Has the Growth of Science Crowded Out Other Things at Universities?

Abstract

[Excerpt] While many faculty members associated with the arts and humanities and the social sciences bemoan what appears to be an ever increasing share of campus resources going to science, there is little hard evidence about whether the growth in science has come at the expense of other fields at universities. In this brief paper, we present an initial approach to this question, using data for a recent 20-year period from the colleges of arts and sciences at a set of selective private research universities. Specifically, we examine whether the shares of faculty positions and of the faculty salary bill going to science have increased at each of these institutions over the period? Our major finding, which we confess that we did not expect to observe, is that, on balance, the sciences’ shares of faculty numbers and faculty salaries in these institutions’ colleges of arts and sciences have not systematically increased over the period.