Sign of the times: Brandeis cancels music

Faculty members are spreading the word that Brandeis University, one of America’s most prestigious colleges, has abolished its PhD programs in composition and musicology and put its PhD teaching staff on hiatus.

Assistant Professor Emily Frey Giansiracusa writes: As some of you know, our Provost told us in May that the Musicology graduate program at Brandeis would be put on hiatus, with the intention of restoring it when the University’s finances improved. The administration told us today that BOTH Musicology and Composition will be put on hiatus following this year – now with the intention of closing them permanently and shifting their scant resources to the sciences. This recommendation was made in spite of the results of an 18-month-long review of all Brandeis PhD programs, which found that Musicology and Composition ranked at or very near *the top* of all programs by every metric the PhD review team claimed to value. These elements included job placement rate, attrition, matriculation, and many other measures by which we were found to be excellent.

Despite the fact that our President has a background in economics, the administration makes this recommendation contrary to all economic sense; comparatively speaking, the PhD programs in Music are dirt cheap to run, and they produce among the best results at Brandeis. This decision is based, rather, on values: the Brandeis administration does not believe that the arts and humanities are worthy of study at the graduate level. It’s an attitude that smacks of the techno-utopianism of 15 years ago – before Silicon Valley realized that it might have to think about the ethical and historical questions 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. This is an exceptionally strange time to declare so confidently that the arts and humanities don’t matter, but here we are.