Many faculty members consider “academic prioritization” a dangerous buzzword used by college administrators to signal the imminent demise of one academic department or program and the forthcoming expansion of another.
This term is increasingly being employed, in theory and in practice, by administrators at liberal arts colleges and universities across the country to explain or justify decisions to cut certain programs or even entire departments. Such decisions are essentially a death sentence for the liberal arts. It is a simultaneous devaluation of the many underrepresented, first-generation and social justice-oriented faculty (who were hired as a result of various diversity initiatives) who teach in disciplines such as foreign languages, women's and gender studies, area studies, critical race and global studies, etc.
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