Brandeis Was Ahead of Its Time

Slosberg Music Center

Courtesy of Brandeis University

As a Brandeis undergrad, I spent countless hours attending classes, practicing, and rehearsing at Slosberg.

Two years ago, Brandeis announced that it was suspending admissions to its graduate music programs, in music history, music theory, and composition. For a while, it looked as if it might reverse this decision, since the music graduate programs cost about $300,000/year, a rounding error in its $100 million annual budget. But then they went ahead, ending Brandeis's long history of excellence in training music scholars and composers.

Since then, we've seen many other schools suspend various programs in the humanities, including unique programs in certain Eastern European languages, graduates of which have served in the U.S. Foreign Service and at U.S. intelligence agencies. The University of Wisconsin is eliminating such programs. Indiana University is discontinuing up to 100 different programs. 

Brandeis is overhauling its liberal arts programs to make them more career-oriented. (They're calling this a bold initiative, well....) I'm so glad that I went to college when there was respect for the arts and humanities.

The University of Chicago is the latest to join in this ongoing attack on the humanities.

• UChicago Reducing, Freezing Ph.D. Admissions for Multiple Humanities Programs
  
• More UChicago Ph.D. Programs Pause Admissions in Humanities, Social Sciences
  

Chicago's musicology program has a legendary history. When I mentioned this to my colleague Michael Zwiebach at SFCV –– himself a holder of a UC Berkeley doctorate in musicology –– he cited a wide range of scholarship that's come out of Chicago in the last fifty years. 

These changes are truly tragic, inflicting major damage on the intellectual life of the United States. Once you eliminate these programs and possibly lay off scholars in those areas, it's at best extremely difficult to reconstruct them. Institutional memory is lost along with teachers and students. What happens to specialized libraries and archives in those areas? Are they dispersed to less shortsighted institutions?

What's happening here is not so different from the Trump regime's ongoing attacks on science, with their attempts to eliminate important medical and scientific research and institutions, for no discernible reason other than to be destructive. The country is being set back decades with the destruction of ongoing and anticipated research. The elimination of funding for mRNA research means abandoning productive research into things like cancer cures. The attack on vaccines means people will die. The elimination of smallpox and the near-elimination of infectious diseases like polio and measles is one of the great triumphs of medical science and public health, and a few crackpots are being allowed to throw all of this away.