Messages

Hi there,

Just wanted to note I'm moving on from the Board! It's 9 months since I moved physically away from Valpo.... so it seems like the right time, as that's the time it takes to gestate a new life!

Thanks so much to all of you... I've learned a lot from you all, and am grateful for the way this board distilled and made more intelligible the different competing interests and perspectives at the university. The various diagnoses and prescriptions offered by you all here have been incredibly illuminating to digest, whether I agreed with them or not. Although it is a kind of grim conversation to analyze the particular mix of strengths and disfunctions that grip the university so much, it really has helped with a sort of closure to better understand 'what happened' in the complexity of all the pressures and narratives within and upon the university, both about how it got to this place and how it might move forward. When I was there (2019-2022), everything was SO intense for both institutional and stage-of-life reasons (new faculty buried in course preps, COVID pandemic, new baby born, layoff, restoration, more unstability, debates over liberal arts and sciences vs professional schools, senior colleagues leaving, campus worry over the sports teams, regret over having asked my spouse to give up his career so I could take the job at Valpo, only for us to now leave, etc) that it was hard to make sense of anything, or even to gauge whether there was any sense to make at all! I remember just feeling kind of shell-shocked as we packed the moving van this past June. The world seemed a nonsensical mix of grief and sunshine, as I gave back the key to the office where I had spent so many late nights grading and prepping for class, and loaded my Valpo-born baby chattering and laughing into her carseat in the back with the rest of the family, and we all waved goodbye to campus and then to our house. So I've really appreciated hearing and thinking with you thru all the ponderings of these recent conversations, as it's been tremendously clarifying with a little distance.

I know that, thanks to what is good about Valpo, I am a much better teacher now at my new university than I would have been in some alternative universe version of life where I never taught at Valpo and just went straight from my doctorate into my current job.

grateful to you all!

best wishes, Beacons!

Probably apples and oranges, just different kinds of institutions.

I know I originally raised the comparison earlier in this thread since back in the day Wustl had been a local commuter school in the mid 20th century and then got a lot more financially stable. But this comparison is probably a red herring in the big picture they are just different type of universities. They're still both comprehensive universities, but WashU is only Division III for sports and isn't really known for any of the teams, though it is #1 in the US for investment metrics like "instructional wages per full time student" ($68,315). Valpo has Division I sports and a more lofty sports profile, though is #282 for instructional wages per full time student ($7,911).

So they are just engaging different kinds of priorities from student and alumni populations, which shows up in who applies for which kind of place and also what sort of donations come back on the other end.

Instead of more griping. I am trying to build a network of Valpo football contacts to help alumni secure jobs post graduation ( think Wabash)

If anyone is a football alum would like to talk

If you haven't already, you might want to try getting contacts & resources from the athletics office or VU Alumni Association and from the Career Center. I know at least the Career person is a new interim this year as they were trying to rehire, but I'm guessing somebody somewhere at Valpo should have a list of past football students or maybe possible job networks that athletics students have found helpful? Maybe if you have energy around this and can make friends with one of these offices, they can help you get data from the other offices..

Thanks to everyone for taking the time to educate us outsiders about roles, responsibilities, and time commitments. Clearly, the workload is greater than I had ever considered. If I may, let me respectfully ask I final question to help me fully appreciate what you are saying. Anytime I drive through campus in the summer, it looks like a ghost town. What are faculty members doing behind the scenes over that "silent" period, when I don't see any students?

For me, Summers at Valpo were indeed lighter in work. The 3-4 or 4-4 loads we had in my (humanities) discipline were always during the year and I only once taught Summer I and II sessions since kind of desperate for extra $3k or whatever it was.

On non-teaching Summers, I would usually end up working about 30 hours a week...

-- preparing for the next semester, since you have to have everything ready to go on the first day of classes and so you spend Summer or Winter break doing that (selecting readings, scanning things in, drafting assignments and rubrics, arranging any guest speakers or field trips, etc.)  In some fields like 'intro to bio' or 'statistics' there may be pretty set content and a textbook you can just use, so it's not like you have to recreate the wheel; but in a lot of the disciplines like political science or theology you really do have to sort of create a lot from scratch in terms of pulling together thinkers around the course theme or central question with case studies, etc. The Summer course prep does take significant time, since you can't just say to students, 'write an essay' but you need to plan ahead a good connection between course content and assessments, build them around good questions, and then provide clear directions for the students so the expectations are clear.

