Academic departments are in permanent competition to win limited university funding. In recent years, however, programs in arts, humanities and social sciences have struggled to find funding to hire much-needed faculty in comparison to hard science departments, university and state officials say.
And although half of all classes are in the colleges of Arts and Humanities and Behavioral and Social Sciences, those departments have not received enough funding from the university for faculty, Provost Bill Destler said.
These departments have the burden of teaching a large number of classes, both for majors and non-majors, and are not given enough money to shoulder it, Destler said.
“The two largest colleges, the College of Arts and Humanities and BSOS, are under financial stress because they play such a significant role in the instructional program,” Destler said.
The lack of funds will prevent the college lege from hiring new faculty, keeping class sizes small and ensuring the quality of instruction, said James Harris, dean of the College of Arts and Humanities.
The departments also have difficulty winning private and government grants, a primary source of funding for science departments.
Companies would rather invest in scientific fields than the humanities to earn more profits, Harris said.
“[Science-related fields] have a kind of recognized social utility for various things in the country,” Harris said. “If somebody is doing research on nanotechnology, they might commission work to be done at the university. No one out there in business is doing research on English literature and commissioning work at the university.”
Harris said the college received about $7.5 million in research grants and contracts this year – a fraction of the $70 million received by the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences and the $90 million received by the A. James Clark School of Engineering.
“Graduates of the College of Arts and Humanities don’t usually turn out to be people worth hundreds of millions of dollars, so external funding is harder to find,” Destler said.
In fiscal year 2005, organizations in science-related fields awarded grants in the largest amounts of money to the university, said John Blair, director of the office of budget and fiscal analysis. The largest grants were $45 million from the National Science Foundation, $27 million from NASA and $22 million from the public health service, Blair said.
However, Harris said the College of Arts and Humanities was awarded ten times the grants it had received a decade ago.
Destler said funding for the College of Arts and Humanities to support faculty often comes out of a one-time pool of money from the Provost’s Office because there is seldom enough money from the regular budget. He said this is troublesome because money from the regular budget is needed to hire permanent faculty, and the college is often forced to hire temporary or adjunct faculty. He said permanent faculty have more availability to students and are more able to support graduate research.
“As a result of [budget] cuts, we run a structural deficit the campus has been trying very nobly to reduce,” Harris said.
If higher education receives extra funding from the state, which has a billion dollar surplus for the first time in years, the money will probably not go toward the humanities, Harris said. “Competition is different among the sciences than for the humanities,” said state Del. Richard Madaleno, D-Montgomery County.
Madaleno said funding new construction in the sciences, like the Jeong H. Kim Engineering Building, is a higher priority for the state because technology is constantly changing and the university needs to keep up to attract the best students and faculty. Renovating buildings in the arts and humanities wouldn’t necessarily make it easier to educate students in those fields.
“On the state level, they’re interested in things that will add to the economy – high-tech jobs,” Blair said.
Without additional funding, arts and humanities departments risk not having enough resources to attract and retain top faculty and students.
“We would hope that as more money comes back into the university, the arts and humanities would be expanded,” said professor Gary Hamilton, the associate chair of the English department.
Even though the college is not currently attracting all the funding it needs, Harris said he can only hope to get money from the state surplus to keep up with the university’s advancements in scientific areas.
“If we are to get to where we want as an institution, we need to invest and enhance programs in the arts and humanities as much as we need to invest in other areas,” Destler said.
Contact reporter Megha Rajagopalan at rajagopalandbk@gmail.com.
