"Abolish [Humanities] Grad School"
March 26, 2025
Brutal but 95% true:
Anyone who has paid the slightest attention to the trajectory of academic hiring, especially in the humanities, should regard it as utterly insane that these programs were admitting this many students as a matter of course. . . .
What’s even more remarkable about elite universities using NIH grants to indirectly subsidize doctoral programs in fields where there are no academic jobs is that these are the same institutions that have reduced hiring of tenure-track faculty. By complaining that the cuts are forcing them to reduce graduate admissions, they are admitting that they used the money to keep oversized Ph.D. programs on life support while also not creating hiring lines that would give the resulting Ph.D. holders a crack at a job.
(I'd vote for keeping a dozen, maybe two dozen, departments in each of the humanities.)