Brandeis College broadcasts plans to discontinue its doctoral packages in composition, music concept, and musicology in a letter to tutorial employees.
Massachusetts’ Brandeis College has notified its tutorial employees in a letter of its plans to discontinue its two Ph.D. packages in composition, music concept, and musicology. The college claims it could allocate the financial savings from the doctoral packages towards its undergraduate music program to make it akin to “these at elite liberal arts faculties.”
Brandeis has loved a protracted historical past because the alma mater of a few of America’s most prevalent musical expertise, together with composers Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland. A number of distinguished Brandeis alums have written an open letter to the college’s administrative employees to warn of those modifications’ impending menace to the college’s heritage.
“As a few of you understand, our Provost advised us in Could that the Musicology graduate program at Brandeis could be placed on hiatus, with the intention of restoring it when the College’s funds improved,” wrote Assistant Professor Emily Frey Giansiracusa. “The administration advised us as we speak that each Musicology and Composition will likely be placed on hiatus following this 12 months — now with the intention of closing them completely and shifting their scant assets to the sciences.”
The chair of the music division at Brandeis and a former dean of its graduate faculty, Eric Chasalow, lately advised the Boston Globe that he suspected the college would prioritize funding science packages over the humanities and humanities.
Frey Giansiracusa continues: “This advice was made regardless of the outcomes of an 18-month-long evaluation of all Brandeis Ph.D. packages, which discovered that Musicology and Composition ranked at or very close to the highest of all packages by each metric the Ph.D. evaluation crew claimed to worth. These parts included job placement fee, attrition, matriculation, and plenty of different measures by which we had been discovered to be glorious.”
“Regrettably, the choice to trim a marginal fraction of the finances has despatched waves of uncertainty all through a nationwide community of establishments,” the open letter reads. “This choice conveys the notion that music lacks the worth to benefit the restricted assets it at present receives. The elimination of a high-achieving program not solely adversely impacts its personal school, college students, and alumni but additionally casts a shadow over the whole tutorial panorama of the humanities.”