Casting Numbers Aside

Few people in the world understand Scottish Gaelic. Even fewer enrolled in Celtic 131, “Intermediate Scottish Gaelic” at Harvard this past semester.

And yet the course was offered—an indication of how the University, even in the midst of the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression, has reaffirmed its commitment to its smaller departments.

Small departments, as the name suggests, serve a relatively small portion of the Harvard student body. In 2008, five undergraduates concentrated in Germanic languages and literatures, five in Sanskrit and Indian studies, and nine in Slavic languages and literatures.

Despite their sizes, such departments entail substantive costs: faculty and staff salaries, office space and supplies, and administrative support. Every dollar spent toward small departments is a dollar not spent elsewhere within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences—or toward fields that draw far more students.

In flush times, the luxury of garnishing smaller departments is just another reminder of Harvard’s reach and wealth—the trappings of a mighty endowment. But recent fiscal constraints have forced the University to sharpen its priorities and, consequently, devote greater attention to where cuts—not additions—can be made.

In this environment, the budgeting process for small departments, formerly almost a matter of course—is far less certain.

“Universities cannot cover everything—we cannot teach all the languages of the world here,” says Classics Professor Jan M. Ziolkowski. “We have to make choices.”

SMALL ENOUGH TO DISAPPEAR?

As the former head of the classics, comparative literature, folklore and mythology, and medieval studies programs, and a former member of the Celtic languages and literatures department, Ziolkowski is no stranger to the smaller humanities disciplines. He currently directs the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in D.C., which dedicates itself to such specialties as Byzantine, garden and landscape, and pre-Columbian studies.

With a resume like this, Ziolkowski is familiar with reconciling the specialized academic focuses of smaller departments with their financial realities.

“I would think of...the inefficiency,” he says. “You would think, this department has only one concentrator every two years and two grad students. And then you add up the grad student stipends, multiply by five years, and you ask yourself, ‘Why should we be doing this? Why do we need the small departments?’”

These questions became particularly relevant during last spring’s budgetary frenzy, when units across FAS found themselves re-examining their expenditures—ranging from cookies to staffing—and University Hall found itself searching for ways to rationalize the existence of separate units.

“We looked at all kinds of options for us when we began this process,” FAS Dean Michael D. Smith says when asked if the administration had ever considered merging or scaling back smaller departments.

Such considerations arose in the minds of worried faculty members who recognized that sprawling departments like Economics possess a distinct advantage over smaller units when making their cases for funding.

For example, Slavic Languages and Literatures currently lists 20 faculty on its website. It had only nine concentrators in 2008. In stark contrast, Economics had a student-faculty ratio of 20 to 1 in 2006, and resorted to cancelling its junior seminars because of a dearth of staffing.

“There always has been pressure for departments that have a large influx of students to have more faculty,” says Wilt Idema, chair of East Asian languages and civilizations, which had 40 concentrators in 2008. “If I were the chair of economics, I would push my dean to have more faculty.”

Since faculty salaries are a considerable investment for FAS, the likes of the Celtic department have less recourse for claiming the additional dollar if budgetary streamlining is driven purely by efficiency and practicality.

VALIDATING THEIR EXISTENCE

Harvard, some argue, should not base its course and program offerings on the areas that students decide to frequent. “We shouldn’t choose [what to offer] simply by relevance or by popularity or by modernity or by what’s trendy,” Government Professor Harvey C. Mansfield says.

For now, the University is falling into line, standing by its smaller departments even amid high fiscal pressures.

“Just because a department has a small number of faculty or small number of concentrators taking their courses—that’s not a good reason for getting rid of it,” Smith says. “Take something like Sanskrit—it might be small on campus but India is huge.”

The cuts to smaller departments have been proportional to those of larger departments—to the tune of 15 percent in the fiscal year that ends this coming June.

“We serve many constituencies in both graduates and undergraduates,” Slavic Languages and Literatures Chair Julie Buckler says. “We feel that the University continues to support us robustly in that.”

As Smith says, “It was not high on my list to go cutting activities out of the FAS that have been fundamental to what we’ve been doing and have been wonderful on campus.”

WHAT IS PRAGMATIC?

Departments that have the fewest concentrators tend to teach subject areas that have more oblique connections to current affairs and fewer obvious paths to the job market.

In an opinion piece published in The New York Times, University President Drew G. Faust wrote that in the face of pressure toward preprofessional undergraduate educations, “we should remember that colleges and universities are about a great deal more than measurable utility.”

In deciding to support the smaller departments at Harvard—both financially and intellectually—Faust and Smith have been bucking the national trend by defying what Ziolkowski refers to as “American pragmatism”—the emphasis on studying subjects relevant to one’s immediate environment.

Some administrators and professors argue that there is distinct value to teaching courses not in step with current trends for the sake of preserving knowledge and perpetuating intellectual thirst.

“Let’s say that you take care of crisis in the Mideast and that you cure tuberculosis,” Ziolkowski says. “You still have to make life worth living and enjoying for people. And that’s where the humanities come in...things that will bring us solace, bring us self-knowledge, increase our understanding of others as well.”

As Mansfield says, “A university is not an institution that is directed toward practice but is meant to cherish the life of the mind.”

—Staff writer Elyssa A.L. Spitzer can be reached at spitzer@fas.harvard.edu.