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I do not know the details, but it does seem incompetent to identify German (language of the most important economy in Europe) and the classics as marginal departments which must be eliminated in the name of economic efficiency.

A vendetta against the humanities perhaps, but economic efficiency? Neither are departments likely to have soaring costs: all you need is a classroom and professor. Lecturers in the classics will probably not even break 50k, while language classes are even cheaper since they're often offloaded to graduate students teaching from standard texts. As long as there are students opting to take those courses, they should be printing money for the university.

So unless there has been gross mismanagement of these departments for decades (aggressive hiring and declining enrollment), it is hard to believe that costs could get out of line. And closing down popular and should-be-profitable classes in order to funnel students to other departments in the name of economic efficiency is a very strange move.

Lots of people in Germany speak English.

See, this is a great reason to discourage people from learning German - you don't even need to know the language of the people you are doing business with. To the chopping block!

Oh wait, no. There are lots of german speakers in the US, but when German companies do business here, they send people who can speak English. Many (most?) US companies send employees to do business in other countries who speak the local language. It doesn't have to be even a fluent level of speech, but the gesture is well received on all ends. It is a general courtesy to at least attempt to have people who speak the language, as it signals other cultural awarenesses and sensitivities.

So is it a university's job to teach "German for business"?

Suppose the CS dept just did Exchange-server admin 101 - people would complain that it wasn't the proper role of a research university.

It seems that closing marginal depts, rather than just milking them as cash cows is a noble strategy - whatever the rest of the UVa management's actions

And does a university need to teach every subject? Should UVa have (for example) an Oceanography dept? Is there much point in having a one person dept teaching Vulcanology when students would be better going somewhere else that specializes in it?

10 years ago the Netherlands started this process for their entire country. They picked the subjects that their universities did very well at and decided to close all the other research depts. There was no point in having the 100th ranked dept of tropical medicine when students could go somewhere else to learn that and you could use the money to support the worlds top dept in some other topic

It is a University's job to educate students, and to expose them to many fields of study that will give them a grounding for later study and inquiry. Basic instruction in many different topics at least gives the students enough grounding to ask good questions.

Education in foreign languages has far reaching affects on many aspects of life and cognitive abilities - this is a documented fact. The analogy to Exchange is broken in many, many ways. Training on a product only brings some level of competency in that product, as soon as it end-of-lifes, the skill is useless. Learning a language opens many doors, and I don't really see German being end-of-lifed any time soon.

Perhaps every university doesn't need a research oceanography unit, but it sure would be nice if they provided at least a teaching unit or two on those. Or do we just tell the students that would like to know something about it, "screw you, enroll at these other universities too, if you want to learn the basics of that.". I understand that in the Netherlands, this may not be that difficult, it is a small country, but in many places, e.g. the US where UVA is, the college where they kept an oceanography program is probably sever hundred, or even thousands of kilometers away.

Finally, the basics of subject do not need leading experts to teach them well. For low level classes, most people capable of getting a Ph.D and an interest in teaching can cover the material quite well. In fact, there is a whole school of thought (with pretty good evidence) that suggests that experts can't teach novices a subject very well at all. (this is known as the tacit or expert knowledge problem).

There is teaching and training. If they have a German lit prof who has published nothing for years, has no research students, no enrollment and the justification for keeping them is "learning German is useful" - then it makes sense to close the dept, buy some language tapes for the library and pay some German grad students to help. Rather than fire 10% of the post-docs in semi-conductor physics because you are making "across the board' cuts.

In europe where every city has a university this is easier and going to a particular university because of a particular course is more common. There are probably only 4-6 veterinary/dentistry ugrad programs in a country and perhaps half the places will have a medical school.

It's different in the US with in-state tuition, but at some point it is cheaper for the state to just say we aren't teaching Oceanography at U of Iowa - here is a scholarship to UCSD to cover the difference in tuition.

You can't ask questions of tapes, nor can you ask for extra help from said tapes the same way you can with an actual teacher. A tape base program can't tell you when you are mispronouncing, nor can it detect the areas you are confused in. There are benefits from having someone knowledgable around to teach.

I haven't taken a language class in a decade but last time I was there there was a lot more than speaking going on in class. It's one thing to speak a language (Google translator has you covered), it's quite another thing to know what to say.

