Classes begin

The first day of classes went quite well. I put out various small fires that arose, then prepared for and met my class of writing students. The class flew by all too quickly as it does, but I believe that I hit all the things I wanted to be sure to touch on in class. The students seemed enthusiastic and I'm looking forward to a good semester.

On Sunday, there was an article the Globe that put a spotlight on UMass. The summary was "Hampered by years of cuts, Amherst campus struggles to draw ranking Bay State students" and the focus was on Massachusetts students going out of state to find public higher education. The article resonated with me at several levels and I though it really hit the mark in several places.

UMass’s challenges, though, run deeper than its reputation problem among many prospective students. It is a campus in crisis, professors say.

The Amherst campus has lost nearly a fifth of its tenure-track faculty over the past two decades as a result of the state’s financial woes, leaving only 972 permanent faculty on a campus of 20,000 undergraduates. In comparison, the 17,000-student UConn employs 1,286 tenure-track professors.

UMass’s English department, once 100 strong, has dwindled to 43 professors.

“It’s been difficult, very difficult,’’ said Joseph Bartolomeo, the English department chairman. “We struggle to get back to an earlier level and then there’s another cut. That is very demoralizing for the faculty.’’

You could say the same thing about Biology. When it was formed, we had around 60 tenure-system faculty. Now there are 26.

And then there was this:

“Instead of just saying, ‘You have a $6,000 scholarship as part of your financial aid package,’ we said, ‘Congratulations! You’ve been awarded a Chancellor’s Scholarship for $6,000, and you get a certificate to hang on your wall,’ ’’ he said. “That’s kind of a marketing tool.’’

The chancellor sent a broadcast email to the faculty expressing his outrage over what he perceived as a negative bias in the article.

But what's happening here, is happening everywhere else too. Bob Samuels wrote a somewhat naive post about unionizing non-tenure-system faculty. I say naive only because a number of faculty unions have been organizing non-tenure-system faculty aggressively for several years. Similarly, the Chronicle had an article about the death of the humanities.

At the bottom is a shift in the United States away from the idea of a common good. Over the past forty years, the US has shifted from a belief that we can build a future together to one where everyone is a rugged individualist that needs to earn their own way. And, whereas we used to require those who had benefited most to pay a larger share (ie, higher incomes were taxed at higher rates), now the largest burden has been shifted onto the poor and middle class. And so, while GDP has continued to go up over the past 40 years, wages -- and tax returns -- have been stagnant. As state support for higher education has declined, Universities have increased tuition. And as state support for financial aid has declined, UMass has started self-funding a lot of the financial aid. This particularly hurts the middle class that makes too much money to receive financial aid, but increasingly is paying the burden for everyone.