Inside Higher Ed reports that Indiana State is eliminating physics and philosophy, among other majors, in a move to streamline their programs. These programs have very few majors relative to the number of faculty (physics has five faculty and nine majors, philosophy four faculty and 19 majors), so they’re on the block due to an accreditor’s comment that they have too many programs.
The discussion in the article centers on the question of whether you can really call a university a university if it doesn’t teach physics or philosophy. Several people in comments object that they’re only eliminating the major in those subjects, not the department– there would still be faculty in those disciplines around (they can’t fire the tenured ones, after all), just no official majors. If nothing else, they can’t completely eliminate physics, because somebody needs to teach the pre-meds physics for the MCAT…
This misses a crucial aspect of the problem, though, which has to do with the quality of the faculty. While it may be technically true that there will still be people on staff teaching physics, eliminating the major more or less rules out any chance of getting and retaining really good faculty in those positions.
Not only is it going to be almost impossible to do research without a pool of majors to draw from, eliminating the major means eliminating the major classes. Which means the prospect of an entire career spent teaching nothing but introductory physics and pre-med physics. I doubt I’m alone in finding this a soul-crushing thought– picture a copy of Halliday and Resnick falling on a human face, forever.
Eliminating the major means that faculty hired in those areas will never be able to teach the highest level classes in their discipline, which means that they spent years in grad school becoming the world’s greatest expert on some area of research, that they’ll almost never get to talk about. That’s pretty depressing.
“Big deal,” you might say, especially if your online alias is “Ponderer,” “They’re obviously not very good at research as it is if they’re looking at Indiana State, so why should they care?” There’s a big difference between knowing that the bulk of your work will be low-level teaching, and knowing that all of your work will be low-level teaching. I know that by coming to Union, I am committed to spending a lot of time teaching low-level classes– we offer something like seven sections of intro mechanics a year, and somebody has to staff those– but I also get the chance to teach physics major classes, like the Quantum Optics course I did last year. And I get the chance to do research with students in the lab, which is one of the highlights of the job.
If I was looking for a job, and you told me that your job did not offer either of those opportunities, I would look elsewhere. I have no objection to teaching intro mechanics– it can be a good deal of fun, sometimes– but I don’t want to spend thirty years teaching nothing but intro mechanics. I’m in this business because I want to teach students who are really interested in physics, not just students who have to take physics for some other major.