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