An interesting article in the September 20th issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education (sorry, the article's behind their security wall, which is a shame because it's such an important topic) investigates the recent rounds of budget cuts in libraries, presses, resident culture programs, and other parts of the infrastructure of intellectual life in American universities. In the name of balancing their precious Excel spreadsheets, bean counters in higher education are going after the easy targets - that is to say, the so-called "soft" disciplines of the humanities, social sciences, even physics and mathematics - and slashing funds for everything but the practical (read as: profitable) arts. Even then, no one is guaranteed a stay from the finance dean's executioner. Here at Harvard Medical School, for example, the decision was made to start charging library users for every book or photocopy they request from other non-Harvard libraries via Interlibrary Borrowing (that's me). Whereas before all such requests were free, and the cost written off as the price of maintaining our preeminence as a top research institution, the Powers That Be now think that such a subsidy was a waste of Harvard's money, and have instituted a fairly punitive system of charges in its place designed to drive away all but the desperate and deep-pocketed. Aside from seriously jeopardizing my livelihood, this is horrible idea in principle, and I think a fairly ominous sign of times to come. What the bean counters don't understand about the life of the mind is that discovery is hardly ever a straightforward thing, and that many of our best innovations were happened upon by pure chance. Reducing a library's acquisitions budget or charging users for intellectual curiosity may save universities a few bucks now, but it sharply reduces the possibility for all those happenstance connections - say, a chance discovery in the stacks of a book that transforms an entire field of inquiry, or an article that wasn't particularly useful for the research project at hand but turns out to be invaluable for a completely unrelated one - that have happened time and time again and have lead to countless breakthroughs in science and the humanities. By emulating the "corporate model" for its operations (as if big corporations should be emulated by anyone these days, what with Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, et al!), American higher education is unwittingly sowing its once-fertile fields of humanistic inquiry with salt, and ultimately we will all be the poorer for it.