The chat is disabled in this online faculty forum at my college, so I will be happy to post here instead. I will start with: our financial problems are not caused by "unpopular majors" nor will they be solved by cutting them and replacing them with more popular ones.

Student interest, academic/intellectual value, market trends, all of these are distinct (sometimes overlapping and sometimes competing). Let market trends be the law of the land at your own peril

If we all create universities that ONLY structure academic programs around market trends, we will actually affect those trends: saturate markets and cauterize new avenues for innovation.

Cutting majors undermines the building of a more interdisciplinary and innovative institution because it dilutes disciplinary expertise and engenders conformity rather than collaboration.

"Majors" are an intellectual category, not a commodity. You can count credit hours, faculty time (teaching and release), equipment fees, and all that stuff. And you can look at ways to cut all that stuff and gain efficiencies or savings.

But "majors" are an academic concept, which should not be tied to "cost-savings" unless we all agree that learning and knowledge are fundamentally fixed-value items that can be bought and sold on the private market. I reject this.

If we "can't continue doing things the way they are," it may not be that we need majors that our customers like better. It may be that we need a learning environment that doesn't package majors as individual consumer commodity-credentials.

Shifting that mindset places "blame" in new places, and shifts innovation from a rat race/turf war/survival exercise into a group design project focused on our interconnectedness and the value we can provide for each other: across disciplines, institutions, states, etc.

Say what you want about my naiveté, but you will be wrong. I am both cynical and experienced.

We all have a choice on November 3 that touches a nerve on these public-private wars, but every day the public side is losing a small-scale battle in our public universities. And it's not Trump's fault. It's our own fault.

The case needs to be made for public higher education before we destroy it all in the name of innovation.

Innovation has become nothing more than privatization dressed up by a fancy marketing campaign.

I'm innovative. I'm not unwilling to come out and say it. I like working with students/teachers /staff to shift educational structures to fit learning better. I'm not against the new, or even the novel. I've spent a whole career getting out of boxes, to the benefit of students.

This is not a fear of change. Instead, I resent that the new learning models that faculty/students/staff develop have to be shoved into a paradigm that ultimately undermines the health and sustainability of their learning communities in favor of a profit motive.

There is not evidence that public higher education costs taxpayers anything. Public higher education PAYS OUT to taxpayers in private market and non-market ways, and extends benefits to whole communities in a myriad of spillover effects.

I am not going to engage in one more minute of bean-counting on how much revenue a history major does or does not bring to our college until we get a full accounting of how public education pays back dollar for dollar.

And what is the "public" responsibility in delivering curriculum in ways that are not fully governed by private markets? Otherwise this is private education. I work at a public university. And I'm going to make you pry that honor from my cold, retrenched hand. /End