Photo by Philippe Bout
Dedicated to the memory of Meagan Lobnitz.
Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices,
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me; that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again.–William Shakespeare, The Tempest
I don’t know about you, but these days I bring the same eagerness to reading the morning news that I do to chugging down prep drink before a colonoscopy. So, I was less than thrilled to have to set aside a well-earned – and distinctly legal – summer spliff to hold forth on the hollowing out of U.S. universities. Many of my lovely coworkers at Washington State University Vancouver received pink slips this week as WSU deals the Vancouver campus a second draconian budget cut in two years.
Together the cuts hack away 23% of the campus budget, with administrators warning of more cuts to come next year. While the Washington State Legislature mandated a $3.3 million cut to WSU’s statewide budget in 2026, WSU’s upper admin has instead arbitrarily imposed an $11.68 million cut, more than fifty percent of it to be extracted from the Vancouver campus.
The cuts threaten arguably hundreds of jobs in a rapidly growing urban center with a scenic waterfront, a city that vies with Tacoma for third largest city in the state. And did I mention that the cuts are being enacted the same year the admin is doling out a bonus $20 million to WSU’s terminally indebted athletic program?
Across the steadily warming Columbia River at Portland State University, and across the country, academic workers are looking at losing a livelihood many spent the better part of a decade training to enter. And with the loss of those – disproportionately young – workers, students both present and future are rapidly losing access to some of the last vestiges of the arts and humanities at “public” universities in the U.S.
This time around, it’s staff who are mainly on the chopping block, but anyone who tells us the cuts won’t impact instruction or student experience is blowing some serious admini-strative smoke. The staff and faculty who remain will have their workloads compounded. It’s death by attrition, and I mean that rather more literally than metaphorically. Because the health impacts of these cuts are real and far reaching.[1] They mean a speeding up of everybody’s conveyor belt – from facilities workers to administrative assistants, librarians, accountants, and techs, to grad students, and on a good ways up the food chain.
It seems fair to conclude that folks who do the teaching – along now with more administrative work – are going to find themselves with significantly less of that element Einstein dubbed “Time.” Like staff, they’ll be more stressed, and given the Newtonian principle of shit rolling down hill, it seems reasonable to assume that students are also going to get hit with more than their fair share of it.
Knowing that time is relative, you’ll never guess what program was singled out first for the chopping block and across all campuses: the Program of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS). Despite public claims that no programs have been cut in the College of Arts and Sciences, where Women’s Studies is housed, emails went out to faculty that the major is being “suspended.” This move, of course, demonstrating the theory of relativity, insofar as the cuts seem bent on pushing us decades or centuries back in time. Definitely before Rocky Horror, anyway. And you can bet Comparative Ethnic Studies isn’t far behind WGSS.
Across the country, university administrators looking to trim fat from university budgets invariably come first and most often for the arts and humanities, as we progressively gut university educations of cultural and historical memory. In so doing, we undermine the capacity of students and communities to imagine a better future, as so many are saddled with decades of debt when they’re still having to beg random strangers outside the 7-11 to buy beer for them. So much for informed consent.
Perhaps you, dear reader, can explain to me why so many young people coming of age on a burning planet should also be saddled with levels of debt that were unthinkable at public institutions only twenty years ago. At least indentured servants in the colonies only had to put in seven years. I seriously doubt, friends, that the signatories to the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890 had this scenario in mind when they handed over millions of acres of stolen Indigenous lands to capitalize “land grant” universities. I, for one, would love to see someone test that theory out in court.
And no matter that those veterans – the majority from poor, frontline communities, many of them Indigenous, Black and brown – risked their lives for the promise of getting a debt-free quality college education. If we keep going down this road, what students will have in the future will be a radically diminished education, one that is being reverse engineered to knock their legs out from under them, to make it harder for future generations to find their collective way forward in the midst of unprecedented cascading crises.
