11/28 Response
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 2 When thinking about how to prevent increased corporatization in the university system, the first thing that came to my mind was to have all departments come up with a minimum operating budget, an ideal operating budget, and an extravagant operating budget. Based on those budgets, an accounting firm or some other separate board can give each department an equal category of budget and can adjust accordingly every year if the economy and other conditions are good or bad. At first that sounds like a way to give STEM and athletics programs more money than the humanities or music therapy, but the board would have to give the same category of budget to everyone. If there has been an extremely bad year, then each department gets the minimum operating budget, and maybe a little bit more. If there has been a good year, they get the ideal operating budget, etc. This system prevents certain aspects of the corporatization by giving everybody what they themselves have said they can have.
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 2 Now, I have no idea how digital humanities can be involved in that because I don’t think there is a way for the field to influence universities at a country or worldwide level. Digital humanities is not physics, it is not athletics, it is not engineering, etc. If the whole engineering department of many universities were to advocate and demand for a system such as this, it has a better chance of working than if the same was done by digital humanities. Perhaps DH could advocate for a separate impartial review board when applying for grant money in order to make sure they are not receiving the grant money because they are using it for DH and seen as a buzzword for academia, but because their proposal is actually worthwhile. If it can be clear that the people who are giving the grant money are not just doing, as Wendy Hui Kyong Chun says, “vapid embrace of the digital” then it will help prevent the corporatization.
So I really like this idea, in the light of the UND budget cuts last year. I’ve also heard that the budget cuts aren’t finished yet and we’ll probably get more in the spring. All UND departments have already done this sort of budget planning, where they made three different plans but I believe they were more like ideal, not good, and awful. However, each department had a different plan chosen. Maybe if we did this kind of equalization of budget cuts, the arts and humanities would feel less attacked.
This solution, to me, seems to address the crisis of the humanities more in the immediate sense than the neoliberal takeover of the university. However, I can see how long-term use of this plan could resist corporatization.
I think the only change I would make to this plan would be to add a review committee to look over each departments’ submitted plans and make sure they’re not ridiculous before the accounting firm decides which plan to use based on an analysis of the economy. There should be guidelines for what defines the minimum operating budget because cutting positions of people isn’t really operating, it’s just deleting. So should we add a crisis level budget too or would that defeat the purpose of this plan? Also, the ideal operating budget needs to be closely looked over to make sure departments aren’t asking for ridiculous amounts of money just because they want it.