Broke-Ass Schools: The University of Maine
Lest you think this site is California-centric, never fear. The Broke-Ass School virus has spread to the East Coast, specifically to the University of Maine. A working group has recommended eliminating 16 majors, including public administration, theater, foreign languages, women’s studies and music.
The cut to foreign languages is drastic: “… the memo recommended the elimination of the majors offered by the MLC [Modern Languages and Classics] department, including German, French, Latin and Spanish.”
Not to focus on one scholarly area in particular, but what is with the urge to cut foreign languages? If the argument is that the foreign languages cannot be “monetized,” that’s ridiculous. Any business major with a lick of sense should at least minor in a foreign language to help open up potential markets abroad. This working group is showing a little pity by suggesting that the university should continue to offer a minor.
The real wake-up call that should apply to Post Academic readers is that the proposed plan will “eliminate 80 faculty positions across the five colleges by 2014.” As if humanities grad students didn’t have enough to worry about.
Plan would eliminate 16 majors, 80 faculty [The Maine Campus via HuffPo]
Languages students react to proposed cuts in majors [The Maine Campus]
Post Academic 
on March 27, 2010 on 8:25 am
I really wonder who is on U-Maine’s “Academic Program Prioritization Working Group” (doubt there are many Humanities faculty, maybe they’re not all faculty) and how much their salary will increase as a result of this “service” work. Just another notch on the CV that leads you to the job in academic admin that triples your salary, often permanently (that is, even if you go back to regular teaching).
One of many report on these developments, this one at UCSD:
http://utotherescue.blogspot.com/2009/12/growth-trends-in-uc-administration.html
How about making the administrator-to-faculty ratio a serious factor in quality-of-school surveys? So if a school has a 1:1 ratio, like UCSD, they get penalized in some way for it?