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E-PrinceCorrection appended
Academic departments will cut back on guest speakers, class trips and catered parties in light of President Tilghman’s announcement on Monday that their budgets will be cut, as administrators work to reduce the 2010 fiscal year budget ...
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A truly significant savings for the University, in these difficult times, could be achieved if the English Department reclaimed its historic (and honorable) mission of teaching undergraduates to write. Why not return the Writing Program to its one-time home in English? Instead of hiring adjuncts and outsiders, Princetonians could be taught to write clear, intelligent prose by full-time literature faculty, tenured and tenure-track. A privilege for our undergrads; a sensible, cost-efficient task for a department whose enrollments are, sadly, declining--
It's great that some of these departments have to trim their budgets. Do we really need flat screen tv's in the Frist gallery to display the menu? Do we really need WWS taskforces going out for fancy dinners in DC?
ECO undergrads will not be affected by department budget cuts as the ECO department spends about $0.00 on each dept. undergrad as it is.
I don't know if English can do a better job, but the current Writing Program is a failure. Most of the faculty are visitors with little teaching experience, and their idea of a seminar topic is to repeat their research. My freshman seminar professor was a much better at teaching writing.
This recession has had one beneficial effect - forcing people to think about which academic departments produce things of value, and which are largely composed of bullshitting and fluff.
@11 -- flat screen televisions are cheap compared to personnel. And our department just lost a fair amount of support staff. It's not a good thing.
The University's done a great job. I feel like the tendency is to post complaints on the Prince because people don't want to put in the effort to take their concerns somewhere influential....but my two cents is that the U has made it a top priority to prevent any personnel from being laid off or any of the d-hall workers etc from suffering salary cuts. This is not the case everywhere.
@ Plain: what's wrong with 'outside' faculty? You may feel jilted by not getting Pton faculty but the 'outsider' professors I've had have been chosen well for their invaluable experience and research. One of the best 'outsider' professors I 've had was from NYU - an extremely intelligent and experienced lecturer who gave my career goals direction and inspiration. Undergrad teaching in general is pretty consistently awesome here. This is coming from someone who has taken classes at quite a few different universities.
Then again I'm not an English major, so....
at least Princeton's core Latino Studies will see an increase in support!
Not much money is being put into the new Latino Studies program, since it is composed largely of classes that already existed and faculty from other departments.
That, and Princeton should have implemented it long ago. We were extremely behind the other elite universities, many of which offer a major in the field.