And we, too, faced critical strategic decisions because our income was no longer enough to meet our expenses. They certainly are at Brandeis University, where I work.

I'm sure the budgetary problems you have to deal with are serious. Then there's the question of whether the state legislature's inaction gave you no other choice. I'm sure your Russian faculty would love to talk with you about it - if only you had a Russian department, which now, of course, you don't. You would find a lot in it to think about. That single chapter in a much longer book is one of the great works of modern literature. In giving humans the freedom to choose, Christ has doomed humanity to a life of suffering. The Inquisitor says that the vast majority of humanity cannot handle freedom. The Inquisitor says that Jesus rejected the three temptations of Satan in the desert in favor of freedom, but he believes that Jesus has misjudged human nature.

The main portion of the text is the Inquisitor explaining why. The Grand Inquisitor visits Him in his cell to tell Him that the Church no longer needs Him. He performs several miracles but is arrested by Inquisition leaders and sentenced to be burned at the stake. In the parable, Christ comes back to earth in Seville at the time of the Spanish Inquisition. That idea is thrashed out better than anywhere else, I think, in Dostoyevsky's parable of the Grand Inquisitor, which is told in Chapter Five of his great novel, The Brothers Karamazov. In fact, without wisdom, it's hard for most people. Young people haven't, for the most part, yet attained the wisdom to have that kind of freedom without making poor decisions. You could fix the enrollment problem tomorrow by instituting a mandatory core curriculum that included a wide range of courses. You see, the reason that humanities classes have low enrollment is not because students these days are clamoring for more relevant courses it's because administrators like you, and spineless faculty, have stopped setting distribution requirements and started allowing students to choose their own academic programs - something I feel is a complete abrogation of the duty of university faculty as teachers and mentors. There wouldn't have been many in my day, either, if universities hadn't required students to take a distribution of courses in many different parts of the academy - humanities, social sciences, the fine arts, the physical and natural sciences - and to attain minimal proficiency in at least one foreign language. I'm sure that relatively few students take classes in these subjects nowadays, just as you say. Let's examine these and your other reasons in detail, because I think if one does, it becomes clear that the facts on which they are based have some important aspects that are not covered in your statement. Finally, you asserted that the humanities were a drain on the institution financially, as opposed to the sciences, which bring in money in the form of grants and contracts. Of course, your decision was also, perhaps chiefly, a cost-cutting measure - in fact, you stated that this decision might not have been necessary had the state legislature passed a bill that would have allowed your university to set its own tuition rates. You gave several reasons for your decision, including that there are comparatively fewer students enrolled in these degree programs. On October 1st, you announced that the departments of French, Italian, Classics, Russian and Theater Arts were being eliminated. I hope, when I'm through, you will at least understand why. But I cannot let something like this go by without weighing in. If you want to argue that I can't really understand all aspects of the situation, never having been associated with SUNY Albany, I wouldn't disagree. Probably the last thing you need at this moment is someone else from outside your university complaining about your decision. Philip, the president of the State University of New York at Albany, prompted by the proposed elimination there of French, Italian, Russian and classics, was originally a blog post at Genome Biology and is reprinted here with permission of the author.

Ed visits by state