English speakers learning German gain more from learning another language than the ability to speak the language to its native speakers. I know I've benefited from learning German. As my German teacher said, "I dare anyone to learn a language and not learn anything about its culture or history and more."

Eliminating teaching a language due to economic reasons is extremely shortsighted. What point is a school if it doesn't actually teach a fairly major language?

>In-state tuition has increased about 275%.

I was thinking about going to graduate school there in 2008, but somehow it was cheaper to take 3 classes remotely at out-of-state rates (at a higher-ranked school, mind you) than to drive 15 miles into town and take 1 class at UVa as an in-state student, so I decided against it.

Edited to add: I later moved to start a PhD program at the other school, stayed here and got a job, so UVa's high tuition indirectly removed me from the pool of people that would work and pay taxes in VA.

I don't think that's an entirely accurate backstory.

The facutly are in revolt because the Board fired the President without warning or stated cause. Eventually, the Board said the cause was that the President, who is in the process of making cuts, was not acting fast enough.

For the other stuff, to add to the budgetary woes, the amount of state money that the public universities in Virginia receive (not just UVA) has dropped significantly.

The state money argument is a bit of a canard. State funding has dropped $26 million since 2001. All of that since 2007 (i.e. the Great Recession). Expenses have increased $590m since 2001. As the rest of the economy was belt-tightening the last five years, expenditures on faculty salaries kept growing.

"the expenditures of the academic division at UVA have increased about 80% since 2001...In-state tuition has increased about 275%."

This says to me that some other source of funding (state subsidy?) has just about disappeared, is that right?

Academics is only part of university budgets. Other principal costs include housing, tuition assistance, administration, buildings, grounds, support services, and athletics. Not exactly sure how UVA divvies things up.

The idea that tuition increases are just to make up for deep cuts in state funding is mostly a myth. State funding was cut during the Great Recession, yes, but even if state subsidies had kept pace with enrollment growth and inflation, tuition would still have had to double.

The problem is that expenditure growth is outstripping all non-tuition sources of revenue. E.g. research grants, which account for 1/4 of the budget, have increased only 60%. Endowment income, of course, has not kept pace either given the state of the markets. The University has grown expenditures far faster than its growth in revenues, and has made up for the difference by tripling tuitions.

It's usually the return on endowment investments. Every time the market dips - universities go on a manic cost cutting exercise.

OK, what departments did she want to cut?

Honestly, I've never hard a harder time trying to figure out what an HN story was all about.

Certain programs in the classics and germanic studies.

That seems like more evidence of some kind of clumsy political agenda on the board's part, since there's no way actually looking at the budget could give you a picture where Classics and German studies, of all things, are responsible for unsustainable spending increases; they're among the cheapest programs to operate. I suspect it's just some hedge-fund types who don't like the humanities and are looking for excuses to gut them.

If the goal was really to keep costs in line, then the first thing to do would be to assess where the cost increases have come. Which programs have seen the biggest cost increases? And, in which of those are the cost increases worth the quality the program brings to the university? Rank the programs by both expense and quality, and cut the programs which have the highest expense relative to their quality.

Are you basing this on an analysis of UVA's budget? Someone cited somewhere that the Germanic Studies department had like 15 professors. If they faced declining enrollments, they very well could be in a situation where the size of the department isn't justified by the number of students it is teaching.

The board, apparently spurred by professor Wulf, wanted deep cuts in spending. Sullivan, the president, was moving slowly to implement cuts so she was pushed out by the board. Now Wulf has quit as well, seemingly due to some sort of internal drama within the board due to widespread public condemnation of the ouster of Sullivan.

Sorry. Professor Wulf sided with the board's agenda? That wasn't apparent in his resignation letter. It seemed like his resignation was a response to the board's removal of Sullivan.

Wulf resigned in protest of the BoV's actions.

Right. It's not clear though that Prof. Wulf was pushing the BOV to make deep spending cuts.

He wasn't. He had nothing to do with this before the removal of Sullivan. He is retiring because he is upset the Board is trying to run UVA as a business rather than a university - different forms, different causes.

A different opinion from a UVA alum: The "revolt" of the faculty is partially due to the Board wanting to close marginal academic departments because they can't pay for themselves, like Classics (which studies Greek and Latin texts from the founding of Western Civ.) I was not a Classics major and in fact never took a Classics class but many of my friends who are lawyers today were and universities want students like this. Everyone understands that cuts need to be made, but the board seems to fail to understand that making cuts at a university is different than cost-saving measures at a corporation.

