A group of 138 University of Iowa faculty signatures were featured on a full-page ad in the student newspaper the Daily Iowan last Thursday, opposing a task force that is recommending cuts to arts and humanities courses. The protesting faculty members contend that the task force lacks sufficient representation by professors from those departments.

The ad said the task force’s five-category ranking system was unfairly skewed against the humanities and criticized what they consider under-representation of humanities and arts departments leading to unfair judgment of those classes. Fifty percent of the programs targeted by the task force for "planned mediocrity" lie within arts and humanities, according to their statement.

Many schools grappling with budget cuts have created similar mechanisms to attempt a democratic process of reducing funding. Strategies have ranged from university-wide committees with faculty and student representatives, to a more elite group of appointed faculty members. UI is not the only school seeing retrenchments in the arts and humanities departments. It is also not the only school whose faculty are crying foul and alleging a skewed process for deciding funding cuts.

“The humanities have always had a hard time justifying themselves,” said Associate Professor of History Johanna Schoen, noting that they bring in less research money then the sciences and that their benefits to society are often considered dispensable.

According to Dean of the Graduate College John Keller, the task force is composed of 21 members, 15 of whom are professors—three from each of the university's five core disciplines. One of those disciplines represents the humanities.

Keller denied accusations from humanities faculty, and said there is equal representation in the task force and that recommendations for cuts are only preliminary.

Some professors, like Rick Altman in the cinema and comparative literature department, said the economy is just another crisis that needs to be fixed, like the 2008 floods that ravaged the UI community. 
“Right now, we’ve faced with another kind of flood (sic),” Altman said. “If we don’t react well to that—maintaining our educational goal, maintaining our understanding of what a liberal education is—then the UI may continue to exist, but it will turn into a diploma mill.”

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