196 Teaching Minds

196 Teaching Minds faculty to handle 60 courses with fewer than 20 students in each class, you have a problem. Multiple sections of courses require multiple fac- ulty and maybe even, God forbid, heavier teaching loads. Simply put, if there are too many majors, all the specialty courses will overflow and you might need twice the faculty to handle them. The university is not going to let you hire twice the faculty in order to handle them. Why not? Tenure is why not. Once you hire tenured faculty, they stay for- ever. Tenure is another one of those ideas that sounds a lot better than it is. One of its downsides, and it has many, is that you can’t easily hire new faculty when you need to. There may be a jump in econom- ics majors this year, but who is to say that this will be true next year? Universities move slowly. So, the current economics faculty would have to teach more cours- es. They simply do not want to do that. They want to go back to their offices and do research and write books and consult with the govern- ment or big business, should they call. Voila! Calculus. That will keep the little buggers out. If that doesn’t work, advanced calculus. Who cares if those courses have little relevance for econom- ics? They can always say it might come up some day. (It might.) Or they can say it teaches rigorous thinking. The real reason is to keep the numbers down. This is also why biology and chemistry are required courses for pre-med students, why statistics is required for psychology majors, and so on. Most departments will not admit to this, but that’s why those things are there. You never see this kind of thing in departments that have too few students. Too few students is the kind of problem that gets your de- partment shut down. So, linguistics departments, which were started when linguistics was in fashion in the 1960s, are always under threat of shut down. They won’t be requiring calculus. But they would if their situation changed. Instead, what they are doing is trying to ex- plain why linguistics is calculus, Huh? When I arrived at Northwestern, undergraduates were required to take a math course in order to graduate. There could have been any number of reasons for this requirement—none of them having to do with interests or needs of the undergraduates. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023942