Beyond this one issue, the faculty is also responding like this because the Board is acting silently, secretively and hastily in making decisions for the university with little to no participation from faculty or administrators, or even information being provided. At this point, after a week of intense scrutiny and questioning, still no one outside the Board knows exactly why President Sullivan was let go.

In 2003 UVA passed a milestone in that more money came from private donors than public funds. Today UVA's budget includes only 8% being covered by the state. The cuts from the state are very real and very keenly felt. UVA is on a tricky path to become a true hybrid private/public school and the questions facing the faculty and the Board are not whether this should happen, but how.

Furthermore, to rebut some of your points a) It's not insane to have 3300 faculty when many of those are working directly on research or employed at the medical center. (I believe this to be the case given that on average about 1000 faculty are employed through the medical center http://www.web.virginia.edu/iaas/data_catalog/institutional/...) b) The expenditures have increased in an attempt at keeping close with peer institutions for salary and other options. Realistically, despite these attempts the faculty at UVA could easily head to competitive private or public schools and make more money, and will probably be doing so in massive numbers over the next few years following this fiasco. c) I am not sure where you are basing your correlation that this faculty growth has happened at the expense of students. If it has been driven by the growth of costs at the Medical Center that is a source of income as well. If it's been driven by academic faculty then its either been funding research to increase the number of accolades achieved by our faculty (thereby increasing the ranking of the school) or it has been hiring more professors or paying teaching faculty more to keep them from leaving, which would seem to directly benefit students.

What about the change in money brought in due to research done (aka the main revenue generator for academic institutions)?

Also, do you have a source for the 80% growth?

UVA 2000-2001 budget: http://www.virginia.edu/budget/Docs/Budget%20Summaries/summa... (p. 4)

UVA 2011-2012 budget: http://www.virginia.edu/budget/Docs/Budget%20Summaries/2011-... (p. 1, 15)

Note that the 2000-2001 budget lists only the UVA academic division, while p. 1 of the 2011-2012 budget includes the UVA medical center. The academic division is broken down on p. 15 of that budget. Thus the pie charts on p. 1 of the first pdf correspond to the pie charts on p. 15 of the second.

At UVA, sponsored programs (i.e. research grants) make up only a quarter of the budget. Tuition and fees and state appropriations make up almost half. From 2001 to 2012, sponsored program revenues are up 60%, but not nearly enough to cover the 80% increase in expenditures. The other revenue sources haven't kept pace with spending growth either. Of the $590m in additional spending, $276m (or about half) has been supported by tuition increases.

Another way to look at it is that if spending had kept pace with inflation (2.5%) and enrollment growth (0.7%), tuition could have been easily held at 2001 levels. Or, alternatively, had tuition revenues increased to track inflation and enrollment growth, university expenditures could have increased a more modest 50% given the growth in other sources of funding, rather than 80% which was achieved by almost tripling tuition.

I'd be interested in what proportion of that is spent on education, because sponsored research is sort of its own (problematic) can of worms. When sponsored program revenues are up by 60%, for example, that almost requires that expenditures go up by 60-80%, because those programs generally come with quite strict conditions on spending the money expeditiously, and often specify exactly how to spend it (this is particularly common with DARPA grants, which are extremely front-loaded and micromanaged). In addition, these grants often come with some co-funding requirement on the part of the university, both explicitly and in terms of "upgrading facilities", though some of that is then taken back again by the university in overhead charges.

UVa, like most research universities, has been quite aggressive in trying to "encourage" faculty to get more grants. If that's successful, overall spending must of course increase proportionately, because the grant requires the recipient to ramp up hiring of program personnel. If that's not a goal, then the university should de-prioritize or even discourage grants, because they mandate spending increases.

A different angle would be to look at breakdowns by department. Which departments have gotten more expensive? My guess is that, as this is likely tied to grant-funded research, it's mostly STEM departments, not the "marginal" humanities.

As I said, sponsored programs only make up a quarter of UVA's budget. It's not a heavy science/tech school where most faculty salaries are funded by research grants. A 60% increase in sponsored programs revenue would imply a 15% increase in overall expenditures.

Half the 80% increase in expenditures was funded by A tripling of tuition. This is not a situation where expenditure increases are being funded mostly by grants.