An airplane full of philosophers was preparing for takeoff when the pilot made an announcement: the plane was too heavy, and some weight needed to be offloaded.

The philosophers exchanged thoughtful glances, nodded in agreement, and immediately began deliberating on who among them should leave the plane to lighten the load.

Twenty minutes later, as the flight attendant walked down the aisle, ready to address the situation, the philosophers proudly proclaimed that they had reached a decision: they had determined who would disembark to ensure the plane could take off safely.

To this day, we honor their reasonableness and selflessness. After all, without their noble sacrifice, those bags of shredded documents in the cargo hold would never have made it to the dump before it closed.

The question isn’t whether it is ever justified to get rid of philosophy faculty, the question is whether it is the appropriate time to be laying off philosophy faculty – might there not (very often) be more appropriate things to be getting rid of before the philosophy faculty?

Where in this post does it “seem[] to presume a more principled view: that it’s never justified to reduce the size of the philosophy faculty, even if the student body is shrinking substantially, short of an immediate and acute financial crisis”? You seem to be ignoring that actual content of the letter to provoke some broader and irrelevant discussion.

I’ll just chime in here in support of Wallace. Here’s something I said at Leiter’s blog in August, concerning SUNY-Potsdam’s impending contraction (with “Cuny” corrected to “SUNY”:

I’m a little unsure of what the numbers are supposed to tell us. Curry notes that, factoring in for inflation, SUNY currently receives around half as much money from the State of New York as it did in 2004. What was student enrollment in 2004? After a quick search, I can’t find numbers on yearly enrollments, but Wikipedia discusses the declining enrollment situation at the University and it looks like it went from being a founder of the SUNY system as a college for teachers after the Second World War, to expanding into a more general university in the 60s, riding the wave of higher ed’s expansion in the second half of the twentieth century, with enrollments declining at least since 2010.

But if I’m doing the math right, and just going by what’s given above, with a decrease in student enrollment close to 40%, or almost 1700 students, since 2012, and with in-state tuition fees at close to $9000 dollars a year, that’s on the order of $15 million per year lost from student enrollments. I’m sure it’s less than that, owing to tuition wavers and other support, but Curry says there’s an annual deficit of $9 million, and that most of the University’s expenses are in personnel. Is there any reason to think the drop in student enrollments isn’t a big part of that deficit? If it is, what should be done but lower personnel expenses? We can argue with how much should be trimmed, and where, but the personnel costs have to go down pretty drastically in a situation like this, right?

At any rate, going on the offensive has always struck me as worth more attention. David Hoinski urged the same when WVU was doing something similar, and I wish a more pro-active approach had been taken up by humanities professors two decades ago. The rpk Group is just one of a handful of institutional and individual forces looking to remake higher ed in the image of a new social and employment environment. As it is, I worry that humanities education in the U.S. today has developed an elitist image whose adherents are thought of as fostering ideological commitments that are not as widely shared among U.S. citizens in general as they are in the humanities, so that it seems rational for citizens who reject those commitments to encourage their children to do something different with themselves. Maybe it’s possible, this late in the culture war, to bridge that divide — and if I had the resources to mount a charge, that’s the line of attack I’d take. But together with the demographic cliff that higher education will face in the next few years, owing to the dip in birthrate after the recession of 2008, I suspect we’re fighting a reargaurd action at this point.

what i see in this post, and this critique is implied in slexter’s reply, is zero sum thinking. i understand the idea that arguing/suggesting that faculty ought never to be laid off is a bit silly.

but let us ask what is the purpose of the college/university and to what degree firing faculty rather than making other budgetary adjustments is the best way to preserve that purpose. it is reasonable to ask if administration offers as much value to the purpose of the university as does faculty. and here in the u.s. we have sports, and gyms, and other extracurricular expenses that tend not to get cut first or very drastically. it is far, far easier to get a new gym built than it is to get new faculty hires in the humanities.

let us ask too what kind of savings we actually get from laying off non-tenure track faculty. surely one tenured line is worth at least two non-tenure positions, and maybe far more than that. i’m not saying fire the tenured folks instead but let’s be real: getting rid of non-tenured faculty is a small and short-term savings that is done mostly because non-tenured faculty have little in terms of employment protection and institutional status and not because cutting these positions offers the best way to meet budget shortfalls.