My Response to Anonymous

Dear Anonymous, Please tell me why you need a cloak of anonymity to attack my article for being a “silly, ill-argued, ad hominem” screed. After all in your rebuttal, you do not offer a single piece of evidence; in fact, you do not even make an argument. Your strategy reminds me of Fish’s own rebuttal of Chris Newfield’s and Robert Watson’s actual research.

After stating that both of these authors show how courses in the Humanities and the Social Sciences subsidize expensive research in the Sciences, and after admitting that as a department head, he made the same argument, Fish turns around and simply states: “My first reaction to this is to say (with Hemingway), “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”, and my second reaction is to report to you the conversations I have had in the past week with deans, provosts and presidents at four large public universities situated in different parts of the country. The picture they paint is complex and has something of the aspect of a kaleidoscope. There are so many variables that a nice clean account of the matter will always be an oversimplification.” Instead of refuting Newfield and Watson with his own facts and figures, Fish says their arguments are wrong because administrators have said they are wrong. (continue Below)

Fish even turns to President Yudof to show how the leader of the UC system has retracted his own misguided argument that the university does not know how to pay for the salaries of the English Professors. However, if we look at Yudof’s retraction, we see that he still doesn’t get it: “my point was that the state's chronic underfunding of our public-university system has put more pressure on disciplines and departments that cannot rely on outside revenue streams, unlike, say, our hospitals and research laboratories.” Fish takes this statement and runs with it in order to argue that since the Humanities can only be funded out of state money and student tuition dollars, then, the only way a school can react to state budget cuts is to downsize the Humanities. However, Newfield and others have shown that federal grants often lose money because they do not pay for the full cost of staff, equipment, labs, benefits, and administration. Moreover, we have found that the profit-making centers, like the medical centers, do not want to share any of their profits, and so the result is that everyone raids the profitable large enrollment, low-cost programs in the Humanities and the Social Sciences.


Like Watson, I myself have provided actual budget and salary data to prove that required writing and language courses turn a huge profit. In looking at the cost of undergraduate instruction, I have shown that even with recent reductions in state funding, UCLA last year brought in $25,000 per student through fees and state funds and only spend about $5,000 on each student for direct instructional costs. It is clear that undergraduate enrollments, fueled by large classes and inexpensive faculty, subsidize everything else at universities, and so it is simply wrong for Fish to write the following: “The calculations Watson and Newfield come up with might make sense in a small private liberal arts college with high tuition ($45,000 as opposed to $4,500) and relatively inexpensive facilities, or in a bygone era when state support was at 70 percent or 80 percent (it’s now as low as 7 percent). If the state is paying most of the bills as it once did, tuition can be low because it is not being asked to carry the burden of the operation; but today, when tuition is still low (relative to costs) and the state is walking away from its obligations ever faster and expenses climb ever higher, the math won’t work. No matter how popular humanities courses may be, they don’t pay their way because the revenue they generate in inadequate tuition dollars is only a portion of what is required.” While I too think that states should augment their support for higher education, people like Fish and Yudof make things harder when they simply ignore the facts on the grounds. In short, it is not the salaries of the people teaching in the Humanities and the Social Sciences that are hurting the budgets of universities; rather, it is the cost of administration, externally funded research, and profit centers that are stealing money from under-supported undergraduate programs.

In another false representation, Fish simply pretends that course requirements have gone away, and so departments can no longer rely on language, writing, and major requirements to keep their budgets afloat: “So if there is some cross-subsidization, it is usually not in the direction Watson and Newfield suggest, except perhaps in those departments that deliver instruction in very large classes at very low cost, as English departments used to do when survey courses were required by the major and the same courses fulfilled multiple distribution requirements for all students in a college. (Those were the days.).” It is important to point the falsity of this statement because the same suicidal logic is being used to justify the cutting of language and English courses throughout the country. It is not just the courses required in majors that support Humanities’ departments; it is the required language, writing, and general education courses that supply the enrollments and dollars to these programs.

Last year, I used this type of concrete budgetary information to help defend hundreds of UC jobs. I should add that many tenured professors also helped to support language and writing requirements, and some of these supporters realized that their departments were dependent on the funds brought in by required “skills” classes. Furthermore, as someone who has published six books on cultural theory, my investment in required classes does not mean that I am against research in the Humanities and Social Sciences; in fact, I have written several reviews and articles denouncing the latest attacks on academic theory.

Finally, the title of my article is a reference to one of Fish’s own works, and so I apologize for the playful allusion, and yet, the intent of the title and article remains true: most people writing about the finances of higher education have ignored the basic facts about budgets and funding streams. We now have faith-based budgeting this is driven by ideological investments and has very little connection to actual reality.