In last month's State of the University address, President David Skorton announced a national “campaign” for the humanities, a welcome and much-needed call to action in support of humanistic academic study. The intentions of this campaign are laudable, but it will take more than words to reverse a long national trend of treating study of the humanities as a lesser priority.

Cornell President David Skorton announced Friday his plan to launch a national campaign “in the next couple of months” to bolster investment in the arts and humanities, which have been underfunded over the past 16 years, he said.

Did you know that February is Latin for failboat? No seriously, true story.

As a child I was never really the sharpest tool in the shed. My older sister informed me that the human mouth leads to two separate tubes — the trachea and the esophagus. I figured air and drinks went down one tube, because they’re both fluids, and solid food went down the other. When high school biology came around, I was incredibly excited to find out what happens in the case of partially-melted ice cream and yogurt.

In an old game show named Friend or Foe? during the pivotal moment of the round, two contestants, after working together to accumulate money, decided if they wanted to be a friend or a foe. Two friends would split the money, a foe would steal all the money from a friend and two foes would both go home with nothing.

Real life of course is different than a game show, and luckily, in regards to budget cuts, heads of each department are not labeling each other foes. Likewise, Skorton said last semester that the best strategy for budget cuts is not to split the loss equally among everyone. Despite these differences, though, one principle remains true in both: if everyone gets their ideal outcome, no one wins.

“The college must remain competitive.” That is the reason that Arts and Sciences Dean Lepage gave in response to the mass outcry concerning the disproportionate budget cuts that the Department of Theatre, Film and Dance is currently facing. According to Lepage, “the Arts and Sciences deans decided to invest strategically across our departments,” reasoning that the College would “emerge stronger than we would if we uniformly reduced everything we do”. In other words, the Arts and Sciences deans ranked the departments in order of “importance,” protecting those departments that ranked closest to the top while sacrificing the “expendable” departments that came in at the bottom of the list. This is a horrible strategy! What makes the College of Arts and Sciences great is the vast amount of different studies that a student can choose from in equally strong departments. If you severely cripple the Department of Theatre, Film and Dance to protect another, you are losing out on the many applicants who would apply to Cornell for the arts. Without a strong performing arts program, what separates Cornell from John Hopkins, Northwestern, Yale, Harvard and every other school that boasts outstanding science and research programs?

To the Editor:

Re: “Theatre, Film and Dance Department Hit With Cuts” News, Feb. 2.

It has come to our attention that Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences has mandated a massive budget cut to the Theatre, Film, and Dance Department. The $1-2 million proposed cut would cripple the Department and the Schwartz Center, eliminating numerous faculty and staff members who are essential to the department’s work and drastically reducing the quality and quantity of Schwartz Center productions.

It is reasonable to assume that the budget cuts which have recently bludgeoned the performing arts at Cornell will only expand, as departments, majors and disciplines deemed “peripheral unit to the University’s core” (as a Feb. 3 editorial put it) lose funding. The departments that will be saved, because they are certainly not peripheral in any way, like the hard sciences, will never have to question whether or not they are serving the University’s “mission.”

Because The Cornell Daily Sun is an influential news source on campus and beyond, I was troubled to see several factual errors in last week’s reporting on the Theatre, Film and Dance budget reduction. Those errors, as well as conjecture in the two articles, seem to have informed much of the reasoning in last Thursday’s editorial on Reimagining Cornell. I feel compelled to write about Cornell’s critical challenge to honor excellence and breadth in our offerings, but within the financial constraints recently imposed on universities across the country. It is essential to start by clarifying the request to Theatre, Film and Dance.