Who will defend the humanities?
This summer, we witnessed a dramatic challenge for the humanities and arts at the University of Chicago. This challenge demanded faculty intervention. Since taking power in January, the Trump administration has cut federal aid for higher education and made policy changes that challenge the ability of colleges and universities to teach humanistic content, recruit a diverse faculty and student body, and maintain intellectual autonomy. Faced with these financial, political, and policy challenges, the University of Chicago’s leaders appear to have already conceded defeat. Across the university’s divisions, dramatic cuts are being made, affecting undergraduate and graduate education alike. The administration has argued that these reductions are financially unavoidable and a means of “protecting” the humanities at UChicago. Yet its actions and rhetoric tell a different story.
For example, on June 17, the dean of the Division of Arts & Humanities (AHD), Deborah Nelson, announced an initiative to consider a major reorganization of the division, including the potential dissolution of departments, closure of academic programs, and an immense reduction in the scope of graduate education. In meetings with faculty, the dean identified potential budgetary shortfalls as the immediate reason for the reorganization but also insisted that streamlining the Division had intellectual grounds. To this end, the dean appointed five faculty committees tasked with proposing ways to increase efficiency and cut costs in five areas: divisional organization, Ph.D. education, M.A. programs, language instruction, and teaching within the College. These committees were given approximately six weeks to gather data, deliberate, and produce reports containing “concrete recommendations” for making major changes to the Division. As stated in the committee charges, the dean’s report to the provost’s office was planned to be sent the week of August 25-29.
Unsurprisingly in such circumstances, the process initiated by the dean’s office was rushed and under-resourced, creating confusion while skirting norms of faculty governance and transparency. Members of the committees expressed concerns about the lack of clarity of the charges and the insufficient time for them to collect data needed to generate informed recommendations. The charge sheets given to each committee nevertheless asked them to consider drastic changes such as dissolving departments, closing degree programs, ending instruction in languages and subjects, and imposing minimum class sizes—moves that should be properly considered and debated in departments and organs of faculty governance such as the University Senate. The dean’s office convened a town hall to discuss the reorganization process only after committee documents were shared with faculty and the media, which meant that many faculty found out about the proposed changes only after the process was well underway.
In the absence of a clear vision or plan on the part of University leadership, the faculty of the Division spent the summer months outlining their own vision for the arts and humanities at UChicago, reflected in the committee reports recently submitted to the dean’s office. These reports affirm the value and contributions of humanistic disciplines and departments, recommend against many of the suggested large-scale cuts, and urge the administration to allocate the appropriate time, resources, and deliberation before making major decisions regarding the future of the Division. The reports articulate the same values and commitments affirmed by the AAUP in its open letter of August 20 to the administration, which was signed by hundreds of faculty members within and outside the division. Yet the fate of the committees’ recommendations is still unclear: the dean has yet to share concrete details regarding the manner and timeline according to which her office will make decisions and implement changes (or the extent to which faculty and staff will be informed about the process).
The pause on Ph.D. admissions in the Division gives additional cause for concern. On August 12, without waiting to receive the report from the aforementioned faculty committee tasked with making recommendations for Ph.D. programs, the Dean announced a complete pause on admissions in eight out of 15 Ph.D. programs, allocating greatly reduced admission slots among the remaining seven programs. Faculty across departments organized and, in a demonstration of solidarity, submitted a counter-proposal to the dean asking that any pause be applied in a global and equitable fashion. The dean’s office agreed and has since rescinded its decision, instead implementing a pause on admissions in all but two programs.
Reflecting on the experience of the summer, it is apparent that collective faculty organization in the Division of Arts & Humanities changed the course of events. When consulted, the faculty overwhelmingly and forcefully rejected the more drastic measures suggested by the administration and argued persuasively for a more considered and far-sighted approach. The lesson, so to speak, is that faculty must guide the university’s decision making and, in order to do so effectively, they must organize.
What next? Will the University administration seriously consider the recommendations of the faculty committees and pursue representative and transparent consultation with faculty, staff, and students in the future? Or will it move forward with its own (and largely unstated) plan for the humanities and arts, as we have been warned remains possible?
We appeal to the provost and the president to make explicit the plan for the humanities and arts and to consult with faculty, staff, and student workers in order to understand the stakes and effects of that vision. Over the summer, the dean’s office oscillated between various logics for downsizing the humanities, alternately citing financial, demographic, and intellectual rationale. At some points, it argued that cuts to federal funding have made this downsizing inescapable; at other points, it suggested that an imminent decline in enrollments across higher education makes the humanities as we know them unsustainable; at yet other points, it has proposed that humanities disciplines, as currently taught at UChicago, are obsolete and must be transformed. At the same time, the University administration has shared financial information in a manner that is highly selective and at times misleading. In some communications, it warns that an imminent financial emergency requires us all “to fall in line”; in other communications, it appears to reassure us that the situation is perfectly in hand and therefore faculty, staff, and students have no reason to ask questions or protest. Which of these two radically different scenarios is the case?
