Editor’s Note: This article presents two essays on Boston University’s decision to “pause” admissions to its doctoral programs. The first is by Cassandra Nelson, a visiting fellow in literature at the Lumen Center in Madison, Wisconsin, and an associate fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. Her book A Theology of Fiction is forthcoming from Wiseblood Books in January 2025. The second is by Peter Wood, President of the National Association of Scholars and a former professor in Boston University’s graduate anthropology program, where he taught for approximately fifteen years.
Strengthen What Remains: The Ripple Effects of Higher Ed’s Obsession with Metrics
Cassandra Nelson
Last week, my Tuesday began with words from John’s Revelation, as part of the daily lectionary: “Be watchful, and strengthen the things which remain, that are ready to die” (Rev 3:2). It ended with news that my undergraduate alma mater, Boston University (BU), has suspended admissions to PhD programs in twelve humanities departments for the 2025–2026 academic year.
Why anyone outside of Boston University should care about this decision might not be immediately clear. As a person who sometimes worries that I might be among the last generation of public school students for whom our meritocratic educational system actually worked—in my mind’s eye, I see myself carried along from kindergarten through a doctorate by forces of cultural, if not economic upward mobility, precisely as the enterprise around me crumbles, like Indiana Jones narrowly escaping with his hat in The Temple of Doom—I can perhaps explain.
BU’s decision marks a victory for Mammon and a defeat for any of us who choose to serve another master.
Let me start by acknowledging that the overproduction of humanities PhDs is a real problem. That was clear in 2009 when I started a doctorate in English literature at Harvard, and even more clear by 2014 when I finished it. Contemporary academe, like all monsters, eats its own young. One could make a case for shrinking or shuttering PhD programs on both moral and practical grounds. But much-needed reform, when it comes, shouldn’t come like this—hastily and without warning (prospective applicants had already begun compiling and submitting their materials), hacked out with broad and indiscriminate strokes, as the result of a short-sighted deliberative process concerned only with numbers, not people.
Some important context: BU graduate students formed a union in 2020 and organized an unprecedented six-month strike earlier this year. Only in October did the union and administrators agree to raise grad student stipends to $45,000, ending the strike. Subsequently, the university seems to have decided—despite an endowment of more than $3.1 billion—to make the College of Arts of Sciences (CAS) carve out funds for these higher stipends from its existing budget. Apparently, CAS has no way of doing this, hence pausing graduate admissions to a dozen departments.
I’ve seen this kind of math before. At my PhD graduation, one student speaker breathlessly announced that Harvard had, at that time, an endowment higher than the GDPs of half the nations in the world. Others cheered while I wondered why, in that case, I had spent the previous half-decade without vision or dental insurance.
Before that, in a period between college and graduate school, when I worked in central administration at BU, I encountered abundant technocratic wisdom packaged in colorful, folksy phrases. “Herding cats” was a fun image to describe the headache of persuading highly educated, opinionated, and often stubborn faculty members to cooperate with your plans. (For years, I had a photo of Donna Shalala on my cubicle wall with a caption about how a faculty senate is harder to work than the U.S. Senate. My gaze returned to it gratefully in moments of both triumph and defeat.) “Never waste a crisis” meant that economic downturns could be exploited for institutional gain if you played your cards right. “Every tub on its own bottom” meant that 18 years later CAS would pay for its own pesky graduate students, by golly.
Clearly, I am not an economist. Still, I can’t help but observe that somehow there always seems to be plenty of money to go around, just not for certain things, like human beings or the preservation of civilization.
In this case, BU has crunched the numbers and decided that tending to their endowment—whose growth could improve their U.S. News & World Report ranking—will provide a better return on investment than funding advanced study in the humanities. I could give you what is probably a fairly accurate account of their reasoning. I could even describe to you the exquisitely decorated conference rooms where they thought it all through and the bone china teacups that held their coffee. Years ago, while others made similar calculations, I was the one taking minutes and assembling action items.
It may be that PhD programs will soon be an option only for the children of the very wealthy, as has happened with jobs in publishing. Or maybe churches will begin to sponsor Christian graduate students in the humanities, the way they sponsor missionaries abroad.
However higher education’s rickety and unsustainable hiring model is patched up or permitted to collapse, PhD students will not be the only ones affected by decisions, like this one, to privilege abstract metrics over human realities. The past decade has provided mounting evidence that liberal democracy in particular and civilization in general are not guaranteed to thrive on autopilot or last forever. It takes a significant amount of human effort and human cooperation to keep society going.
