Service Department Tractor Beam - Irreversible?

[Zeus Bird]

While many of us who have been in academia for a long time perceive a state of decline in our profession, I'm interested to hear from anyone who has had experience in being part of a service department that has managed to cease being a service department over time.

Background: I've been part of a humanities unit for 20 years at a large university with growing financial and enrollment problems, and during that time I've watched our department go from a hybrid research/teaching profile to a department whose sole responsibility is teaching in the core curriculum.  The number of majors in our program is near the vanishing point, our course offerings have dwindled dramatically, and research funds have dried up as they are reallocated to the university's professional programs.

This is the experience of many of us in the humanities for sure.  Pre-tenure and post-tenure I tried to get out of here but was unsuccessful on the job market.  Are there any success stories from people in departments that have reversed this trajectory?  I'd like to stay in academe if possible, but have growing doubts I can reconcile myself to spend the next couple of decades at an institution that no longer values the skill sets I was required to have in order to be hired and tenured.  Can this kind of decline be reversed in a department?

[sinenomine]

Whether there can be a major change in institutional culture really depends on the school. I'm at a similar institution, and have made some small inroads by touting the versatility of applied humanities, working with colleagues in other departments to showcase interdisciplinary work.

[Ruralguy]

We sort of did it, but it was partly happenstance. We had a number of new hires in the 90's and early 2000's. We are all reaching the last 10-15 years of our careers now, but when we came in, the "new blood" attracted students to the major. Then, more recently, we created a second major that had a more "professional" ring to it (think engineering) and that didn't necessarily increase our ranks, but kept total numbers relatively high while enrollments shrank. We've also always tried to boost our service numbers by sometimes raising caps (especially pre-covid) or throwing in an extra big course when we didn't need to teach certain majors courses (that sort of behavior keeps the admin happy and makes proposals for new or replacement faculty positions seem more vaild due to serving more people). I think as we really really age (all getting into 60's in a few years), student numbers may fall off again, plus there is the constant problem of total college enrollment dropping.

Also, interdisciplinary *teaching* as well as research (and likely more so) can help in these situations, as it builds more options for students and grows your allies.

[spork]

I do not have any success stories to share, but you should read Leaving Academia: A Practical Guide by Caterine. For any university, no matter the size, with a dwindling enrollment the crucial problem is recruiting new tuition-paying students, not whether major X continues to exist. If your department can't demonstrate that students want to take courses taught by its faculty, then it is toast. Whether the organization "values the skill sets I was required to have in order to be hired and tenured" is irrelevant.

[Parasaurolophus]

Ours is a service department. The problem is that the "university" as a whole only offers a handful of majors and minors. We have a relatively large department--6 FT faculty and 1 PT! (for comparison my UG SLAC had 2 FT and 1 PT)--but we offer no certificates, no associate's degree, no minors, and no majors.

That makes enrollment a struggle. We pretty much only offer 100- and 200-level courses, and even there, just the ones that have historically drawn enough enrollment (our classes are capped at 35, and get cancelled if they drop below 27). It's kind of rough.

The "university" plans to offer master's degrees by 2030. Maybe that will help, but I suspect they've got things backwards.

[Ruralguy]

Yes, being honest, we have 15-ish majors, but the top 5 probably cover more than 75% of everybody, and our major isn't one of the top 5. Furthermore, the bottom several are in a danger zone. With the current curriculum, we wouldn't get rid of the faculty in those depts, but we might consolidate their programs, and eventually, dwindle down the sub-discipline considerably (unless there was some sort of unforeseen revival).

Also, just as rising tides float all boats, receding tides lower the water level thus lower overall enrollments generally bring down the enrollments for everybody (in fact, the really big departments can be hurt even more than some of the smaller ones, in terms of  % decreases in course enrollments).

Bottom line: Everyone is in some sort of danger! However, the real "death star" is the combo of bad demographics, seemingly irrelevant major, and changing curriculum that decreases service needs of your dept..

[Hibush]

Spork has words of wisdom, unfortunately. One unusual condition in the job market is that it is extremely strong. It probably will remain so for at least two or three more months.

There is demand in all parts of the economy for people who will show up, think through what needs to be done and get to it. Employers are willing to pay for it and they are not quibbling about precise qualifications. But this anomaly may be brief as the market comes back into balance.

If the receding tide is about to ground your boat, wade on over now.

