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[mad_doctor]

The least qualified people to be making decisions like this are university- and state-level bureaucrats.  When they get involved it becomes a politicized bean-counting process.  Lower program completion rates are an indicator of quality programs.  When most of us started college, decent schools had a policy that the ideal retention rate was around 1/3 from the freshman to the senior year.  Now it seems that departments are being cut because they have "poor" completion rates - the same completion rates that 30 years ago were desirable indicators of a program's rigor.  When faculty make these decisions it becomes more about rigor and less about revenue, but rigor doesn't sit well with the administration when the Provost and President make five times the salary of the highest paid full professor on campus and have support staff sufficient to allow themselves job responsibilities less than an average departmental administrative asistant.  "We support rigor - the kind of rigor that justifies our grossly inflated salaries and enough support staff to keep us from getting our hands dirty".

[advil]

I asked the initial question because, as a linguist (with a job in a cognitive science department), I was a little puzzled about the singling out of linguistics as a field that is insular or outdated or in any way about to expire.  In fact I'd say it is rather thriving, though it may be that the balance of research across subfields of linguistics is not what it was in the 70s (i.e. Chomskyan syntax is not at its apex).  Modern linguistics is and always has been a tiny field, so this may make it seem isolated in some way.  (Like, there are subfields of psychology that seem to be about an order of magnitude bigger than all of linguistics.)  There are few large linguistics departments, and many schools lack one altogether.  But abuflletcher's initial comment as well as a lot of the followup comments have lacked any specifics that I can easily identify and address, so I guess you'll just have to take my word for it that the field seems to be in decent shape and isn't about to die.  (And has by no means run its course.)

My impression, and feel free to correct me, is that linguistics needs those fields much more so than those fields need linguistics. I know to some degree it is just cross disciplinary hackling but in my experience with folks in those fields they are pretty skeptical about the linguists perspective. I can't say anything about linguistics on intellectual grounds, but it seems to me that the profession is not in a good place.

I don't know that there is particularly extensive need in either direction, except in two ways: collaborative work between linguists and psychologists has been extremely fruitful on both sides, and will likely continue to be, and linguistics has lately been adopting many experimental methods from psychology (and to some extent cognitive neuroscience).  So we do need psychology etc because the methods are well-developed, and as a much much larger field, there are many more people actively working on methodological issues.  But I don't really see how this need puts linguistics in a particularly bad place.  I actually don't think that the skepticism is much more than cross-disciplinary heckling compounded by the fact that linguistic theory is much more complicated/developed than theories of the mind in other domains, so it is easier to go into a linguistics talk and not understand it, than to do so for a psych talk (which will be about a series of experiments, not a theory).

[lerasmus]

This is not new, really - many performing arts programs have been forced to consolidate since the early 90s at least. The problem not articulated in the article (and I know about this first-hand) is that administrations are quick to change their criteria for evaluating programs and allocating them resources. At the university I teach at, until about 3 years ago department budgets were quite closely linked to total student enrollment in classes. For departments like philosophy that provided a substantial number of large service classes, their contribution to the education of the entire campus (nearly everyone went thru a philosophy class at some point, including most humanities grad students) justified their faculty numbers, TA lines, and funding.

This totally changed, without notice, when the university eliminated the concept that number-of-students-taught should be equated with funding, and went to a system concerned with "time-to-degree," "outcomes assessment," etc. Philosophy didn't have a large number of enrolled students, and many were kept on indefinitely through extensible TA assignments, meaning the dept's "time-to-degree" suddenly wasn't up to snuff, and the "outcomes" determined by some "interdisciplinary committee" weren't adequate. But money was cut anyways, and the department has been "downsized" several times now.

Not just philosophy, but other degree programs at this public R1 are suffering similar problems. Now smaller programs are being threatened for closure, even though it was only a couple months ago that any information was provided to any of the programs outlining why it was that their budgets had been slashed to nearly non-operable levels. It's pretty difficult to change time-to-degree for a grad program with only a couple months notice.

[the_goat]

!!!!


<mourns>

[fiona]

The goat no longer exists, and maybe never did, except as a scape.

The Fiona

[yellowtractor]

The goat no longer exists, and maybe never did, except as a scape.

The Fiona

No, I think he (she?) was more concerned that his (her) field had been taken away.

My personal experience with goats is that they like fields, though they will also settle for yards, back lots, woody scrub--anything, really, so long as part of it's chewable.

[watermarkup]

Here's another CHE article about a disappearing field: The Career Risks of Scrutinizing the Physical Side of Books

I wish there were a free link, because I don't have access to the full article from here. From the summary, it looks like another case where a decision has been made that one of the basic building blocks of academic literary research has been declared superfluous.

Wait, my bitterness would like to speak for a moment. Ahem...

You can feed a Penguin edition of Hamlet into the Theory of the Week and be the next MLA All-Star. But if you do the kind of painstaking research upon which new editions of Hamlet are based, you're a washout, no matter how many articles you publish in top journals. You should have known when you started grad school that the skills all your professors were trained in were about to be eliminated from the core of the discipline.

[embitteredhistorian]

I'd love for my field to disappear.

advil is right: to say that linguistics is in danger of disappearing is laughably preposterous. English linguistics is one of the few fields I know of where a good Ph.D. can land you a university job almost anywhere in the world.

[fiona]

I'd love for my field to disappear.

advil is right: to say that linguistics is in danger of disappearing is laughably preposterous. English linguistics is one of the few fields I know of where a good Ph.D. can land you a university job almost anywhere in the world.

Not so. My own university has downsized its linguistic program, along with cutting back on "foreign" languages. Maybe there are jobs in the rest of the world--though I notice that U. of Toronto is closing its Comp Lit Program--but in the U. S., not so.

The Fiona