Universities are all about tenure.
Liberal Arts was part of the Great Western Tradition but funding and enrollment is way down.
In the final analysis, these centers for higher education are businesses, they need to generate wealth for themselves to maintain themselves.
The Big 10 schools and similar all depend on football revenues as well. It’s great fun, college spirit and all that but it’s all about the bottom line - funding.
The idea of churning out a responsible and knowledgeable mass populations from the nation’s universities is a noble cause but one that has been sidelined by Liberals. It’s not what you know, it’s how you’re dealing with it or touchy-feely it.
Let’s face it, we are churing out millions of unprepared hamburger flippers.
What IS saving the nation are foreign students who are eager to learn, work in America and create their own American Dream.
There is also a core group of talented indivduals at every college - they enable us to stay on top of Nobel Prizes and research, the rest of us?
I agree that they are about tenure, but they are also about majors. Academic friends tell me that they have to have X amount of majors to get funding at public universities.
No majors no department.