- writing letters of recommendation for students applying to internships or grad school -- or I know at Valpo I know senior colleagues actually spent a lot of their summer time writing letters of rec for junior colleagues who were trying to find positions at more stable institutions  :/

- some minimal ongoing support to students (say, if they were carrying a capstone project from junior to senior year with some work over the Summer on it)

- preparing presentations and going to conferences (for instance, two of main conferences in my field are in late May and then in June, so that's easily a month of work if I'm preparing new research to present at those)

- trying to write/publish articles, reviewing other articles, etc.

- once everything got so unstable, applying for jobs (putting together cover letter, teaching statement, research statement, and sometimes mission statement or DEI statement, teaching evals, asking for letters of rec, etc)

I think a lot of people do so much teaching at Valpo on the 3-4 or 4-4 loads with 2 or often 3 different preps a semester, that they are tempted to basically give up on the research side of it... but that is dangerous for them in a couple ways. It's important to keep up the research even at a teaching-focused institution like Valpo, since the tenure requirements for plenty of departments still expect multiple publications in peer-reviewed journals even if they're on 3-4 or 4-4 loads on the 'teacher-scholar' model that the university expects from them.  And as somebody earlier mentioned, it is actually the research profile that is usually the ticket to a better job, weirdly, even in trying to transfer to another teaching-centered institution. If you haven't published a lot when your program or position is cut, it's very, very hard to get another job elsewhere.

So faculty were generally using the Summers for course prep and to make up for the scholarship and conference or service-to-the-academy duties they weren't able to get to during the year.

[Not VU's fault]

Hello dude to you too! 

Read the last line...

Not VU's fault, but part of the reality why the stagnated salaries have become such a turnover problem.

Not blaming Padilla.... just trying to note that the affordability problem exists and Valpo isn't immune to it. More creative & successful universities than Valpo have found ways to make it work for their employees, and not just in W-2 cost-of-living adjustments but in all kinds of housing assistance and HSA and DCA benefits where it was necessary to maintain the workforce. It's just not good for any institution, whether school or business, to have a constantly revolving door.

Wh, thanks for sharing this data. Really interesting to see. Yes, the differentials still vary a lot between disciplines so for instance, to get an average of $59K for Assistant Profs across the institution, you're going to have most the liberal arts and sciences profs below that and lots of Business/Engineering School faculty above that. Anyways, what's most interesting (maybe hopeful?) about the data here is you can see how it looks like the ERIP did achieve getting some high-rollers off the books, as evidenced in that -9% change in the average salaries for the Full Professors.

Anyways, the uni struggles to keep up with the reality that people at all levels are facing the heightened living and housing costs. For instance, I was paying $26K per year for daycare for two toddlers at a preschool near the old law school campus in Valpo, which was a real strain on the $50 and then $48K tenure-track salary. Or to rent now in Valpo is easily $2K+/month for a two-bedroom apartment or even a small 2 bed/2bath house that's not a foreclosure will easily run $250K if you can save enough to try to buy. Other universities are facing this housing problem in much more extreme ways, like Santa Clara U, LMU and others in HCOL areas that now offer rental assistance or forgivable loan downpayment assistance programs, or sometimes childcare DCA contributions, as part of the benefits package so faculty and staff can get a foothold and stay, and be able to afford food and clothes after the housing and daycare is paid for. It is not that bad yet in Valpo, but housing did get pretty expensive these last couple years. Not VU's fault, but part of the reality why the stagnated salaries have become such a turnover problem.

Valpo is selling land not buying it.

As I suggested in previous posts (see below), I would not be so sure about that.

ValpoPal, you're sounding cryptic and I don't really understand what you're saying. So Valpo is currently trying to buy *more* land? or sell land?

[Average Faculty Salary]

Valpo undergrad professor salaries look to be highly competitive when compared to the broad spectrum of 4-year universities.

Average Faculty Salary

Valparaiso University   $66,206
Master's College And University (larger Programs) Colleges   $75,240
Master's College And University (larger Programs) Indiana Colleges   $69,579

I admit I am not sure what goes into those averages, and of course they vary widely between disciplines/schools. I know for certain that new asst profs in A&S were coming in at around 50-52 these last few years (with the 5% cut and salary reduction clawback, then went down to around $48.5K for me in a humanities disciplines). I know some of the A&S meteorology folk who'd reached associate and been there a dozen or so years had over the years inched up to around the $59/60K mark through promotions. But the going rater for engineering and business school profs is a lot higher, and there are also some specialty faculty (like university level chairs) who have much nicer packages that probably pull the averages up on an institutional level.

