I am a recent graduate of Brandeis University and hold my B.A. in Classical Studies and History. The history department is relatively large and never has a problem generating students, largely because it is considered a tack-on major. Classics had more difficulty because of the language requirement, but for the second time in five years an academic review board/ the Dean of Arts and Sciences has proposed eliminating the department (this second time, the suggestion is to reduce faculty, eliminate the department and make the major interdepartmental).

This is regarded exclusively as a financial issues as the university is in dire straights after the Madoff fallout. This is also despite the incredible efforts of the faculty in this department who teach multiple courses across all disciplines, including, though not limited to: history, language, literature, philosophy, theater, art, and archeology.

Couple of points that relate to this.

1) Smaller departments sometimes (often?) cross-subsidize. They support some small courses by having a couple of really big broad ones. This isn’t necessarily a *good* thing. (To start with, there’s the “senior faculty teach small classes in their preferred areas, while the untenured have to teach everything to everybody” phenomenon.)

2) Numbers aren’t independent of the specifics of how the course fits into that particular institution’s general education (or whatever) requirements. Certain departments – I’m afraid that History is often one of them – may be able to lock in large numbers for some courses because many or all students have to take them. (For my department, it’s the language requirement that does this for us.) One can’t, I think, open this can of worms without expecting the issues to broaden dramatically, really fast.

Actually, that’s not true. I will commend your comment that what matters in flush times ought to matter in lean times, too. Otherwise it’s not really a value; it’s an expedient position.

Okay, now the nitpick. I think the true cost of tenure is not the first thirty (or twenty, or whatever) years after tenure is granted but the years after that. With the end of mandatory retirement, tenure becomes a one-way employment contract, and the future of the institution is not a collectively managed thing but only an aggregation of individual decisions to stay or go. I’d like to see tenure applied for a fixed period — possibly tied to age, possibly not, depending on law — and then converted to one-year term contracts, with no loss of rank and probably no diminution of compensation. If a senior faculty member is productive and everyone wants her to stay, well and good; if not, then the department and/or the dean doesn’t have to grin and bear it as her enrollments dwindle and she draws a salary that can’t be used by the department to hire new junior faculty.

To me that’s a straightforward application of your principle that “we all owe each other a constantly renewed explanation of our institutional importance and we all owe each other skeptical examination of those explanations.”

I don’t understand your use of “aver” here, and a trip to the dictionary didn’t help. Do I need a better dictionary?