The incipit of a piece in Inside Higher Education … I suspect the situation at Centenary College is rather more common than we might know:
In this era of financial turmoil in higher education, many arts and humanities programs have found themselves in the cross hairs of budget cutters. Some proposed cuts have quickly attracted national or even international opposition. Think of all the outrage, for example, about Brandeis University’s plan (since put on hold) to sell off its noted collection of modern art, or of the budget cuts that for a time endangered the future of the Louisiana State University Press.
In both of those cases, and many others, prominent academics and scholarly associations organized petitions, lobbied key decision makers and shouted to anyone who would listen that these cuts simply could not be made. Thousands of students in California are expected to rally across the state today to protest various cuts to California’s colleges and universities.
But there are also a lot of people and programs this year that are being eliminated with hardly any attention at all. These programs are on hit lists precisely because they are small, because they are not famous and thus they don’t have thousands of supporters organizing petition drives and rallies.
Stephen Clark has since 1988 been the only classics professor at Centenary College, a liberal arts institution in Louisiana. This week, the college decided to eliminate the Latin program, which has been the focus of his career as a tenured professor. While there is an appeals process, the college earlier indicated that tenured professors in departments that are closed would probably lose their jobs.
At Centenary, much of the discussion about which programs to eliminate focused on size, and Clark makes no claims that Latin classrooms are packed. Enrollments of five to seven students are good for upper division courses and most years there are only a few majors, sometimes just one.
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rogueclassicism 