I am not trying to argue about the internal differential between humanities vs professional schools here, just noting that the lower end can indeed be low and the averages can be higher, and both those things can be mathematically true. It can also depend on whether they submit deans as 'faculty' salaries to these syndicating websites, since obviously a couple deans making $150k+ can really help 'up' the overall institutional salary averages. And I don't think they count the adjuncts paid more like $3K per course w no benefits or the lecturers.

Valpo95, I think it's a combo of the explanations you offer... Yes, salaries have become unlivable in a situation where daycare and housing costs have skyrocketed so much. Yes, the uni relies more and more on VAP/temporary type instructors who may or may not have much long-term buy-in. But also, and this is the one that makes me saddest, I think most faculty and staff (even if they believe in the mission) are fairly certain that the board and administration (at least the 2020s versions) don't.

When I came to Valpo, I was really excited about teaching well, trying to make a difference in personalized attention to students, about the integration of faith and intellect, in service to the world, etc. But over time, it just became clear that the "Lutheran" mission of the institution wasn't about investing in students or trying to be some kind of leaven in the world... but rather than it just meant being really cheap.... a sort of midwestern 'cultural christianity' or corporate efficiency ideal based less in any vision of the kingdom of God and more in a kind of spindthrift effort to extract as much out of people before driving them into the ground. As faculty, I felt it in all the tumult of the salary cuts, layoffs, rising teaching loads, etc. But the students also felt and resented it in their own ways too. One of the big controversies during my time there was that the uni took away the microwaves that commuter students were using to heat up lunches in order to push more of them onto the (expensive) on-campus meal plan -- though the uni backtracked and the microwaves came back. Just an example, but that sort of cheapness and pettiness just seemed everywhere, and as a Christian, even I felt it kind of awkward to talk about 'mission.' I think things were better in CC and in Engineering where there was a greater sense of professionalism and generosity to community members, so maybe talking about Christian witness and mission made more sense there.

This is not to say there weren't real Christians or dedicated teachers committed to an educational, student-focused mission there... As I noted in an earlier post, my (Lutheran) department chair resigned his job in trying to get mine restored -- which is THE most stunning act of kenotic care for another that I've been on the receiving end of! And most the faculty I worked with on a day-to-day basis, whether religious or not, were killing themselves and burning the midnight oil trying to give students the quality education they deserved, in genuine hope that those students would grow up more thoughtful and more capable as they headed off into employed adult life.

But unfortunately, that was just not how the uni-level administration operated, and the institution overall seemed much more secular/corporate.... mostly interested in extracting more classes out of faculty being paid very little and extracting more cash out of students taking on high debt, and focused on real estate development as its main thing. Obviously the teaching faculty see education as the point of the school, but most the people in charge are working on other endeavors, so who knows if they even know what the uni mission statement is? I know in faculty hiring, people have to write up a statement and interview on commitment to the mission. But I think most the board members and top-level administrators are brought in because of their qualifications in legal counsel or real estate investing or fundraising, so they may not have to read or adhere to the mission/vision material as much if it is not part of their hiring or review process. Not sure.

Thus I think many of the faculty in the trenches, both Lutheran and of other denominations, did get pretty discouraged or dubious about the educational mission. This is probably in the background of why some are so mad about Padilla buying these new sections of land while selling the art & cutting academic programs

Yes, that's true... the structures/incentives for formally expecting and compensating recruitment would probably need to differ slightly for different ranks and types of programs.

For instance, let's say currently the typical humanities department chair is a full prof making $60-68K with some bump for chairing that gives them a bit extra (not sure how much more). They are often under a lot of time-pressure since they may still be teaching 2 courses a semester if they have a partial load -- but are also managing the other faculty's reviews, dealing with curriculum issues or updates, dealing with students of concern, doing the existing recruitment work, having chairs' meetings with the dean, uni service, etc. For them, time is definitely the biggest crunch, so probably the most realistic way to buy them time to do the Admissions recruiting is to give them additional course releases, like only teach 1 class per semester while the university hires other faculty to cover the difference if necessary.

For the regular lower rank faculty members making perhaps $50-55K, they are probably teaching 3 or 4 courses per semester but its a toss-up whether course release or stipend would be more helpful. For faculty teaching big gen ed courses with heavy writing/essay components and fairly high caps (like 30 students), most of them would probably also prefer the course release of the time to do the recruiting. But if they are small courses (like music classes that are fundamentally tutorial-oriented or small-group or something), maybe then maybe cash would matter more, and it could make more sense to give them a stipend or something to do additional Admissions work, so they can afford to give up their weekend income gigs and focus more on recruitment.