As the administration’s austerity measures expand to encompass the rest of the University, we must insist on transparency and shared governance and remind the administration of its responsibility to ensure the future of research and teaching in all disciplines. The faculty in AHD made their voice heard, but colleagues in other divisions may not have the same chance.
At this moment of crisis, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) appeals to faculty across divisions and ranks to join the push for substantive faculty governance. While we share with the administration serious concern regarding ongoing threats to higher education and educational spending, we do not believe that humanities faculty and students (or their counterparts in other divisions) should accept the diminishment and dissolution of their fields as inevitable or as a fait accompli achieved by the Trump administration within eight months of taking power. More than ever, the humanities and arts need spokespersons, representatives, and leaders who will assert the integral value of the humanities and defend them from short-sighted impositions of austerity. To our colleagues across the University, we urge you to join and get involved in our chapter of the AAUP, our organ for democratic deliberation and advocacy of our shared interests. The faculty, staff, and student workers of UChicago are now leading the defense of the humanities, and of the broader enterprise of the research university—will the administration join us?
AAUP Arts and Humanities Working Group
Graduate Students United calls for no merges, no pauses, no cuts
Dean of the Division of the Arts & Humanities Deborah Nelson has already announced a pause in Ph.D. admissions for half of the departments in the division—the same half the University of Chicago administration will likely seek to either merge or dissolve by the next academic year. What’s more, the University aims to drastically reduce the total number of Ph.D. students admitted to the division in the coming years.
As graduate workers whose teaching and research remain essential to the University’s commitment to rigorous inquiry and field-defining research, we know what these measures ultimately mean: the disappearance of our jobs and fields of study. The administration’s proposed defunding of the division would be the end of serious teaching and research in the arts and humanities at UChicago.
The University administration claims these measures are a response to current political and financial crises—but it is clear that higher-ups are taking advantage of the national political uncertainty to enact cuts to fields they deem expendable. The proof? The University’s endowment tax burden under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act remains . Alreadyof the value of undergraduate students’ tuition goes toward servicing the University’s debt, and the Arts & Humanities Division must not be the next scapegoat for years of administrative mismanagement. University endowment records reveal a business model that prioritizes reckless spending and experimenting with new investment strategies over its mission and its workers—leading to catastrophic financial decisions that faculty, staff, and graduate workers never had a hand in.
These proposals threaten the existence of entire disciplines and the project of higher education as a whole, contributing to a broader crisis of happening at universities across the country. If the administration aims to drastically reduce the number of Ph.D. students in the division, this means that our departments—already small—will soon no longer exist. Moreover, merging departments undermines the fields those departments represent. Such measures worsen an academic job crisis that is already accelerating towards its breaking point. Fewer distinct, specialized departments mean fewer professorships, both tenure-track and contingent. Less language instruction means less language learning, further endangering fields focused on non-English languages and cultures.
No amount of administrative rhetoric can obscure the ways the University of Chicago is putting our current and future livelihoods in jeopardy. Admission ‘pauses’ are hiring freezes. ‘Restructuring’ signals the end of independent area studies programs. ‘Reducing’ language teaching means jobs slashed and diversity of knowledge diminished. Shrinking the Division of the Arts & Humanities will not save the University. It will only lead to the dissolution of UChicago’s intellectual community and of the very fields upon which this University once proudly built its reputation. UChicago could continue its legacy as a space for rigorous humanistic inquiry; instead, it is cowering to this era’s iteration of anti-intellectualism—a shameful capitulation to attacks on democracy.
As the Trump administration attacks on higher education, UChicago is using this moment of crisis as cover to accelerate austerity measures that have been in the works for decades—aiding and abetting the Trump administration in destroying our universities. These cuts are not simply a consequence of recent federal policy changes but of decades of mismanagement by University administration. Graduate workers refuse to bear the brunt of this crisis. We demand the University administration to live up to its mission, not in empty rhetoric but by dedicating itself to protecting the workers whose labor turns these words into reality.
The University’s administration has made it clear that we cannot expect them to uphold commitments to academic excellence and scholarly inquiry without pressure. The power of this University lies in the students and workers that make it function every day, and it is incumbent on us to demonstrate our collective power to defend our communities, our workplaces, and our livelihoods. As graduate workers mobilize to resist these cuts, we call on students, faculty, alumni, and all workers across the University to act in coalition to oppose the defunding of higher education.
