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Last week’s proposals to trim the fat off of the University of Maine’s already lean steak were met by rumbles in the belly of hungry faculty and students. On the cutting end of the budgetary knife: women’s studies, public administration, theater, music and languages.
Public administration will be shipped to the Augusta campus, where students can learn from the same policymakers who screwed up everything in the first place. Given Maine’s current crisis, you might think they’d get those kids as far from the capitol as possible.
Women’s studies, a controversial and maligned major, will cease to exist. It has always been a graduate pursuit in the guise of an undergraduate degree, though both will get the axe. If history were taught properly, there would be no need for the department to compensate. But with more women in college than ever before, the department has become a victim of its own success. Where the program has tried to reinvent itself — GLBT studies, for example — it simply runs into political minefields that make it an easy target, regardless of the vast need for GLBT support and perspectives in policy and education.Teachers, social workers and other areas need people trained to teach and respond to underserved populations. If we want to turn our backs on educating and empowering struggling Mainers, the women’s studies program is a fine place to start.
The music performance and theater programs, some of the favorite scapegoats of number crunchers, will also be eliminated. Any committee that targets them for cuts is probably incapable of being convinced otherwise.Training an army of bassoon players may seem like an inefficient way to reap economic awards, but not when graduates leave the state in droves for brighter cultural horizons. Essentially, we train people for affluent careers so they can get bored and move.If you love video games and cable TV, Maine will be a great place to be in 2014, when the proposed changes will take effect, assuming they are approved by President Robert Kennedy . Sadly, the educated, energetic workforce and student body that this state desperately needs tends to crave a more engaging lifestyle.
Finally, there’s languages. Supporters know languages are challenging and rewarding cultural pursuits. Until you learn another language, the limitations of a native tongue are incomprehensible. But there’s also a cynical, practical case for languages: money.Rather than starving the department, truly savvy administrators should consider expanding language requirements to more majors. Imagine if UMaine churned out engineering or business school grads who spoke Chinese?
Markets are emerging, opportunities are opening and even the brightest business or engineering students won’t see them if they can’t think outside of the American border. UMaine knows it: On the business school Web page, there’s a picture of students at the Great Wall. Cutting language classes means cutting students — and the state — off from foreign financing for domestic products and markets for Maine exports.
No cuts are easy, but this is far worse: a decapitation. Sadly, it’s expected that humanities — the fields that probe ethics, critical thinking, human culture and meaning — would take the brunt of the blade.The report emphasizes careers, reducing education to its economic potential. Unless we’ve decided, as a state, that our flagship university is no more than vocational training, it’s more important than ever for humanities to prove there’s substance in the supposed gristle of UMaine’s steak.
Eryk Salvaggio is a senior journalism and new media student.
Bangor Daily News