Brandeis Music Department Response to Graduate Program Closure

The Brandeis University Department of Music has issued the following statement after learning that the university's administration has decided to close down the graduate programs in music.

Response to the Proposed Closures of the PhD Programs in Music

On Thursday, culminating a laborious and costly PhD review process whose findings were ultimately disregarded, Brandeis Provost Carol Fierke announced the administration’s plans to end both PhD programs in the Department of Music. The Provost’s letter describing the proposed closures made no reference to the outcomes-based criteria by which the PhD review team had claimed that programs would be evaluated. Rather, in meetings this week, Provost Fierke indicated that the PhD review process had found both of Music’s doctoral programs to be excellent – but that they would be cut anyway as part of a “strategic decision” to “lean into the sciences.”

To justify their actions, the administration insinuated without evidence – in the pages of The Boston Globe, no less – that Music’s undergraduate program is not up to the standard of those at elite liberal arts colleges, and that cutting our doctoral programs would somehow ameliorate the situation.

These statements are as staggeringly untrue as they are staggeringly impolitic (we sincerely hope the administration has girded its loins for a barrage of angry calls from the parents of music majors, demanding their tuition dollars back). How bizarre for us to have to remind the Brandeis administration that undergraduate and graduate programs do not exist in a zero-sum relationship, and that the administration’s own “Framework for the Future” identifies “vertical connectivity” between undergrads, doctoral students, and faculty members as the bedrock “Academic Value Proposition” of a Brandeis education. By the Framework’s logic, eliminating a department’s doctoral programs would worsen the academic experience for undergraduates, to the point of making it un-Brandeisian. Beyond this: Music’s last two tenure-line hires came to Brandeis directly from faculty positions at Amherst and Swarthmore. They are far better positioned than any administrator to know just how well the Brandeis undergraduate music program stacks up.

No: the administration’s proposed cuts are not about the performance of any music department program, undergraduate or graduate. To establish conclusively the excellence of our doctoral programs – as well as the futility of the PhD review process – we attach an appendix below with data produced by the PhD review, demonstrating that Music ranks at or very near the top of all Brandeis PhD-granting departments by many metrics. Our academic job placement rate (71%) and low attrition rate (8%) rank first in the entire university; we rank third in matriculation rate and fourth in graduation rate. Our renown extends far beyond the Brandeis campus, as a recent article in Nature ranked Music’s graduate programs ninth in the nation. Moreover, we have achieved this success despite teaching more undergraduates per tenure-line faculty member than any other PhD-granting department outside of the sciences. The PhD review thus proved that Music offers an extraordinary, perhaps unparalleled, bang for the university’s buck. Clearly, we are being cut not because of numbers, but because of values. The Brandeis administration does not believe that the creative arts are worthy of study at the graduate level.

We contend that – amid a 75th birthday celebration and an expensive “national branding” campaign – the Brandeis administration has chosen a course of action that betrays the university’s very identity. One of the most famous founding principles of our university was a commitment to the liberal arts, as exemplified by the founders’ decision to place the arts at the core of the curriculum. Brandeis’ founding President, Abram Sachar, wrote proudly in A Host at Last: “we were one of the few colleges to include [the creative arts] in its requirements. In most established universities, the arts were still struggling to attain respectability as an academic discipline.” By cutting the PhD programs in Musicology and Composition – the last two PhD programs remaining in the Division of Creative Arts – Brandeis will announce to the world the abrogation of its hallowed values. Shorn entirely of their graduate programs, the arts will no longer be equal partners to the sciences, social sciences, and humanities (who, let’s face it, are next on the chopping block once there are no more arts to cut). From here on, the arts will be mere accessories at a university that once provided a home to so many great Jewish artists, who helped to establish Brandeis as a world-class place for the advanced study of the creative arts.

This decision also puts Brandeis squarely at odds with intellectual currents in the broader world.The administration’s move to “lean into the sciences” by cutting the arts smacks of the techno-utopianism of fifteen years ago, before Silicon Valley realized the need to grapple with the moral and historical issues in which artists and humanists are expert, before ChatGPT and generative AI pushed questions about the nature of human creation to the front page of every newspaper. It is so clear what a liberal arts university like Brandeis has to offer such an environment: a place in which scientists, social scientists, humanists, and artists can speak to each other at the highest levels. Why should we aim to become a second-rate MIT when the world so desperately needs a first-rate Brandeis? We have a chance to position ourselves at the cutting edge of the world’s most critical conversations, rather than offering a “Framework for the Future” that is already a vision of the past.

We urge the Brandeis University administration to find the courage to reverse this hasty, short-sighted, and self-defeating decision.

The Brandeis Department of Music 

The data appended to the letter are difficult to post because the tabular format in the PDF doesn't format correctly when I copy/paste. Please let me know if you'd like me to email you the PDF.