Neoliberalism and Administrative Bloat
When I began grad studies in English at the UW in 1987 as a late baby boomer, the U.S. was twelve years into the fifty-plus-year arc of neoliberalism. If you’re new to the term, check out David Harvey’s most excellent and accessible A Brief History of Neoliberalism and ditto re: Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. The books map out the strategy: cutting corporate taxes and taxes on the rich, incrementally privatizing – selling off – public institutions, gutting the social safety net, rolling back the gains of the New Deal of the 1930s and the Civil Rights Movement, centering markets – i.e. Mammon – as the measure of all things.[2] All the while, of course, there’s limitless money for prisons, for weapons, war, genocide, surveillance, and AI. Extraction and War unto Death.[3]3
Among those most impacted if the Vancouver campus were to go belly-up would be people from towns like Longview, WA, who already commute more than forty miles to campus. Longview, you might recall, recently made national headlines when a chemical tank imploded at the Nippon Dynawave Packaging Company papermill. The blast killed 11 members of the Association of Western Pulp and Paper Workers, Chapter 633, and injured nine more in what Washington Governor Bob Ferguson has described as “the deadliest industrial disaster in modern Washington state history.”
WSU and the University of Washington are the outliers among state universities in Washington in that we’re not unionized. And you can bet that’s going to hurt us as the cuts play out. At WSU Vancouver, neither faculty nor staff have had any say in how the university is being incrementally reshaped under the auspices of this manufactured fiscal crisis. The cuts are being made in near total secrecy. Many worry that whatever the intended effect, the cuts will send Southwest Washington’s only research and teaching campus into a death spiral.
The Vancouver campus emerged out of years – if not decades – of organizing by Southwest Washington legislators, business interests, tribal nations, unions and community groups. When I joined the faculty at WSU Vancouver in the 1990s, like so many of my coworkers who preceded and followed me, I was drawn by the beauty of the Pacific Northwest and the challenge and promise of building a university from the ground up. We were not, WSU held for decades, a “satellite” or “branch” campus, but rather one research university but geographically dispersed.
We started out teaching in a building at a local community college while construction began on the scenic 351-acre wooded campus with a six-mile -long hiking path. Drive up the hill on a clear day and you can see Wy’East and Loowit – Mt. Hood and Mt. St. Helens – sacred to the Cowlitz Indian Tribe, the Chinook, and Peoples of the Lower Columbia Valley, on whose ancestral lands the campus is sited.
In the early days of the Vancouver campus, more than 70% of the faculty had the job security of tenure. Over time, though, those numbers have flipped with the erosion of tenure and of the arts and humanities, of academic freedom, of faculty governance, faculty pay, and staff support. And while deep cuts in state support for higher education in Washington have definitely played an important role, the changes have also been driven by ballooning ranks of administrators with ballooning pay.
The last few decades at public universities across the country have seen the transformation of students into “customers” and the proliferation of associate and executive vice presidents, provosts, deans, your garden variety associate and assistant deans, dean-lets, dean-lites, demi-deans and on and on. Their salaries far outstrip those of the staff and the vast majority of faculty.
Is it honestly reasonable for legions of administrators at public universities to routinely make more than the governor of the state? Because that’s what we’re looking at. In a salary search for 2025, excluding the all-hallowed ranks of the athletic staff, I still found more than 100 people at WSU making more than the governor ($234,275). The vast majority of them are current or past administrators. I counted at least ten making $400k or more.[4]
A 2022 report by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) estimates that across all disciplines, adjunct professors – many of them burdened by student debt – make less than $50K a year or around $4K per course. Presidents at public universities, by contrast, routinely pull in between $700K and $1.8 million annually. In 2021, as Shawn Vestal of the Spokane-based Spokesman Review reported, then WSU president Kirk Schulz was “ranked No. 11 on Chronicle of Higher Education’s list of the highest-paid presidents of public colleges, a ranking that put his total compensation at just over $1 million, which would make him one of 16 presidential millionaires at public universities.”
