Abolish Grad School

A DOGE initiative I can get with

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say I think some of the Trump/Musk hatchet blows to government spending seem bad. Take the slashing of the IRS workforce. In a sane country, “fiscal conservatives” would want to maximize tax compliance. But in the America I’ve known throughout my adult life, those claiming this label have always sought to reduce government revenue. Or take the cuts to the Social Security workforce. Having had to deal with the Social Security Administration on behalf of elderly relatives, cutting its workforce—presumably so as to outsource customer service to Grok—also seems like a bad move. But hey, what do I know? Probably not much more than the DOGE bros.

I do, however, know a thing or two about universities, which is why I found this New York Times article about graduate students “on the chopping block” somewhat odd. It starts out with a tale of admitted doctoral students having their acceptance rescinded due to the cuts. The ostensible source of the crisis is the Trump administration’s change in the formula of NIH grants, which does indeed threaten to reduce a major source of funding—the University of Pennsylvania, the article notes, stands to lose $250 million annually from the reduction.

Weirdly, though, the students who had their admission offers retracted in the story’s lede were supposed to be studying … sociology, not a discipline reliant on NIH funding. While it mentions some fields that do depend on such grants, such as biology, many of the interviewees in the story are in humanities disciplines. We hear from Penn’s chair of comparative literature, and read about reductions in doctoral cohorts in English and history. At no point does the Times reporter see fit to ask why NIH funding was relevant to these disciplines.

The answer, presumably, is that universities, now that they are bleeding NIH funding, are finding themselves obliged to shift resources away from less valued fields—comp lit or sociology—to more valued ones—microbiology or organic chemistry. The implication of this is that NIH funding was indirectly subsidizing, for instance, the Penn history Ph.D. program, which until this year was admitting 17 new students a year, now reduced to 7; English, we are told, was taking in 12, now cut in half to 6.

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. Five years ago, the Times reported on the ongoing “extinction event” facing the academic job market. Faculty hiring in English, the article noted, had declined by 33 percent between 2012 and 2020. Remarkably, this bleak report appeared before the pandemic, which precipitated an even more dramatic collapse.

It is even more astonishing, therefore, that the US government, and therefore the taxpayer, were expected to accept the indefinite subsidization of professional formation for professions that increasingly do not exist. In whose conceivable interest was it for the Penn history department to admit 17 students a year? The article implies it was in the prospective students’ own interest, but we get a hint of the real answer from the interviewees. The Penn comp lit chair tells us that “cuts to graduate students would reduce opportunities for undergraduates. With fewer graduate student teachers, class sizes may increase, for example.” Translation: having Ph.D. students means I have TAs who will grade papers for me so I can do more important stuff.

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.

This is an area where I think DOGE needs to go further. The Penn history, English, and comp lit Ph.D. programs are still way too big. What we need, to borrow a phrase, is a complete and total shutdown of humanities grad school until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.

The Crisis of Liberalism

Ashley Frawley’s arrival at Compact roughly coincided with the defeat of Kamala Harris and return of Donald Trump— “The Fall of Maternal Liberalism,” as Ashley called it in a post-election column. It would seem that with the Democrats in retreat and right-populist parties surging across the West, liberalism is in a profound, perhaps existential crisis. But a number of conversations with Ashley made me think this crisis is not so new—indeed, that perhaps liberalism has never been able to escape certain fundamental contradictions intrinsic to it, and that what we are experiencing now is the latest manifestation of these contradictions.

With all this in mind, Ashley and I are embarking on a series on the Blame Theory podcast that will ask: Was liberalism ever not in crisis? Is liberalism itself a kind of crisis? In the first episode, released today, we lay out the themes and questions that will inform our exploration of an ideology that has received plenty of blame from both the right and the left—in part because it has been the dominant one for hundreds of years. In this conversation, Ashley explains why the conflict between social and political liberalism and economic liberalism is foundational to the modern world, and constitutes a crisis that liberalism has never been able to transcend.

Please subscribe to Blame Theory via this Substack and/or via your favorite podcast app to keep up with the series, and if you enjoy it, please rate and review us. Also, in the future there will be bonus material attached to the podcast series—additional commentary, bibliographical essays, and more—for paid subscribers to this Substack only. Stay tuned for that.

This week in Compact

• Dan McCarthy on “Why Zelensky Must Go”

• David Singh Grewal on why nuclear proliferation may be the inevitable trajectory of a world in which US hegemony is in retreat

• Adam Rowe on the forgotten legacy of Henry Carey, perhaps America’s most important economist and an early theoretician of protectionism

• David Goldman on the setbacks facing the NATO “war party”

• Emmett Rensin on Kanye West’s challenge to the logic of destigmatization

• Juan Rojas on the self-defeating presidency of Colombia’s Gustavo Petro

• Stephen G. Adubato on the obsolescence of debates about gay conversion therapy

• Darel Paul on why the right has won the battle against woke, but perhaps not the war

Thanks for reading!