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Boston University stops admitting PhD students in social sciences, humanities

By adamg on Tue, 11/19/2024 - 12:38pm

Inside Higher Education reports the university is blaming the recent strike by existing graduate students for making its programs too expensive to run.

[T]he programs not accepting Ph.D. students for next academic year are American and New England studies, anthropology, classical studies, English, history, history of art and architecture, linguistics, philosophy, political science, religion, Romance studies, and sociology.

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Comments

By SwirlyGrrl on Tue, 11/19/2024 - 1:09pm.

Need to keep up the fascism. How dare those free thinkers think freely!

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By BostonDog on Tue, 11/19/2024 - 1:39pm.

The cost for the program went up and they decided to spend money on other things.

I'm guessing they still offer bachelor and masters degrees in the humanities so it's not as if they are cutting the departments.

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By Friartuck on Tue, 11/19/2024 - 5:11pm.

Be satisfied with Gen Ed electives that you're only taking because you couldn't get into the ones you really wanted and fuck the development and furtherance of scholarship. I see...

To be clear, I'm not referencing scholarship of the financial type if there were questions about that....

By Lane Straddler on Tue, 11/19/2024 - 1:18pm.

Last year they "made" $84 million.
The year before that, they made $152 million.

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By anon on Tue, 11/19/2024 - 1:46pm.

The alumni from those programs do not contribute as much as engineering and business, similar to the nursing school that closed.

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By MrZip on Tue, 11/19/2024 - 3:19pm.

"Ha ha! Your academic fields are dying!")

/s

By Zhu Hengpeng on Tue, 11/19/2024 - 2:21pm.

Better late than never.

By Friartuck on Tue, 11/19/2024 - 4:07pm.

Seems Brandeis isn't far behind.

By BostonDog on Tue, 11/19/2024 - 4:27pm.

Article on Higher Education under the Trump administration:

Trumpian critics of academia are determined to rescue universities from the Marxists and social justice warriors they say unduly influence them. They aim to use federal funding, accreditation boards, taxation, congressional investigations, and, potentially, changes to the Higher Education Act to achieve their goals.

I don't blame any university who looks ahead and thinks they need to trim back and prepare for much higher costs, few grants, and plenty of legal action. Apart from news, there's no other industry the GOP wants to hurt as much as higher ed.

By mg on Tue, 11/19/2024 - 5:01pm.

While heartbreaking, the situation at Brandeis is different. It's not retaliation against grad students unionizing. The school is hurting financially (the president resigned recently due to this). Brandeis is a relatively young school (first class was 1954, iirc) and hasn't built up the kind of endowment of older or larger schools.

By Irma la Douce on Tue, 11/19/2024 - 5:22pm.

All of the suspended programs are not supported by any external funding. One of the internal memos suggests that even those programs that do have external support may have to reduce PhD admissions going forward.

By Rob on Tue, 11/19/2024 - 5:26pm.

"Pause" on new admissions to doctoral programs in philosophy and religion??!! At BU??!!

What would MLK, Jr. say?