In 2018, Schulz laid off the entire theater faculty, cutting a vital program with an annual budget that was roughly equivalent to the $271,800 salary raise Schulz had accepted just two years before. In 2025 WSU opted to pay outgoing president Schulz and WSU Vancouver’s outgoing chancellor Mel Netzhammer each a bonus year’s salary. Collectively the tab for that payout, including benefits, was likely nearly half of the $3.3 million overall cut mandated systemwide by the Washington State Legislature in 2026.
One can only wonder at the role that Elizabeth “Betsy” Cantwell, Schulz’s successor as of – no joke – April 1, 2025, may have played in the decision to impose a cut four times that mandated by Washington State legislators, a full half of it to be extracted from the Southwest Washington campus, from the Southwest Washington community. Cantwell’s starting salary? $735k (with the promise of an additional $150k “incentive bonus”), a $151k raise over her previous position at Utah State University (USU), when she was still a first-time university president.
Cantwell’s time at USU may have been brief – 18 months – but she nevertheless managed to leave quite a mark. As president of USU, Cantwell was centrally involved in “rolling back diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, programs that the legislature prohibited.” But it was Cantwell’s “lavish” spending that really grabbed public attention and headlines in the Salt Lake Tribune.
Trashing the Arts and Humanities
As an English professor, I know many will assume my expertise is largely imaginary, so let me state for the record that by a conservative estimate, over the course of more than thirty years as a professor, I’ve observed a good thirty presentations by university presidents and chancellors, and some sixty meetings with deans justifying yet more cuts to the arts and humanities.
Based, at least theoretically, on decades of empirical observation – conceding that I slept through a good many of those meetings– I can say with conviction that The Trashing, Devaluing, and Marginalization of the Arts and Humanities is a regular seasonal ceremonial rite in academia (insert French horn, bugle, or trumpet blast here), wherein administrators present us with the very bad, not so very good news about the arts and humanities, how things are not looking so very, very good for them. The meeting, we know, is a prelude to yet more cuts to our units, majors, courses, cuts to job security, cuts to benefits, cuts even to life expectancy, and on and on. And always the implied call to stay silent, to above all never mention the inverse relationship between their pay and ours.
Personally, I find one of the challenges of making a compelling case for the arts and humanities is that I’m not always clear what my role or motivation is. I mean, am I Orson Welles doing Clarence Darrow? Jeffrey Wright as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison? Elaine May as Henrietta Lowell? Christopher Lloyd as Professor Plum? And should I be quoting Matthew Arnold’s essay on “Aesthetic Realism,” and if so, could you perhaps hum a few bars for me first?
My point is we went from universities that were directly administered by the faculty with minor disparities in salaries and low overhead to a medieval village in which the overwhelming ranks of the teaching faculty are food- and housing-insecure peasants whose futures are routinely dictated by princes who fly (often first class) to deliver news of imminent cuts, between anecdotes about their second and third homes whilst – metaphorically, at least – gnawing on sizable legs of lamb. Well over a decade ago, an administrative assistant in upper admin let drop that negotiations over a job package for a position in upper admin had included covering the cost of transporting a chilled wine collection across country.
I’m not at all the first to say that chancellors, presidents, and their legions of vice, associate, and assistant presidents, their deans, assistant and associate deans, deanlets, don’t exist to solve the crisis – university administrators are the crisis. The unspoken job for which they are paid the big bucks is to normalize and model the business of squeezing students, workers, and entire communities, transferring wealth upwards into an ever-narrowing sieve until you have the kind of – literally sickening – inequality we have today. Today, far too many “adjunct” faculty and students alike are relegated to the ranks of the unhoused, sleeping in their cars, “shopping” at food banks, and, one can only guess, dying before their time from stress and lack of healthcare.
