Boston University stops admitting PhD students in social sciences, humanities

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.

it was a very mediocre school until he got there. At my high school in the 1960s BU diplomas were compared to toilet paper by reputation. What you see now on Commonwealth Ave is his legacy. An amazing expansion and improvement in reputation.

Curbing some of the late 60s/early 70s madness was part of improving BU. Hence the harridans who were a part of that madness call him a "fascist."

and some of those departments (New England Studies?) probably didn't exist before his time.

Silber and Reich were the best governors Massachusetts never had. His planned emphasis on city elementary and secondary education could have been revolutionary for Boston, Lawrence, Worcester etc kids.

The shitlibs ("I'm socially liberal but fiscally conservative") and Howie Carr did him in. Weld, an affable boozer, had a few relaxing years.

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

/s

Very nice. The Khmer Rouge were big on that, should we follow their lead?

You sure seem to be completely ignorant of the last century of Chinese history.

Can you get more Maoist than this?

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.

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.

Theology and religion are not the same. And it looks like the doctorate programs at BU in theology aren't being paused.

To speculate, if MLK, Jr was a doctoral student in 2024, he'd probably opt for a smaller and less prestigious school anyway. In the early 1950s, BU was more of a seminary then it is today.

This is how civilizations collapse.

But it is the obsolescence of highly educated technicians who are replaced by machines. Most leaders of businesses favor replacing humans with machines when possible. That is the primary motivation behind AI. Why hire an architect if a computer can produce the plans? Why hire writers if AI needs only researchers who don't need to know who to write well? Why have authors if AI can produce books that are good enough to sell? That sounds like a crazy idea unless one considers the literary of that venerable genre romance novels.

Without the humanities as a basis of thought, contemplation and imagination many highly educated folks who believed that their technical expertise will protect them will wonder how to sell themselves when their only foundation is one that effectively leaves them as human machines.

Even as an undergrad I kept hearing stories of folks with higher ed degrees having to drive taxis and accept jobs where they wasted their abilities and talents. Whether this was the result of too many PhDs or the result of not enough universities and other institutions not supporting not maintaining sufficient demand is another question.

There is a tragic irony. The one industry where the need for higher ed graduates has increased non-stop for 50 years is now creaking along, bordering on collapse. They are primary care doctors. Over 50 years ago anyone paying attention knew that we would need more general practice doctors than the medical education system would provide. Yet no one acknowledged that the pipeline for doctors was gamed to fail.

Now university managers are choosing to reduce humanities but the managers of the medical schools continue to maintain the doctoring pipeline at the rate of a drip. Maybe the humanities side of academia needs iron to end its anemia while the medical school side of education needs penicillin to stop its drip and open its pipes to a healthy flow of new doctors.

Oh look - a banned commenter repeating their frequent pre-banned whinging.