“After careful consideration, we have decided to suspend admissions for many of our programs for the upcoming academic year. We deeply value graduate education and intend to reopen admissions for future academic years.”
This terse announcement a couple of weeks ago by Boston University took the academic world by surprise — starting with the BU professors in the dozen humanities and social-sciences disciplines whose admissions were halted.
BU’s statement is cryptic but portentous, not only for the institution itself but for graduate education generally. Could it be a harbinger of things to come?
Let’s try to read the tea leaves. We can begin by noting that science was exempted from BU’s edict. Graduate education in the lab sciences is a financial engine — or perhaps more accurately, a treadmill. Each lab generates publications that result in grants, which lead to more publications, and more grants, and ever onward we go. Graduate-student labor turns the treadmill. You can’t easily pause the labor supply to science labs without disrupting the economy of big science.
Upon other departments — including English, history, and political science — the administration is imposing a radical financial slowdown. The same thing happened during the pandemic, when many departments and programs suspended graduate admissions while universities grappled with the immediate financial effects of Covid restrictions. But there’s no pandemic to drive the change this time, and the BU administration offers no motive for its decision. Why did they do it?
We know that the BU administration and the BU Graduate Workers Union (BUGWU) recently agreed to a three-year contract after a long and bitter strike. The contract delivered large raises — up to 70 percent — to student teachers and researchers, who will now make $45,000 annually (with a 3-percent raise each year of the contract).
So we should ask: Does BU’s action result from anti-union animus? The union thinks it does. “In our view,” BUGWU said in its own press release, “these recent decisions by BU management are direct responses to the historic seven-month grad workers’ strike this year and the resulting Collective Bargaining Agreement.”
Anti-union animus — and retaliation — are barred by labor law. But they are also hard to prove, absent the proverbial smoking gun.
Left unsaid is what the union might do about this. Is the admissions halt a “mandatory subject of bargaining” — that is, an area that labor law requires the parties to negotiate in good faith? If so, the union may summon management back to the table. Indeed, the union describes BU’s action as “a massive layoff aimed explicitly at cutting costs.” Union and management may have addressed this possible outcome during their negotiations (though the union statement suggests they did not). Beyond the union’s formal statement, officials have not responded to further requests for comment.
If the administration is retaliating to the union contract by cutting off admissions, that would be petty, uncollaborative behavior. The graduate-student union movement has vaulted graduate education into a new economic environment. We have to figure out a way through it together. Daniel Star, the chair of BU’s philosophy department, has said the news of the admissions halt was “delivered to us as a fait accompli.” That’s not exactly shared governance.
But what if this isn’t retaliation but rather economic contraction? BU says it wants to “set up its future programs for success.” The graduate school has also said that it wants to examine the “budgetary implications” of the new union contract. This context shows that the sharply increasing cost of graduate-student labor is making graduate education more expensive for BU — as it has for many other universities.
In effect, the graduate-student union movement is stress-testing the willingness of universities to prioritize graduate education — and to fund it.
The bottom-line costs of graduate education have always been difficult to calculate, for a number of reasons. Time to degree varies considerably, and different institutions calculate the offsetting revenues of the teaching and other labor that graduate students perform in different ways.
In this, graduate education differs considerably from undergraduate education, which has always been at the heart of the university mission. Teaching undergraduates is one of the university’s most visible public activities, and also a crucial source of revenue. Educating graduate students is harder to categorize, because graduate education is faculty-centered. We see this especially clearly in the lab sciences, where a graduate student’s dissertation must fit their adviser’s funded research agenda, because the adviser is also the director of the lab that the student works in.
The graduate-student union movement is stress-testing the willingness of universities to prioritize graduate education — and to fund it.
But faculty-centeredness shows clearly in humanities graduate education too. Every humanities graduate student has taken graduate seminars with esoteric titles and a common invisible subtitle: “My Next Book.”
Under the prevailing economic model, lab scientists can’t run a lab without graduate-student labor. That’s why newly hired professors in the sciences negotiate for graduate students as part of their start-up packages. It also helps explain why the university didn’t pause admissions for its science departments.
But humanities and social-science professors don’t require graduate students to do their knowledge-creation work. Professors want to teach graduate students because doing so conveys prestige — and also because they believe that graduate teaching (especially dissertation advising) can inform and enrich their scholarship. But that’s not a justification for admitting graduate students. There has to be value for the students — and for the university as a whole.
So what’s in it for the students? There are very few academic jobs for Ph.D.s these days. That’s been true for a while, but the big change is that those Ph.D.s just got much more expensive to educate. Does that mean we should train only a few Ph.D.s, only enough to replace the faculty when they retire?
That idea is not new — and it’s not good, either. It carries existential risk to the disciplines and to our values as educators. If we start whittling graduate programs to a nub — and perhaps shuttering some of them — the survivors of this culling process will inevitably be the wealthiest, the most conservative, and the most risk-averse. Diversity of any sort will become an unaffordable luxury. Do we want that for our fields, and for our students?
The problems don’t end there. If we reduce the availability of doctoral education to a privileged few, we promote academic isolationism, in which we reserve our most advanced work for institutional acolytes who will face inward, toward the institution, and not outward toward society at large.
The cost of such isolationism is becoming more plain all the time. Look no further than last year’s show trials of university presidents before Congress. One important message of that debacle is that academe needs to face outward, to maintain a mutual caretaking relationship with the public that funds it.
The alternative is before us: We should educate Ph.D.s for diverse careers — including, but not limited to, academic careers. But even as the number of professorships has shrunk, many professors still cling to the notion that we should educate doctoral students for academic careers alone.
If we start whittling grad programs to a nub, diversity of any sort will become an unaffordable luxury.
That’s not a sustainable argument. Of course we should prepare students for academic careers, and it’s great when they succeed in getting professors’ jobs. But we need to honor and support the work that most of them will actually do — and we need to recognize its myriad value to them and to society at large.
Career diversity benefits our doctoral students: The data show a high degree of job satisfaction among those who work outside academe. Second, career diversity benefits society, because Ph.D.s prove to be sophisticated and valuable professionals.
And when Ph.D.s work in the wider world, their visibility also benefits academe as a whole. We sorely need that benefit right now. The wider public needs to know more about what academics do. Ph.D.s can show them, every day, with their skills, knowledge, and wisdom.
The graduate-student labor movement has brought social justice to graduate education, but at a price. That price has brought us all — not just BU — to a new version of an old question: What is doctoral education for? The answer can’t be just to make more professors — not in this academic job market, anyway.
Educating Ph.D.s who work outside our walls is much more costly now. It’s more expensive than it was only a generation ago. And yet it’s still crucial.
Is BU saying that we can’t afford to educate the people who — whether or not they get jobs as professors — will end up becoming ambassadors for our disciplines in society at large? I hope not. Because we can’t afford not to.
