Opinion: UO should take humanities off the chopping block

Jeff Schroeder

For The Oregonian/OregonLive

Schroeder is an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Oregon. He lives in Eugene.

Last month, I was preparing my syllabus for a new course at the University of Oregon on religion and climate change. My students and I would investigate topics ranging from Pope Francis’s statements on climate to indigenous views of nature to the claim that worship of money and free markets has become a kind of religion in this country.

More broadly, like many offerings in the religious studies department, the class aims to help students develop reading, writing and communication skills, as well as the capacity for both critical analysis and sympathetic understanding of diverse perspectives on a topic.

But in the midst of my teaching preparations, I received a phone call from a colleague informing me that my department was likely to be eliminated, with all or most of its seven tenured professors terminated. It was a surreal moment. We are a thriving department with brand-new hires, fully-enrolled courses and internationally renowned scholars. Until that week, no one in our department, including the head, had received any indication that our department was endangered.

I also learned that it was not just religious studies facing likely elimination. The administration is also reportedly planning to shutter the classics, Russian, and German and Scandinavian departments –terminating their faculty, as well. This would mean that programs in Judaic studies, Arabic studies and Holocaust studies would also no longer be viable, because those programs rely heavily on religious studies and German and Scandinavian studies professors.

Across the country, the humanities are under attack. As budgets tighten, leaders at the University of Chicago, University of West Virginia and Indiana University have made only limited cuts to sciences and pre-professional programs while slashing the humanities. I believe that is a deeply flawed choice. When we lose the humanities, we not only lose knowledge of the diverse literary, cultural and religious traditions of the world, but we also lose skills of critical thinking, communication, empathy and creativity. These skills are essential for all kinds of reasons—including career readiness. A 2023 research report out of the University of Oxford shows that in today’s shifting job market increasingly defined by automation and digitalization, humanities graduates, equipped with transferrable skills in communication and critical thinking, are more capable of moving flexibly between occupations and across job sectors in ways that advance their careers.

University of Oregon administrators claim that these cuts are necessary due to a budget hole. But there are reasons to be suspiciousof their apparent plan – gleaned from news stories and communications from department heads – for solving it. The provost instructed the deans of each of the schools and colleges to identify cuts to achieve average reductions of 2.5% in their budgets; however, it seems that the College of Arts and Sciences, and not the eight other schools and colleges, will bear the brunt with the elimination of entire departments as well as severe faculty cuts. There have been many suggestions of other ways—early retirements, temporary pay-cuts, hiring freezes—to address the situation, but the university has resisted these options. Why?

It seems plain to me that University of Oregon leaders do not see a future in broad humanities education, and instead are choosing to invest in other disciplines and initiatives. As I write this, in the midst of this alleged budget crisis, the UO’s College of Arts and Sciences is hiring tenure-track faculty in data science, computer science and neuroscience.

This is a choice that University President Karl Scholz and Provost Christopher Long are making with painfully little consultation with faculty or students. All these changes are being suddenly carried out during the month of August, while faculty are not on contract and students are not on campus. The University of Oregon Senate has issued an open letter characterizing the administration’s actions as “an unacceptable violation of our shared governance responsibilities.” Similar declarations that required consultation has not taken place have been made by the faculty union, the President of the American Association of University Professors and even a group of six state legislators. Nevertheless, UO administrators seem poised to carry out these cuts, which are scheduled to be announced this week.

I have taught at the University of Oregon for 10 years and have ushered over a thousand students through challenging discussions about the causes of global religious violence, the nature of church-state relations in the U.S. and the role of religion in combating climate change. In my courses, students of all religious backgrounds, including those with no religious affiliation, learn to think critically, engage in self-reflection and speak respectfully with one another about very charged topics. What kind of world will we have if our students, funneled into STEM and pre-professional disciplines, are deprived of these skills?