Letting academic disciplines in the humanities wither on the vine will only advance the disintegration of institutions, trust, and other building blocks of human flourishing. In a culture that prides itself on moving fast and breaking things, universities and churches—and the burgeoning world of Christian study centers where they overlap—need to be preserved and built up with care, intention, and money. They are, after all, among the few places left poised to “strengthen the things that remain.”
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A Sign of the Times: BU’s Decision in Light of Financial and Demographic Trends
Peter Wood
Observers beyond higher education would do well to take note of Boston University’s (BU) quiet decision last week to “pause” admissions to doctoral programs in the humanities for the coming academy year—not least because the story is unlikely to end there, given current trends in undergraduate enrollments. Other administrators within higher education will be watching closely as this process unfolds. If BU ultimately uses this suspension as a first step toward shuttering programs they deem dispensable, peer institutions may well take a page from their playbook and follow suit.
I taught in the graduate anthropology program at BU for about fifteen years, leaving in 2005. I don’t have any current contacts there and I have no inside knowledge about why the BU administration took this action. But I heard about it right away from some old friends. The list of graduate programs that have had their admissions suspended includes the Anthropology Department.
Do I find it plausible that the contract with the BU Graduate Workers Union (BUGWU) was a prime consideration in the University’s decision? Yes. I think it is likely the prime factor. The contract, as I understand it, awards each graduate student a $45,000 annual stipend and includes expanded health care coverage and free coverage for dependents under six years old, free dental care, childcare subsidies, 14 weeks of paid parental leave, and subsidized subway fares. I don’t know how many graduate students BU has in total, but this must add up to an enormous bill, and it does not include the free tuition that many graduate students enjoy. In return, these students typically have to teach one course. As one of my friends put it, the package adds up to “more than the average starting salary for high school teachers who are teaching six classes, not just one.”
But there is surely more to the story. BU has numerous graduate programs that are covered by this freeze on enrollments. The University isn’t freezing enrollments in the natural sciences, engineering, African Studies, Economics, Dentistry, and many others. What this tells me is that BU administration has shuttered admissions in the programs that it sees as expensive luxuries. Most of the programs in the sciences and engineering attract a substantial percentage of their students from abroad—mainly from China and India. These students typically pay all or a substantial portion of their tuition. The University makes money in these programs—or at least loses very little. The University can afford to bear the extravagant cost of the BUGWU contract for these programs. The BU administration most likely has made a different calculation with some other programs that it might find awkward to put on ice, such as Theological Studies and Social Work, which attract substantial minority enrollments.
Another factor may be BU’s falling undergraduate enrollments, which of course are part of a national decline that has hit all but a few institutions. In 2023, BU’s enrolled freshman class was 490 students less than the year before. Typically as it becomes harder to recruit students, the institutional cost of recruitment goes up and the sweeteners to students—the “discount rate” in the from of scholarships to students—climbs steeply. I don’t know the details of Boston University’s situation, but I expect the administration there is looking at all sorts of ways to cut costs, and freezing graduate admissions in programs that can’t pay for themselves was an attractive option.
I’d also expect that the faculty in these programs are mindful that the next step could be to shut them down completely. That has happened at some universities. Sociology, in particular, has suffered several such closures. That means that the administration can count on minimal resistance from the departments that have been targeted. They know they are vulnerable to worse.
Lastly, the move sends a powerful message to the graduate student union. The union seemingly prevailed in its contract negotiation with the University, but the long-run cost is catastrophic to the next generation of graduate students in the humanities and social science—and probably not just at Boston University. Other universities will be taking note of what is possible.
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Image of Boston University sign by Wally Gobetz on Flickr
Unless the Ph.D. programs figure out how to make themselves useful in the world — in the good of “useful” — they are going to fall apart.
“The union seemingly prevailed in its contract negotiation with the University, but the
foreign student tuition rates.
Now traditionally, under labor law, a union wishing to organize a workplace has to have an election where “no union” is on the ballot but the UMass Amherst Union (GEO, Local 2322 of the UAW) so terrorized UMass that the spineless administration capitulated and agreed to recognize GEO without an election because there was no other union wishing to be recognized. Welcome to Planet UMass…
What UMass proceeded to do was eliminate about 3/4 of the assistantships (at least in the School of Education) with the end result being a few students getting dramatic stipend increases while a lot of other students were totally screwed.
