The scene: An open forum at a large public university that is grappling with graduate funding markedly lower than state and national averages. How can this situation be remedied?
The characters: Graduate faculty, identified only by discipline because these are not real people. Real faculty are much smarter.
English: Since stipend monies are mingled with general department operating budgets, it is difficult for many departments to raise them--operating budgets are too constrained. Would it be possible for the university to set aside a separate fund for stipends, or maybe a fund that departments could apply to in order to supplement their stipends?
Graduate dean: Certainly many universities have funds earmarked for graduate stipends. Big University in our state does that, supplementing departmental contributions by 20%. [As she speaks, business and engineering faculty make faces and shake their heads.]
Engineering: It's ridiculous that departments want the university to rescue them in this way. Those of us who have better graduate funding have set our priorities and made tough decisions. You departments who complain haven't done that. You should do fundraising so that you can offer fellowships to your students, rather than relying on the university to help you. You departments need to stop whining all the time, "Give me more, give me more."
**As faculty leave the meeting**
Economics: You people in the humanities need to learn to live within your means.
English: If departments had control of their income, your statement would be more reasonable. But we don't have stable budgets from one year to the next. Our department budget is 10% less this year than it was last year, but we had to make admission decisions before we knew it would be cut.
Economics: If your budget is less, you must be producing fewer student credit hours.
English: No, we're producing MORE student credit hours.
Economics: That's not possible. The provost told us that his funding is based on credit hour production. You should just stop admitting so many graduate students.
English: If we admit fewer graduate students, we have fewer people to teach our classes, and we produce fewer credit hours, which lowers our budget even more according to the provost's model.
Economics: Well, then you should teach bigger classes.
English: 75% of the students we teach are in freshman composition. How big do you want our composition classes to be? We already teach 6 students per section more than the state average, and the state average is 4 students above the level recommended by our national associations.
Economics: Well, no one forces you to have graduate programs. If you can't support them, get rid of them and teach bigger classes rather than continually asking for more money. We teach some of our classes in 500 student sections.
English: The next time you complain that your students can't write, I'm going to remind you of this conversation.
Economics [as they both walk away]: Oh, we agree. You people shouldn't have taken on that responsibility, since you can't do it well.
This fictional university has 50% more students this year than five years ago, but humanities budgets and faculty lines have not kept pace. The department teaches eight times as many undergraduates as grad students, even though many in the community (high school and community college faculty, technical writers, publishers) rely on its graduate programs. And even if all full-time English faculty taught 4/4 this year, (including several who are currently administrators), 370 classes would not be covered.
Thankfully, faculty would never be so uncollegial in real life.
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