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One evening when leaving campus, I received an email that I’d long been dreading: the anthropology department where I worked, along with several other departments, would be retrenched in the context of the university’s budgetary crisis—a formal process, often caused by financial exigency or declining enrollment, where institutions reduce programs, services, or staff—including tenured faculty—to cut expenses. While social science disciplines are often cast as particularly “problematic,” these polarizations exist alongside disputes over efficiency, particularly in relation to metrics. Such metrics include enrollment numbers, declared majors, graduating students, and related quantitative measures.
I worked at this university in the Midwest as a tenure-track faculty for a year. The university’s total enrollment had dropped dramatically in the prior few years (the numbers had almost halved). From an R1 university known globally as a leader in engineering, it contemplated converting itself into a polytechnic institute—something akin to a vocational institute—as some faculty members shared. The university had a previous round of retrenchment, which I wasn’t aware of (as someone desperate to land a job anywhere in the US, I simply didn’t care). When a colleague shared that there was some chatter about the anthropology department being retrenched, I didn’t take it seriously, thinking that I had just been hired and that tenure-track faculty, after all, couldn’t be fired easily. But I’ve found that tenure (and much less tenure-track) no longer affords the stability that it once did, especially when universities face financial exigencies.
I frantically called the chair asking her what it meant. It had barely been a few months since my appointment. She expressed that nothing was final yet. I was encouraged to “keep applying” to other jobs, with the reassurance that the university was meant to be a stepping stone in any case, while also being told that the dean had a “plan” for me. My colleagues and I later discovered that the dean, too, had been giving job talks.
Faculty members who were established in their departments hesitated, but when they realized the fear of retrenchment was real, they too became part of the conversation. At this point, I still thought that the department could not be retrenched because, well, faculty members were unionized. There was some discussion that the higher administration typically announced such restructuring plans right before Thanksgiving so that faculty didn’t get the chance to respond to criticism immediately.
In the coming days, the university would encourage senior professors to tender voluntary separations so that junior faculty could be saved. While all this was unsettling, there was a concern on which I partially agreed with the higher administration. During a meeting with the chair, she showed me a document with the summary of findings from a report compiled by a private consulting firm. The table showed the total number of majors across various disciplines. Students graduating with an anthropology degree had dropped to below five. I wondered whether anthropology’s contribution to General Education shouldalso have been counted, and so did others, but some faculty members suggested that the problem was that anthropology as a discipline was held suspect for instilling “woke” ideas, and so the mere mention of “diversity” could get the university into more problems than it was already in (especially with conservative lawmakers, as they strove to pass SB-1 limiting any education on diversity, which would eventually be passed).
In our echo chambers, we as faculty talked about the university’s onslaught on diversity and the administration’s collusion with conservative members of the board. But I think during these culture wars, there was something fundamental that anthropology as a department couldn’t address—about the usefulness of the degree for students in the absence of an employment ecosystem to absorb students. To respond to this anxiety, university leaders sought collaboration with the department to expand health pathways and train a future healthcare workforce. In these efforts, the university risked reducing its mission to labor market demands rather than prioritizing the cultivation of critically educated individuals equipped to thrive across diverse environments.
To give the impression that retrenchment was a faculty-led process, faculty members were asked to submit proposals for restructuring. Eventually a few proposals were accepted. One was to organize departments around public affairs, and the other one, as I mentioned above, was to have a healthcare pathway. As these proposals were being assessed, a grievance was also filed, resulting in combative relations between the faculty in the department and higher administration. Eventually an attorney would be involved; the solution was to have a negotiated buyout, letting the remaining anthropology majors complete their degrees before the department would officially be closed. Within a few years, senior faculty would retire, and junior faculty would be moved to other departments. I realized that unions at times serve merely as talking shops, especially when the university invoked financial exigency as a cause of retrenchment, and they only help negotiate a slow death.
As higher education in the US is undergoing transformation, there are new inequalities emerging between what I call “faculty-bureaucrats” (the people turning themselves into administrators to ensure their survivability and increase their appeal among provosts, deans, and presidents) and the weak and vulnerable graduate students, adjunct faculty, part-time instructors—and there is always an invisible pool of Brown and Black workers to rely on, or staff who continue to labor in conditions of great precarity. My experiences show precisely this gap between faculty-bureaucrats and members who demand greater freedom from administrative overreach. And these administrators, strangely, are no different from investment bankers, highly paid consultants, or famous soccer players—jumping between universities, each bringing their own vision of growth, and undoing previous efforts. A cursory glance through any higher education news website proves that. The tradification of monographs by university presses and the emergence of the “celebrity-scholar,” always boasting about their accomplishments on social media, are particular representations of the same economic crises, where scholarly value is equated with popularity. Other faculty may continue to insist on “cultural wars” to entrench themselves or consolidate power.
In these debates, we often overlook the unique needs of students, the precarity faced by junior faculty, the complexities of the evolving economy for which we are preparing students, and the importance of fostering interdisciplinary conversations for the future. Anthropology need not as always be fighting for its survival, and neither do anthropologists need not be selling their “souls”; anthropology is, in fact, at home with all other disciplines, serving as a vital bridge between the past and the future, science and the humanities, and between theory and community at large, reflecting on a question too misleadingly simple: “what does it mean to be human after all?” in today’s technologically driven and divisive environment.
Note: this piece was published anonymously at the request of the author.