It got worse — there are certain traditional benefits for being a graduate student, e.g. reduced prices for computer software, except that UMass turned around and said that only those graduate students who were in the GEO bargaining unit were eligible. And what made it worse is that UMass also said that only undergraduates were eligible for the other benefits of being a student. Hence graduate students who weren’t “employees:” were treated as if they weren’t even students — even if they were working 40 hours a week for the university…
This is why I use Open Office and require my students to submit in a format that either Open Office or the free .pdf reader can open, but I digress…
There was a popular song in 1937 about Franklin Roosevelt doing something similar on a national scale — “nice work if you can find it.” And I never cease to be amazed by the sense of entitlement of those lucky enough to have “found it” — and, social justice be damned, demanded even more while their peers were both doing without and struggling with onerous tuition costs.
And Local 2322 UAW is why I will never own another American-made car….
There is one other question here — the IRS code states that employer-provided graduate tuition is considered taxable income. In other words, once you have a BA or BS degree, any tuition assistance your employer provides is taxable income (it isn’t if you don’t)
Now these tuition waivers currently are not taxed on the grounds that they are scholarships and not an employee benefit, but now that those receiving them are unionized employees receiving them as an employment benefit — why aren’t they taxed???
The final outcome of all of this stuff likely will be the IRS taxing graduate assistantships as income, which would also put those receiving them into a much higher tax bracket. There is a big difference between paying taxes based on a $45K gross and paying taxes based on a $100K gross, and I doubt the IRS would consider tuition discounting in the latter figure.
Maybe that will be the cold shower that these spoilt brats badly need…
These are important essays, for a number of reasons, one of which involves the overall structure of US Ph.D programs. In the Humanities especially, they are unusually protracted compared to their counterparts in the UK and EU: up to eight years, versus three (about five years average duration in US science Ph.D programs, versus three as well in the UK). This alone makes it difficult to assess the underlying inherent value of such US research degrees, and distorts our ability to more accurately quantify their economic impact. There may be some basis for reconsidering the MA degree, which, depending on how it is organized and pursued, can deliver many comparable benefits. I discussed some of these structural education issues in the London Financial Times (https://www.ft.com/content/2676282a-70f1-11e9-bf5c-6eeb837566c5, and in archive, https://archive.is/WnFMv). The previous president of the University of Chicago, Robert Zimmer, subsequently underwrote a lengthy management consulting study of ways to possibly achieve better economics in graduate programs; it has not been implemented, although UChicago has two excellent MA programs, one in Humanities, the other in Social Science, that are considered “mini-Ph.D” tracks, or preparation for them, and they are organized in efficient 1-year tacks, with a thesis supported by a graduate preceptor, and faculty review, which can result in high quality results that make the Ph.D perhaps a faster, more efficient next step, or for some, unnecessary. This issue also underscores higher education residency and duration in general, where the undergraduate degree can be completed in three years, the JD in one, the MD in three (as at NYU), and the MBA in 9 months (as at Insead). Degree compression and “lean” efficiency management standards have yet to become installed in the university system including in administration practice. See also https://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/2144.
I once had a roommate from India — he told me that he’d been taught English by teachers who themselves had been taught by non-native speakers of English and hence themselves had no idea how words are actually pronounced, and the British Colonial dialect of English differs considerably from the American dialect of English.
What his department did, what a lot of departments did was have have him teach for a couple of years until he had learned the American dialect well enough to help with research. While that makes sense from the researcher’s perspective, it is horrendous from a pedagogical perspective.
I know that there is a Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) that these kids have theoretically passed, but to stand in front of a class and effectively convey knowledge for 50 or 90 minutes requires a higher level of fluency to be effective. And the only reason why we don’t hear more complaints about this is that those who do complain are called racist for complaining. But would it be racist for students to complain about a White TA from Maine or Louisiana who couldn’t be understood because of their accents?
And then there is the issue of teaching ability — to teach in high school, I had to have 30 credits in “how to teach” courses and then spend a semester Student Teaching in an actual classroom under the supervision of actual teachers as well as a Professor of Education. These TAs are going into classrooms with no teaching experience, and often no public speaking experience as well. While I’m highly critical of our current approach to training high school teachers, at least it’s better than nothing.
Undergrads are paying how many thousand dollars a year to be taught by graduate students who neither know how to convey knowledge nor the ability to be understood when they try. This is a real issue and why I recommend students start in a Community College where they will get actual faculty whom they can understand and who aren’t teaching for the first time.
Before unionization, TAs were cheap help — they’re teaching a field that they did well in as undergrads, but then that becomes another issue — because they had no trouble learning the subject, they can’t comprehend others not being able to learn it as easily as they did. That’s where the methods classes come in, and I still remember some of my professors making the point that I needed to understand that not all of my students could learn things as quickly as I could.
So you have incoming freshmen being taught by instructors they can’t understand, who have no preparation for teaching (or even public speaking) and who spend most of their time with people who have expert knowledge in the general field, if not the specific one.
And people wonder why we have freshman attrition?!?