Another creative option would be to more formally set up a trade-off between Admissions and the departments, like if faculty could trade hours spent in the cultivation/communication with prospective students for hours where the Admissions staff could help serve as TAs to help tackle the grading. Obviously there's a lot that the admissions staff couldn't help with if it's really content-specific. But definitely they should be capable of grading multiple-choice exams, create an assignment prompts and rubrics, or mark up essay drafts for basic grammar etc to help free up the faculty to recruit. Valpo always stresses that there are no TAs and professors do everything.... but so long as they weren't actually prepping and teaching the classes, the advertising would still be true and meanwhile these 'admissions assistants' could still make a huge difference to the faculty in taking off some of the back-end load so they can take up this additional Admissions recruiting work instead.

Right now, faculty are just doing the recruiting entirely on top of their normal workload, so even if it doesn't mean raises, I think any shift towards the sports 'coach' model in this area could be a good idea to help make it more formally factored in as an expectation of faculty duty and compensation

It differs by program, but I think most liberal arts and sciences departments do some recruiting efforts.

In my humanities dept, I know the chair regularly communicated with potential students who'd expressed an interest in our two majors. Admissions gave us faculty cards & envelopes and addresses to write and send hand-written notes encouraging them to come, etc. Whenever prospective students came to visit, they'd meet with the chair and often have at least one meeting with another faculty member, plus get toured down the hallway to meet others.

In other programs, they did even more. For instance, I know the Music faculty were expected to do a lot in terms of recruiting their own instrument-specific students from local teachers, high schools, etc. And the Language profs were definitely out in the high schools trying to cultivate relations with the those area high schools teaching their respective languages and giving presentations at those high schools.

Honestly, it seemed not to matter at all in terms of the university choosing to keep faculty or not. For instance, the classics (Greek and Roman) professor had recruited super successfully for Classics and really grown the program especially in drawing African American students to her classes (rather remarkably for a pretty stereotypically majority-culture Western field). But they cut her anyways.

I guess for universities to have faculty operate more like recruiting coaches, maybe they could free up faculty from some of their teaching responsibilities or reimburse some of the travel costs? I did some weekend promoting but it was pretty hard most semesters if I was teaching 4 courses a week x 3 classes = 12 actual sessions of face-time classes per week, plus all the prep to prepare for each class and then grade all the essays. It was also pretty expensive to recruit as a volunteer at churches and such on the weekend, since babysitters in valpo are not cheap, easily $15+/hour. I was already hiring a lot of babysitters on the weekend just to keep up with the course prep and grading & going into a financial hole trying to pay full-time daycare plus the additional evening/weekend hours to keep up with grading. So unfortunately I could only rarely hire babysitters on the weekends to do additional recruitment outreaches or events though I did really care about trying to bring in majors. And once the pandemic hit, it was all too hard.. I gave up doing anything beyond  the Admissions-arranged stuff.

I think faculty might be open to the 'coach' recruiting model if there was a sort of reconfiguration of compensation. My sense is the coaches make a lot more, they are probably doing less than 12 games or practices per week (not sure though, and not sure how much lesson prep it requires), their time recruiting is built into the job rather than add-on time, and they are reimbursed for travel expenses for traveling around to region high schools and the like. I think that might attractive to a lot of faculty if the incorporation of recruitment could lighten their teaching load, so it could definitely help everybody and be a kind of win-win.

From learning on this board, I've been kind of shocked honestly to see how much the coaches make, so I think most professors would stand to see a pretty significant raise in quality of life and pay if the uni shifted to the coach model, and it could be pretty popular.

Wh, I imagine the context for this distrust of the administration is arising from a history of concerns about promises being reneged.

For people to respond in the way you're assuming would be logical (ie, stay quiet and try to avoid administrative ire, try to be cooperative for the sake of self preservation in dicey times), it would require some sense that being a compliant citizen actually garners some kind of safety. But that's just not how anything has worked in the murkiness and randomness and confusion of the mass layoffs and salary& benefit cuts during the last few years.

For instance, when Covid hit, many staff and faculty had worked at Valpo for pretty low pay for decades in order to be eligible for the tuition remission to send their kids to Valpo, .....but then they got cut while their dependents were halfway through college or just about to age into it in Fall of '20. As you can imagine, some of the facilities and secretarial workers etc were hardly wealthy (former Bosnian/Yugo refugees, black first-gen families, or just local white Midwestern staff trying to find a way to send their kids to college). So it was a terrible blow to staff and faculty to have not only their jobs cut but also their high school/college kids become suddenly ineligible. If I recall correctly, the Staff Council or Faculty Senate had a role in trying to get the administration to honor that.

