenhausen argues, because he can ask questions, listen and communicate well with patients. Another liberal arts professor mentioned a student of his that majored in history and English and now runs a major law firm in the country. A third said he had a student who also studied English and is now a vice president for a worldwide guitar company.

“Homelessness, global migration, climate change — those are going to be solved by people with liberal arts education,” Badenhausen said. “Those people know how to think.”

As for pay, the Westminster dean said, it’s foolish to only look at the first five years of a job — as the Utah audit does. Most national studies show that while science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) jobs had higher starting salaries, the earnings of humanities majors eventually tend to catch up over a career, according to salary parity data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Harvard economics professor David Deming wrote about those 2017 findings in The New York Times with the headline, “In the Salary Race, Engineers Sprint but English Majors Endure.”

He mentioned part of the cause behind that is that science jobs tend to have higher skill turnover as new technology emerges. And, for that reason, more STEM majors tend to leave the field between the ages of 25 and 40 than those who studied the humanities.

“I do think we should be wary of the impulse to make college curriculums ever more technical and career focused,” Deming concluded in the piece.

Commissioner Landward said he has seen that study and understands that humanities majors “do well over time.”

And for those who choose to study the humanities for their degree, Badenhausen further cited a seminal 2014 study from Georgetown University that calculated the return on investment ranges from 300% to 700% over a lifetime.

Badenhausen also pointed to additional data that shows that students in Generation Z — currently in college — will work an average of 18 jobs in six different industries. And humanities, he believes, will help them adapt and prepare for careers that may not exist now.

Examples abound, too, of famous creators who credit their work to a particular class or degree program. Badenhausen’s favorite is the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who dropped out of school but often spoke about how a calligraphy class he took at Reed College later influenced him with the innovative font designs for Mac computers.

“There are subtle ways these classes influence people all over,” Badenhausen said.

Westminster is a private school that isn’t affected by lawmakers’ plans. But Badenhausen is worried about how measurements are being used to diminish the value of programs in the state — and might leave his university the only place in Utah where students can still major in certain degrees.

The way Neil Kraus, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, River Falls, sees it, lawmakers should also look at what it might cost communities to not have those degrees available.

Liberal arts degrees are also some of the cheapest to teach, he said. Those departments cost far less to run than chemistry, for example, where students need laboratory spaces and specific materials for experiments. “Liberal arts majors are actually more efficient,” he said with a slight laugh.

Kraus finds it strange, too, that academic programs are being judged by metrics that schools and professors have no say in.

“None of us can control the jobs in the market or the pay,” he said. “It’s that our economy values finance more than it values history. That’s a completely separate question. … There are jobs for history and English and political science and sociology and philosophy majors. There are tons of them. Do they pay well? No, not as well as engineering or finance jobs, at least initially.”

The Universities of Wisconsin system has faced many of the same pressures that Utah lawmakers say they’re preparing for. Enrollment has dropped steeply. In response, the system will have closed four branch campuses by the end of this year and two more by the end of next.

President Jay Rothman also said that system should “consider shifting away from liberal arts programs to programs that are more career specific, particularly if the institution serves a large number of low-income students.”

Most of those closed campuses were in rural areas and provided two-year degrees. As a result, students who were place-bound and could only access higher education through those locations no longer have that option — effectively cutting out one of the most vulnerable groups of students, Kraus said.

Families with money and in bigger cities will continue to have opportunities, so it’s disadvantaging those who are already economically disadvantaged, too. And that’s possible to measure as well, Kraus said, based on family household incomes and who in a state is going to college. Those numbers have already dipped in Wisconsin.

Kraus sees it as a form of elitism and prejudice — a way to make it so low-income families either don’t have access or only have access to technical jobs. Curry said the same.

“Public universities were meant to supply access to the non-elites to the kind of education available at private schools,” he added. “A robust liberal arts education will remain available at Princeton and Harvard. Maybe at public flagships, though even that is in doubt. But not to our lower and middle-class citizens.”

The smaller, more rural places seeing higher education cuts are also more economically dependent on those institutions for job opportunities and cash flow. In the North Country region of New York, where Curry’s university cut back on programs, it’s starting to kill the community.

In Utah, Snow College would likely be the most at-risk. It’s the smallest school in the less populated central part of the state. President Stacee McIff said she hasn’t taken action from the audit at this point.

“We have not yet done an analysis to determine which programs need to expand, pivot, or transition,” she said.

Weber State University President Brad Mortensen said he believes there should be some calculation for how university programs add to their local communities. Ogden, for instance, “supports and relies on us for a host of economic and cultural contributions.”

Landward acknowledged that but didn’t immediately know how it could be factored into program cuts: “I think there are conversations that need to be had about the value of the arts and our state’s culture.”

‘An awful lot to be lost’

In Mississippi, a similar audit advised the state to invest in business degrees and not the liberal arts. West Virginia University — the first flagship school to do so — cut 28 programs in an “academic transformation.” North Carolina lawmakers passed a measure making arts and humanities professors ineligible for state-funded distinguished professorships.

The University of Kansas. Miami University in Ohio. Henderson State University in Arkansas. Iowa State University. The University of Alaska. The University of Nebraska.

They’re all following the same pattern of cuts.

“And once you get rid of them, they don’t come back,” Kraus said. “There’s an awful lot to be lost there.”

Dan Edelstein, who teaches French, political science and history at Stanford University, said universities are supposed to be beacons of enrichment. The Latin word for university is “universitas,” which means “a whole.”

That idea seems to be forgotten with the shift toward the corporate and cutting the degrees that made schools “whole.”

“Utah has some great public schools and should think twice before harming their reputation and harming the value of education they provide,” he said.

Unfortunately, Edelstein believes that’s not going to make a difference to lawmakers “with a budget to balance or an ax to grind.”

As the politically-driven battle that hammered Curry’s school spreads across the country, he said many aren’t heeding the signs. “We’re not fighting the good fight,” he said.

He’s long taught about allegories as a philosophy professor — from Plato to George Orwell. What happens, he asks, if students not only don’t read those anymore but also don’t recognize when they’re meant to be a warning?

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