I fear the three year BA (which currently exists in the context of the Freshman classes being taught while one is still a high school Senior) because there is a major transition between being 18 and living at home and being 18 and living independently of parents in college. To do this during while taking more difficult Sophomore classes makes me wonder how many more students we will lose to attrition.
” Others cheered while I wondered why, in that case, I had spent the previous half-decade without vision or dental insurance.”
I never cease to be amazed by the sense of entitlement that I see amongst academics — I worked my way through graduate school, with neither vision nor dental insurance, nor health insurance, nor a tuition waiver… And instead of it taking me a half decade, it took me nearly two and I can’t put things like replacing defective refrigerators and responding to frozen water mains on my CV.
Dr. Nelson should be grateful for merely not having to pay Harvard’s graduate tuition of $55,656 a year — if she took classes for four years and then spent two with her dissertation, that would come to $222,524 plus $3,682 in continuation fees for a total of $229,988 — and adding $8,448 in student health fees and $24,654 in state-mandated health insurance*, $255,628.
That’s over a quarter million dollars — the price of a house in some parts of the country!
But she got all of this, along with her pay, for teaching just one class!
And she complains about not getting vision and dental insurance?!? Does she have any idea how many other people don’t have employer-provided vision and dental insurance?
___
*Massachusetts law requires all college students to have health insurance. As Harvard lists their insurance cost “to be announced”, I used the UMass Amherst figure. I also used the current Harvard costs which have probably increased since she graduated.
It’s a travesty that Boston University seems willing to sacrifice PhD slots before systematically addressing its administrative bloat. How many pricey vice-presidents and associate provosts does the University actually need?
How much administrative bloat does BU have? The Boston Globe says that there are 3,000 graduate student employees at BU. and it’s a common mistake to overemphasize the statistical relevance of outlier statistics.
Let’s deal with numbers: 3,000 graduate employees at $45,000 each is $135,000,000 or $135 Million — except that is just the cash paid to them.
Looking at what the total cost of a similar health plan for public employees in Massachusetts (the Mass GIC), I find $33,974.88 a year, or $101,924,640 ($102M). Now this is only a guess based on the total cost of a similar large plan in Massachusetts — and where public employees pay 25% of the total cost, the BU graduate students won’t be paying any of it.
So now we are up to $236,924,640 or $102M — and the Mass GIC does not cover dental care. The full cost of a MBTA PERQ pass (the employer subsidized subway fare) is $90 per employee per month, or $1080 per pass per year. BU will either pay half of this or give the employee it in cash, so this is another $1,620,000 or $1.6 M.
The $3,500 annual child care subsidy would be $10.5M if everyone had a child, my guess is that 10% do so it is $1,050,000 which is still a million dollars. The 14 week “childcare leave” (not “maternity leave” as it applies to both fathers and in the case of adoption) is going to be pricey because BU is going to have to hire someone else to teach the class.
Furthermore, if both parents are employees, Massachusetts law allows them to split up the 28 weeks (7 months) however they wish — a woman so inclined could time her pregnancy so that she went out in late September and return in late April. If she wished to use her 15 days of sick time for the last three weeks of her pregnancy, Massachusetts law says she can. And this is for each child, and I know women who’ve had three children inside of five years, I know a lot who have had two.
No one is ever going to know how much this all costs because what a prudent department chair is going to do is simply eliminate the course(s) that the employee would otherwise have taught. Quality of the undergraduate experience goes down as undergrads have to fight over fewer courses. BU gets a few less alumni donations in the future, but there is no way to quantify this.
What is quantifiable is the $64,000 tuition waiver given to these 3000 students — that’s $192,000,000 ($192M) in lost income, $90,240,000 ($90M) if one uses the 47% tuition discount figure. And what’s not being said here is that BU could simply replace all of its TAs with adjuncts and then bring in a bunch of rich International students who will gladly pay the $64,000 and hence resemble a university on a different branch of the MBTA’s Green Line. And I am going to use the $90M figure because I doubt anyone’s actually paying the full $64,000/year.
So when we add this all up, we get $329,834,640 for 3,000 graduate TAs (and I believe there are more than that) or $109,994.88 each. Yes, only $45,000 in cash, and that’s all they are being taxed on, but the actual value of their compensation package is $109,994.88 and that is without including the list price of their tuition, which would push them above $113K!
Bottom line: These TAs are costing BU almost $330 Million — if you figure that the average pricey vice-president or associate provost costs $300,000 (and that’s an issue), $328,889,640 could pay for 1,099 pricey vice-presidents and associate provosts and while the BU admin is bloated, its not THAT bloated….