And keep in mind most of  the Artsci departments, even if they weren't discontinued in toto, nonetheless lost some or all of their lecturer or tenure track colleagues (whom they may have been involved in hiring... a terrible feeling if you had been involved in search committees to bring them in, only to watch them to get cut.) So any impulse to duck and let the torpedo hits somebody else would come with a heavy dose of survivors guilt.

So in these and other cases, I think there  arose a deep doubt about whether Valpo board/ administration would care for anybody. For comparison, at other universities (like my current one) the top administrators took temporary 20% pay cuts in order to just get the community through the early days of Covid without having to do salary cuts or layoffs on the ordinary people, in order to buy time to figure out what was going on and reassess. But in addition to the mass layoffs, Valpo immediately cut all benefits and applied the same 5% paycuts whether you were a CFO making $250k+ or somebody lowly trying to raises family on 1/5 of that... and the loss of benefits like health care contribution and retirement match and tuition eligibility all hit families hard in different ways. These benefits wouldn't matter so much except that pay at Valpo tends to be so low that people really were  relying on the other stuff.

Now we're on the other side of Covid, but all this this was during one of the scariest and most uncertain times... so it seemed to many that the university was hanging people out to dry at their and the world's most vulnerable...It looked really bad to the whole campus community that during the pandemic, Valpo seemed to be reneging on everything, pulling the rug out from people in ways that made the pandemic so much harder on people.

Of course, this recent history from before Padilla's arrival isn't his fault, but my point is the mixed and heightened employee responses on the art issue should probably be understood in this larger context of low trust, where people still probably don't imagine there's much safety anyways... like, does it really help to hide under the desks in a nuclear attack?' As in the tuition remission issue, a lot of people had put in decades of quiet, loyal work in devotion to the institution..... and overnight it became clear that meant little to nothing, (unless somebody like Staff Council or Faculty Senate pushed back).


This is all to say, I don't think this opposition to the sale is necessarily a function of everybody being naive and self righteous about art. Maybe for some it is simply that. But people know the situation is bad, and for most it's probably much more complex than mere contrarian pettiness. Padilla inherited a verrry low trust environment and his time trying to earn back trust was very short before all this art stuff blew up.

Nobody talks in these terms...nobody cares...

DejaVU, I hear your pain. When I first got my own budget layoff notification, it was very painful to me that it seemed all the alumni cared about was the mascot debate. I wasn't a huge fan of the crusader mascot myself, but it seemed utterly weird to see all the energy around that, while the careers of so many of my peers were being thrown into upheaval or just destruction, and we were dealing with the sadness of students' whose programs or course offerings were cut so severely they had to face the prospect of transferring.

My hero will always be my department chair, who resigned his own tenured position (with no ERIP on the table, in those early days of the pandemic) in opposition to the hastiness of the cuts and in order to try to get the administration to do a quid-pro-quo to save my position at Valpo if it stabilized, or at least buy me more time to find a lifeboat. Truly self-sacrificial on his part.

I deeply hope there's a way to save the art and the whole university.

Folks needs to be a return out of their investments, especially with skyrocketing costs.

This board has beat this horse really dead. The same camps are just going to keep disagreeing on the extent to which university leadership is supposed to take parents' ROI market investment logic as a curricular guide or not, and whether that is a recipe for institutional survival or suicide.

I saw this article that St. Johns / St. Benedicts in Minnesota are phasing out 8 majors / minors. ...

Here is another example of an academically-focused university with a modest endowment (in this case $80M) cutting back on traditional liberal arts majors and minors due to declining enrollment.

https://kstp.com/kstp-news/local-news/saint-johns-and-saint-benedicts-phasing-out-8-majors-9-minors/

Gahh, another one. It's sad it seems often a matter of pre-existing wealth. It's like there's this line getting drawn across American higher ed, where the rich institutions above it are fine but everybody <$300 million endowment is selling a kidney or two. Maybe we really are returning to some Victorian era future where it is just the rich, or those who get to be beneficiaries of rich institutions, who have the chance to study the liberal arts.