[marshwiggle]

There is demand in all parts of the economy for people who will show up, think through what needs to be done and get to it. Employers are willing to pay for it and they are not quibbling about precise qualifications. But this anomaly may be brief as the market comes back into balance.

This is always what employers are looking for. Things like degrees are just proxies for those abilities. And sometimes poor ones at that....

[spork]

I do not have any success stories to share, but you should read Leaving Academia: A Practical Guide by Caterine. For any university, no matter the size, with a dwindling enrollment the crucial problem is recruiting new tuition-paying students, not whether major X continues to exist. If your department can't demonstrate that students want to take courses taught by its faculty, then it is toast. Whether the organization "values the skill sets I was required to have in order to be hired and tenured" is irrelevant.

I didn't phrase part of my original comment clearly. I should have written "If your department can't demonstrate that students enroll at the university because they want to take courses . . ."

[dinomom]

My situation is slightly different, but I can say that we have managed to drastically increase the number of minors in the department, and that has created a culture in which the few majors feel legitimized. Humanities enrollments are way down at my institution, but our redesigned minor (we made it more flexible and also lined it up with other departments--it had been too large credit-wise compared to other departments) quadrupled enrollments over a four year period.

I did a lot of grassroots work to make it happen--are there any carrots you can offer to students? e.g. your program makes you eligible (or a better candidate) for some kind of summer research funding? a mix of "serious" and "fun" classes? (I hate this distinction, but certain classes in our dept. have certain reputations) can you create a community around the students who are active in your department? replacing one faculty person with someone who was excellent and energetic made a huge difference (they resigned after three years, but their former classes are still considered "cool" in a way that has changed the culture). I hate that I had to do all this, but it did work.

Finally, can you work with admissions at all? In my case, I was able to, and it helped a lot.

[marshwiggle]

Humanities enrollments are way down at my institution, but our redesigned minor (we made it more flexible and also lined it up with other departments--it had been too large credit-wise compared to other departments) quadrupled enrollments over a four year period.

Kudos to you! That's an impressive feat, and in a pretty short time.

[Ruralguy]

Well, 2 to 8 is easier than 100 to 400.

[kiana]

My situation is slightly different, but I can say that we have managed to drastically increase the number of minors in the department, and that has created a culture in which the few majors feel legitimized. Humanities enrollments are way down at my institution, but our redesigned minor (we made it more flexible and also lined it up with other departments--it had been too large credit-wise compared to other departments) quadrupled enrollments over a four year period.

I want to add on to this -- inflexibility is one of the things that was killing the math major/minor at my last job. Literally you had ONE elective for each and everything else was prescribed.

We had a **lot** of science majors and if we'd been more open to moving away from a traditional "grad school prep only" major I really think that we could have recruited a fair number of them as minors or double majors.

(the "but this is the way we've always done it how dare you delegitimize us" was a big thing pushing me to change jobs, too)

[marshwiggle]

We had a **lot** of science majors and if we'd been more open to moving away from a traditional "grad school prep only" major I really think that we could have recruited a fair number of them as minors or double majors.

I'm glad I clued in to this early on running first year labs. Since only a small fraction of people in the introductory course will major in the subject, and only a few more will even do a minor, it makes sense to put more effort into things like teaching how to use a spreadsheet for data analysis that will benefit most of the students, rather than just pushing for minutiae regarding fine points of theory, which will only benefit the handful of majors but will bore or annoy the rest.

[Stockmann]

Non-US case, here but hope it may be of interest: At my current department, most of the students we teach are non-majors. However, in the vast majority of cases these are students taking mandatory intro courses - not gen-eds. A few do take them as electives, but mostly it's mandatory intro courses for their majors. I think our department has a clean bill of health - somebody else would have to teach those courses if we didn't, and the majors requiring them are themselves in good health. It helps that demand for our main major has increased, and that we have some local research prestige, but there's no way a department this size would be viable if it weren't for the service to other majors' courses, and it's largely because of the department's size that we're able to run graduate programs, have a somewhat diverse array of research, run various electives for our majors, etc. It's not perfect, to be sure, but it's far from being a Faustian bargain.
On the other hand, at my previous employer, I was at a department that had no service courses - it was a small, dysfunctional department whose lack of clout was readily apparent. At some time in the past it had been on the verge of being shut down altogether and was only saved by a merger (think unhappy shotgun marriage). Believe me, it was not better than being at my present department (and I've personally taught many service courses here).