As word of the cuts came down this week, more than one faculty member commented that had she not just died, our colleague Meagan Lobnitz’s faculty position in English would likely have been on the chopping block. Never mind Meagan’s unrelenting dedication, her ability to breathe life into Technical and Professional Writing, shaping course projects to meet community and student needs. Never mind her generosity and commitment to students despite her paltry pay, despite her own health issues and the critical work of holding together a three -generation household.
Were she here to speak, Meagan would likely agree that one of the most striking of the lies that are pounded into us in faculty meetings and assemblies (i.e. mind-numbing power point versions of The Hunger Games) – is that the arts and humanities are barely to be tolerated, they bring so little value to the university, to the community.
And what do you suppose the same administrators do at the end of the day? They kick back and watch tv shows written mainly by English majors. They listen to music. They hop planes (which are not being flown by English majors or that, at least, is my hope), and they fly to Broadway shows, written by playwrights trained in the arts and humanities, and enjoy moving performances by actors, many of whom got their first taste of the stage as undergrads – though I can assure you, not at WSU. And they listen to live music.
Let’s be clear: few of us ever gets through a day, let alone a lifetime, without art. The question is whether ordinary people have a right to a liberal arts education, if they have the right to study, critique, and create or whether they’re consigned to the status of mere consumers, mere “customers.”
If you’re wondering how the present national shit show came to pass, it’s in no small measure an effect of the folks who’ve gotten the big bucks to do the dirty work of dismantling the very universities where they got their own degrees. For performing a feat Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan might describe as “alchemy in reverse” – for transforming an essential pillar of a democratic society into a training ground that produces heavily indebted compliant corporate citizens who, like Caliban, wake to their drudgery and “cry to dream again.”
Conclusion: What is to be done?
In the longer term, we need mobilize unions, community stakeholders, alumni, and students to build support for a “New Deal for Higher Education” and demand that billionaires (and massive corporations that profit from university contracts) pay their fair share of taxes. And in the shorter term, we need to press for statewide legislative caps on administrative salaries so that no one makes more than the governor. And we need to press for legislative mandates for budget cuts to be taken from the top. Alongside lobbying the legislature, we need to press for ballot referendums and to call on administrators themselves to pledge to take the budget cuts from the top.
Whatever our party affiliations, I hope, dear reader, that we can arrive at consensus around a simple mathematical truth: we can have functioning universities governed and administered by faculty as universities once were, or we can continue to bankrupt these precious and irreplaceable public institutions by paying dozens– pecks, firkins, really – of highly paid, very well fed, well feted, very, very comfortable administrators bent on enforcing their enduring right to own multiple Porsches – or bidets. I leave you, dear reader, with the words of the inimitable Susan J. Powter, “Stop the insanity” And, finally, in the immortal words of Kip, “Peace Out.”
The preceding opinions most definitely do not represent the opinions of my employer Washington State University. Thanks are due to Frann Michel and Linda Cargill for reading and commenting on drafts. All errors are my own.
NOTES
1. Check out, for example, this longitudinal study tracing the impacts of the 2008 cuts on the Vancouver campus. The study is by Tahira Probst, Ph.D., a regents professor and internationally recognized specialist in occupational health psychology at WSU Vancouver. Director of the Coalition for Healthy and Equitable Workplaces lab, Probst’s focus is on job insecurity, workplace safety, and worker well-being. ↑
2. For a far deeper dive into the impact of neoliberalism on U.S. universities, check out some of Henry Giroux’s many books and commentaries in CounterPunch. ↑
3. For more on the links between neoliberalism and militarism, see some of Norm Solomon’s many commentaries in CounterPunch. ↑
4. And while the vast majority of these positions are in Pullman, WSU’s upper administration is touting cuts to administrative positions at regional campuses as cost-cutting measures. The cuts, however, also conveniently eliminate an important channel for local knowledge, advocacy, and leadership at a perilous moment and further consolidate power in Pullman. ↑