They tried to lease out old buildings and they're trying to sell land. I'd imagine if they could just sell land for 10 million they would do it, the fact that they haven't might indicate it's not an option at this point.

very curious about this too

There you go, USC! Exactly! Rice is a top15 national research institution, a comprehensive university with really top notch STEM and humanities programs on both sides, that is known for offering some fantastic full-tuition merit scholarships to keep the applicant pool strong and keep the incoming students' declared majors diverse, and able to do that because of their $6 billion dollar endowment. I guarantee you they are not cutting humanities programs or selling art; and are actually especially known for really great departments in English and History, where faculty are probably on a 1-2 teaching load and able to give really personalized attention to students... I'm happy for your daughter, since she's going to a great place, and I'm sure she'll be a very happy Engineering student while also getting to benefit from the whole, rich well-rounded experience that Rice provides. Indeed, that's what parents actually want for their kids when they send them off to a four-year private school.

And so I think we just have to recognize that even the 'practical' option some voices want to pursue for Valpo (a slimmed down, tech/STEM/prof-focused institution, with a $40K+ private tuition bill) is actually not that viable of a way forward for enrollment, when there are other schools that will offer it all...

But on my last question, is it even worth going to a private school to just to major in Engineering? I still feel like if we really carry your utilitarian logic on market practicalities and debt to its full conclusion, then honestly neither the theatre nor the engineering major should opt for Valpo since they'll be better off at IvyTech, Purdue, IUPUI.

I guess I'm curious.... If Valpo was basically the same as it is on the Engineering side but with even fewer liberal arts offerings, would have that somehow made you/her more inclined to send her?

My sense is either people care about a liberal arts core comprehensive university or they don't, and those who don't are going to be very practical in just looking at benefits of location, cost and debt where plenty other schools will come out ahead of Valpo.

Regarding the media and the discussion, what I ask is a fair unbiased report which is obviously not happening. I'm hearing theatre and liberal arts majors being blowhards, who probably also have no clue or care what a decent dormitory should look like. Let's get the whole story with a broad representation of faculty and students...

Also, and this really pissed me off. What got me upset at the start of this fiasco was a creative writing major going off the deep end referring that Valpo was becoming a technical school. An engineering education with some liberal classes  can be pretty powerful, but overall I'm proud of what the college of engineering is all about. They have an identity (an obvious overall gap at Valpo),  they know what they are about, they provide a challenging, comprehensive curriculum and prepare students and graduates for the real world. If we're a technical school and the Valpo College of Engineering represents that, then I'm pretty proud of that.

USC, I admit, this latest article was a little more hyped up in tone than I personally think is helpful. But keep in mind, it's not as though the arts/humanities/professional school dilemmas are somehow otherwise rhetorically neutral!

On the contrary, if we want to talk about markets, there is a lot of market manipulation from Valpo administrators and especially parents in the typical Valpo parent pool who very heavily push for the professional training as the good or successful way to go, while denigrating the humanities and arts as not worth the high tuition. (Or USC, would have you been totally neutral if your daughter had opted not for engineering but become one of those theatre majors you detest so much?  ) I chatted with plenty of Engineering and Business students who would have liked to major in the humanities but would have lost their parents' financial support if they did that; so the choice was already forced and foregone. These cultural pressures are what they are, and surely the liberal arts do need to step up the game on recruiting and big time to convince parents and students otherwise! But the irony is that these same pro-professional voices then want to turn around and blame the humanities and arts programs for their struggles in recruiting, and the institution then uses the metrics on majors  as the rationale for cutting the humanities and arts course offerings and instructors. So the deck is pretty stacked these days when it comes to way the institution and parents and the broader culture looks down on the liberal arts, and the narrative about the failing liberal arts just becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Can you understand why faculty and students who do care about the liberal arts might look to institutional leadership to do something more than just reactively reproduce or double down on market slant? Throughout these news articles, there have been mentions of additional cuts to the arts, so that is clearly in the background of the activist students' concern about all this. Granted, I am a little baffled that these paintings have become THE flashpoint for the deeper issue and this article is definitely slanted in the anti-sale direction. But it's clear people are upset about what is happening to the overall profile of the university, and maybe that's legitimate. The administration does not seem interested or capable to maintain a truly comprehensive university, and why wouldn't the departments who stand to lose put up a fight, when all they've seen these last few years is devastating cuts in which (aside from the program discontinuances) the liberal arts departments had zero knowledge of what was happening to their staffing and course offerings until the cuts were already done? From a PR standpoint, it is really stunning that Padilla seems not to have understood what a powder-keg he was sitting on.