Executive Board, GSU-UE Local 1103
Do not hollow out the Core of the University
The future of the arts and humanities at the University of Chicago is under grave threat. The threat comes not from the dedicated research and instructional faculty who produce world-class scholarship and provide outstanding teaching, nor does it come from the thousands of students who are drawn here specifically for our phenomenal arts and humanities departments and programs. It comes, rather, from the Board of Trustees and upper University management, and from their reckless and ideologically motivated decisions.
These attacks fly in the face of the University’s admirable, long-standing commitments to the humanities, which, until very recently, were central to its core educational mission broadly and to its undergraduate instruction in particular. Indeed, the University of Chicago boasts a proud history of being a pioneer in undergraduate education. Since the introduction of the Core curriculum by President Robert Hutchins in 1931, the University’s emphasis on deep intellectual inquiry and disciplinary breadth has been a part of its identity—its educational hallmark provides students with the foundational knowledge of humanities and arts, mathematics, and sciences that would “cultivate in [them] a range of insights, habits of mind, and scholarly experiences.”
Faculty Forward, the union of non–tenure track faculty at the University of Chicago, has always shared this mission. Whether we teach courses in biology, history, languages, literature, mathematics, or studio art, all of our members contribute to the core mission of the University: education. We hold an attack on the labor and fair working conditions of any part of our membership to be an attack on all of us and on the fundamental mission of the University.
Make no mistake—the hastily announced plan to “restructure” the Arts and Humanities Division (AHD) is just that. The ostensible reason for these actions is “budgetary pressures,” but it is difficult to take this explanation at face value. Not only is the AHD of central educational importance, it is also clearly not a primary drain on the budget. The University has taken on a huge debt load to finance massive capital projects—such as the Rubenstein Forum, with an approximate cost of $100 million—and to create new institutes and schools—like the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering—while grossly mismanaging its endowment . The budget crisis was not caused by a glut of professors of literature or languages, and thus it cannot be fixed by cutting their departments.
One major tool at the University’s disposal in addressing this crisis of management’s own making is its enormous fundraising capacity, but its strategies here lack coherence and likewise do not appear motivated by its avowed core principles. Take, for example, the recent anonymous $100 million gift intended to advance the work of the University’s Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression. It is troubling that the University accepts this particular tribute to its “unparalleled history of devotion to upholding free inquiry and expression,” as President Paul Alivisatos put it, while University leadership simultaneously decimates the educational spaces in which those values are enacted. The humanities classroom is a crucial training ground for our students to practice the habits of discernment; to learn to express their viewpoints with integrity; to challenge each other’s ideas respectfully; and to work toward the goal of finding better answers to their shared inquiries. Our language curricula, moreover, ensure that our students are able to extend those conversations globally. A forum on free inquiry and expression is meaningless if the University turns its back on the education that supports such freedom.
Even more alarmingly, these cuts can only have a chilling effect on the very idea of academic freedom at the University, something our union fought hard, successfully, to expand in our most recent contract. In the much-lauded Chicago Principles, former University President Hannah Holborn Gray is quoted as saying that “Universities should be expected to provide the conditions within which hard thought, and therefore strong disagreement, independent judgment, and the questioning of stubborn assumptions, can flourish in an environment of the greatest freedom.” As it considers drastic cuts to entire departments, centers, and master’s programs, the University instead creates conditions in which faculty must ask themselves if their teaching and research are sufficiently aligned with the ideological standpoint of the Board of Trustees and the provost’s office to be spared the chopping block. This is not an environment of academic freedom.
Since the University has been far from transparent about budgetary matters, we can only speculate as to the actual motivation for the administration targeting certain units for budgetary punishment. Perhaps the University Board of Trustees (none of the 48 members of which—aside from President Paul Alivisatos-—have any visible background in higher education) does not share the values of a classical, broad-based education and believes the University should concentrate on training for immediately applicable skills. It’s possible that the trustees are ideologically aligned with those who declare that “the professors are the enemy.” We know that some of them have participated in the attacks on federal government programs like Social Security. Decimating the core of an educational institution is part of the same program, particularly because a workforce taught to think critically about the world is not a pliant one. The arts and humanities were early bases of support for both Faculty Forward and Graduate Students United, and it does not escape our attention that the departments and programs under threat right now are those that have been centers of worker power for students and faculty.
We call on our colleagues across the University to stand together to oppose these headlong and capricious cuts. We invite all students to express their opposition to the decline in the depth and diversity of language curricula and other offerings that these cuts are sure to bring. And we urge all alumni whose education was enhanced by the University of Chicago’s excellent arts and humanities instruction to contact the UChicago Alumni office and Provost Katherine Baicker and let them know your thoughts. The life of the mind cannot be fully realized without the arts or humanities, and we will do everything in our power to defend the ideals that have animated this University for over a century.
The Executive Committee of Faculty Forward
