The past year has been a miserable one for UT's Department of History. The complaints from within the department about an "unfriendly" working environment for women started 2007 off on a bad foot; now the department deals with the subsequent atrophy of the faculty from 20 full-tenured professor positions to the current eight and the recent struggle to find a department chairprson. On the face of it, this situation seems to just be the sad decline of a proud department - one of the few in the College of Arts and Sciences that has both a master's and doctorate program - due to a lack of departmental leadership, but there is more to this story. UT's administrators have a hand in this as well, as so many problems facing UT today can be traced back to University Hall in some fashion.
Isn't it kind of odd that UT's administration can develop a revolutionizing plan for UT's future in just less than a couple of weeks, hammer out the details with little aid from faculty members and begin to implement the plans the day after their announcement, but the administration can't find a department chairperson after three years of "active" searching? Perhaps Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Yueh-Ting Lee is too busy trying to clumsily merge departments and cut the college's budget by 10 percent to care about finding a chairperson.
Then again, perhaps the chaos surrounding the void of leadership in the history department might be helping the dean to make the 10 percent cuts or "reallocations." The stress on the history faculty created by the department's woes over the last year has led to the retirement and quitting of a number of tenured professors, replacing them with the cheaper positions of visiting and assistant professors. These serious troubles in the department are also putting strain on the master's and doctoral programs, both of which already are experiencing low enrollment numbers, by discouraging more prospective students from enrolling in the programs. The elimination of these programs alone might go quite a way to free up funds for Lee.
Behind these speculations and blame games, though, lies a deeper problem. The value of the humanities simply isn't acknowledged by many in UT's administration. Dean Lee himself said last Thursday that the foreign languages have value on a core curriculum level but should not have their own majors. The meaning of a major in the humanities itself isn't even clear, given the merger of the departments. The value of a space for free thinking as championed by the humanities in a world increasingly controlled by hegemonic corporate interests is lost to UT President Lloyd Jacobs and Lee. Those of us involved in UT's liberal arts programs and who recognize their importance must oppose the ignorance in the destruction of these fields.
In order to ensure the student centeredness of this university, assuming, of course, that history students are as valuable as non-history students, UT administrators should strive to keep the history department from falling apart by hastening to seat a chairperson, keeping the history professors we have here and hiring more tenure-track professors.
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