Finally, this concern for the profile of the university is not all partisan defensiveness or childish artsy-fartsy ideals as some of you are characterizing, but also a legitimate and practical concern that Valpo probably *cannot survive* as a STEM/tech school in the way that an MIT with other benefits (like location!) can do. As much as we all might love Valpo, NWI is pretty grim and just does not have a lot going for it in the big scheme of things. So -- as the article notes rightly -- Valpo with its $40+K tuition has a very fine line to tread in terms pitching itself to students who will stay local rather than go to Boston and also differentiate itself as private from the cheaper public options in the Region. What we never seem to hear, from those voices who are pushing so hard to just lean into the professional schools and make/let the liberal arts die, is an answer to the question of 'how is Valpo going to recruit students to a $40+K private technical school education in rustbelt Indiana when they can no longer pitch the allure of the rest of it?' Somebody please explain why students wouldn't just go to Purdue or IUPUI for engineering?

Note: on the art sale itself, I am kind of agnostic and recognize the university is in a time-sensitive position on a lot of fronts and having to make tough calls. But clearly, the art has become the controversy it is because of these wider issues of comprehensive profile viability, which are more important.

IMO, the really interesting and mostly untapped demographic is actually the charismatics/pentecostals, who are growing like gangbusters all over the world including in the US and don't have any high school or university systems of their own. They tend to be highly diverse (white, asian, Black, latino/a, everythingyou can imagine) yet not particularly interested in identity politics. Since most are from lower-economic minority communities, these immigrant Christian communities have historically attended public & community college options, just assuming that private education is out of their reach. I think it will be interesting to see if either the mainline Protestant or the flagship Catholic universities can become the 'go to' place for this growign populations of often very religious students. At WashU, I had a Brazilian-American Assemblies of God friend on full-tuition merit scholarship actually left and gave up her scholarship just because she felt out of place at such a secular private research university and opted to go back home to study somewhere nearer her family and Assemblies of God pentecostal home church in Texas. And you sometimes meet Filipino 'El Shaddai' type charismatic Catholic students who want a religious university so don't fit into the big state schools or private R1s.... but also don't fit into either the really traditionalist 'classical Western' Catholic universities nor into the more liberal/secularizing Catholic universities. So there are religious students out there, who do want higher ed but struggle to find where they fit.

In all fairness to Valpo, I think it is harder for Valpo to figure out this Christian-yet-wider identity when Lutheranism is a pretty narrow demographic. In a way, the Catholic universities are starting from an easier place, being more able to pitch themselves to some of the growing or religiously fervent immigrant communities like Latin American/ Latino/a Catholics and African international and African American Catholics. We still have pretty strong support to from the Filipino Catholic and Vietnamese Catholic worlds. BUt the Lutheran colleges do not have many significant student demographic pools to tap into beyond the mostly declining white American and white European Lutheran populations. This is not to diss the Lutheran Church as such, since honestly the white American Catholic birthrate and observant population is dropping just as fast as the white mainline protestants, so the small Catholic colleges that used to rely on those populations are hurting too! It is just a reality of whether the church-affiliated institutions have some *other* demographic pocket or immigration dynamic that can help offset the decline in the historically white-serving US churches and universities, or not, and whether they can then navigate the identity issues of Catholic-yet-global, religious-yet-relevant to the world. So yes, maybe are ways in which the Catholic unis may be navigating this better or more easily through a stronger sense of distinctive identity or thanks to demographic relief or support from the global and immigrant Church.

But there are also ways in which the story is much the same, that schools with small endowments and waffling academic or sports notoriety are struggling and at risk of going under as enrollment drops. Whereas the rich Catholic schools with large endowments and notable academic & sports reputations are seeing ever more applicants. It is a sobering kind of snowball effect with the wealthy universities getting wealthier and the struggling universities getting closer to the edge. There have already been some small Catholic uni closures, and there could be more.

Valpo's 2-week spring break allows for some pretty fantastic spring-break study seminars -- for instance, a group currently right now visiting Israel/Palestine:
https://www.valpo.edu/chapel/news/student-trip-to-holy-land/

The Hope Pay-It-Forward model is an interesting approach with a limited cohort of exceptional students. The wider they expand it, the percentage of those who give back a commensurate amount later is likely to decline. It's just human nature. That said, it's a worthy experiment.

True, people might get jaded over time and think their contributions don't matter so much for the future students... It is something that would have to be accounted for.

But I still think the premise of giving to people rather than stuff is a good one. I've never really understood why organizations so often fundraise for buildings... are donors really that insistent on having a shiny wall with their name on it? I actually think most of my Millienial generation would much prefer to give experiences to people, to little brothers and sisters down the line -- assuming their own student experience was indeed so positive as to engender a sense of gratitude and desire for the next generation to have the same too!

