A department, close to home, terminated

Bummer story in Science about the geology department being cut here at University of Vermont:

After a quick apology, the dean pivoted to the news: Given the crunch on university finances amid the COVID-19 pandemic, he’d made a difficult decision to terminate the geology department. If we wanted to keep our jobs, we’d have to find another department willing to take us in. His words hit me like a ton of bricks.

But their predicament did not come entirely out of the blue. Three years ago, the department was faced with falling enrollments and lowered budgets. This comment about the department’s then-response hit really hard (emphasis mine):

We convened faculty meetings to discuss how to move forward. Our curriculum hadn’t changed much in decades. Our students learned how to identify rocks and stare down microscopes, but they weren’t much exposed to many of the more pressing problems in geosciences, such as climate change and groundwater pollution. Some of us, including me, wanted to overhaul the curriculum. But others argued against abandoning our focus on traditional skills and concepts.

I see this (conservative) attitude with faculty all the time. And I understand the sentiment: the current approach is good enough, it’s too much work to change, and the risk is too high of making things worse.

The ivory tower may seem like solid rock¹, and the economics around student loans (in the US) are bizarre, but success hides problems. Life catches up to you fast and tenure is no insurance policy against disruption. And nothing says disruption like what we’re currently going through.

Imagine how different the story might have been if they overhauled the curriculum and renamed “geology” to something like “earth and planetary sciences”. Geology is pretty old-fashioned sounding. (See also “statistics department” vs. “data science department”.)

At least here the story isn’t quite over:

Our new vision looks to the future and leaves the past behind, something we could never bring ourselves to do before the prospect of termination forced us to spring into action. We’re not sure how the university will react to our plan. Hopefully, our efforts aren’t coming too late.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6527/434