Moreover, I think Scroggins is right that when we have received something as as gift, we actually do experience it in a fundamentally different way. I had my undergrad paid for by a uni scholarship, so I then basically walked around for four years marveling that they were so generous to let me be there; total grace. It never crossed my mind to complain whether the food was good enough or the professors turning their grading around fast enough, since it was quite literally a gift to be there at all.... one that I do intend to give forward. I think college students are unhappier today than in past decades when the whole experience was cheaper in the 70s and 80s... precisely *because* today they are paying so much and see themselves as customers paying through the nose. Therefore, they start and go thru their four years in constant awareness and anxiety about the high cost, feeling that such a price ought to have bought not only pristine ensuite glass showers, but also As in all their classes or at least a good GPA degree! So they are in a fundamentally conflictual relationship with the institution from the outset, worried about getting money's worth from institutions they suspect (maybe rightly) are trying to extract as much cash out of them as possible. And it leads to all these other issues, like grade inflation, and the flight of students to high ROI fields in order to retroactively justify the initial up-front cost of college. All these aspects of the defensive customer posture are totally understandable given that students and parents really are paying or taking on so much debt, but the whole dynamic is really really toxic to an actual environment of curiosity, correction, learning, experimentation, etc

So IF it works, a pay-it-forward gift model would do more than address just the loan servicing mess, and it could also perhaps help shift the fundamental relations of institutional financing and teaching & learning back into shared alignment in investment in students. That would make for qualitatively better and happier campus cultures, which is a good in itself and also useful for future alumni donations...

The student debt crisis has its genesis during the early 1980s, when student loans started to supplant grants and scholarships as a main source of financial aid, and many, many universities started increasing their tuition by fairly big chunks every year. In addition, interest rates on those loans shot up dramatically, especially when student loans became a lucrative business. I and many others saw this occurring before our very eyes. ... Of course this is going to affect alumni/ae donation rates. Some of us have been saying this about private universities generally for decades as we've witnessed student debt service explode.

David81, I think one of the most innovative models for addressing the student debt crisis is Hope College's 'Hope Forward' give-it-forward model.

Their president is one of those rare birds who is both 1000% focused on making the economics work and 1000% committed to the liberal arts, so his whole presidency is about trying to re-think the economic model of higher ed to cut out the loan middleman and make college accessible again. Basically, the idea is that the college will raise sufficient endowment to give some and then eventually all students their liberal arts educations as a gift, and the students commit to later  give forward to the next generation.
https://hope.edu/hope-forward/
https://hope.edu/offices/president/
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/07/15/hope-college-wants-trade-tuition-donations

I know this 'gift' donation model may sound nutty and unrealistic, but my sense was that Hope was in a much better position than Valpo... I had a chance to visit in Fall 2020, and it seemed morale was super high, their faculty were on a more manageable teaching load, students seemed really committed to a real integration of intellectual inquiry and professional prep, their job offers for humanities asst profs was paying about $10k/yr more than Valpo, the freshman-to-sophomore retention rate had risen over the last two decades to quite high, about 90%, and the yield rate was pretty good around 25% of admitted students.  Moreover, this was the Fall after Covid hit, so it was impressive that not only were they not laying off anybody or cutting salaries... but they were hiring at a time when few schools anywhere in the country were running searches due to Covid.

Will this gift model work? Maybe it'll crash and burn, but I hope not! We really need institutions to strike out bravely like this, to try to find a different way, unless the plan in US Higher Ed is just to put the nation's young adults into indentured debt servitude for life. Not sustainable.

Berea College (founded by abolitionists before the Civil War) is another no-tuition promise school, on a worker-scholar model where the students have jobs around campus and pay no tuition. Berea is always top 5 for 'best value' and often somewhere in the Top 15 for 'national liberal arts colleges', which is pretty incredible given the no-tuition promise. Granted, they already have a huge endowment of $1.5 Billion which helps... but still, very cool what they've been able to do.
https://www.berea.edu/about/history/

So there are institutions out there that are bucking the trend and trying to battle the rising tuition & loan problem.

Whoah. This NY times article is pretty shocking; national coverage? I admit I did not know the Georgia O'Keeffe was this big a deal.

As David81 says, the article and comments don't seem too one-sided. Now NT Times has posted it twice on FB from what I can tell, now up to 410 comments on the first and 73 on the second... but overall, no consensus.