As Brown sought to identify targets for University-wide budget cuts in the spring and summer, administrators notified leaders of at least six departments that admissions for their Ph.D. programs would be paused.
The Departments of Egyptology and Assyriology, Classics, Anthropology, French and Francophone Studies, German Studies and Italian Studies will not admit first-year Ph.D. students for the 2026-27 academic year, according to the departments’ websites.
“These decisions followed a deliberative process led by our Academic Priorities Committee, which includes elected faculty members and senior academic administrators,” University Spokesperson Brian Clark wrote in an email to The Herald.
At a faculty meeting last week, Provost Francis Doyle noted that one program “proactively volunteered” to pause admission, The Herald previously reported.
But two directors of affected graduate studies programs told The Herald their input was either not requested or misconstrued as part of this process.
“Our input was not solicited before this decision,” wrote Professor of French and Francophone Studies Lewis Seifert, who is also director of the program’s graduate studies, in an email to The Herald.
Stephen Kidd, an associate professor of classics and the director of the department’s graduate studies, was confused to learn that graduate admissions for his department had been paused. Administrators’ justification for the decision “was based on a misunderstanding from the previous meeting,” he wrote in an email to The Herald.
In that meeting, administrators and the Academic Priorities Committee “asked us questions about our graduate program, how it functioned (and) the role graduate students played in teaching undergraduates,” among other inquiries, Kidd wrote. “But we were not part of the decision” to pause admissions.
“They thought that I had preferred to pause admissions for a year so that we could recruit a larger cohort for the 2027-28 season,” Kidd wrote, adding that he had told administrators “this was something about which I needed to consult the faculty.”
“When I cleared up this misunderstanding, they said there were other reasons too, which remain vague,” Kidd wrote.
“Previous yields, numbers of students currently in the program and application pools were all factors in the considerations of this year’s admissions targets,” Interim Dean of the Graduate School Janet Blume wrote in an email to The Herald.
Clark added that APC “members spent significant time over the past year discussing doctoral education and considering how to balance Brown’s commitment to training scholars with the serious financial challenges facing the University, including both a structural budget deficit and an uncertain external economic environment.”
The Italian studies department had the “opportunity to share (its) concerns” and provide feedback, according to Professor of Italian Studies Massimo Riva, director of the program’s graduate studies.
For him, the downsizing of the graduate programs is a result of “the job market in the humanities overall.”
Citing the nearly 200-year history of Brown’s Italian studies program, he warned that a prolonged pause “would be highly detrimental to Brown, the profession and the humanities.”
Graduate students remain concerned about departments’ futures
Emma Kahn GS, a second-year Ph.D. student in the anthropology department, first heard in February that admissions for her department would be paused for at least a year. It remains unclear how long this pause will last.
“If it’s really just the one year of cancelled admission, I don’t think it will have massive impacts on the program,” Kahn said. But if the pause is extended by multiple years, “that would be a big disruption in the kind of community we’re trying to build,” she added.
For Kahn, seeing similar pauses to anthropology Ph.D. program admissions at other schools across the country has been “disheartening.”
“The disciplines themselves are missing out on those new voices and new insights and new sets of questions and explorations,” she said. Anthropology “needs a constant influx of new voices,” and graduate programs help more individuals pursue careers in the field.
Andrew Clark GS, a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of French and Francophone Studies, is concerned that the admissions pause will harm courses that rely heavily on graduate students to lead sections and grade assignments.
“If this continues and all the cohorts are drastically reduced in size, but the undergrad population remains the same, there’s going to be a discrepancy in the number of TAs available to actually administer all the classes,” said Adit Sabnis GS, a fourth-year Ph.D. student studying neuroscience. “So we’ve been asking the admin about that, but we still really have not gotten direct answers.”
Rivas believes that because the Italian studies doctoral program typically admits only two students per year, pausing admissions would offer limited financial benefits. “Calculating the contribution that doctoral students make to teaching, we believe that the monetary savings, if any, would be negligible,” he wrote.
The University did not respond to a further request for comment on pausing graduate admissions.
While the University shifts its model from a liberal arts college to a research institution, Andrew Clark said he feels frustrated that funding for Ph.D. programs continues to be cut.
Andrew Clark would like to see more “articulate reasoning” as to why certain departments were chosen to pause graduate admissions compared to others, as well as the budgetary reasons behind the pauses.
The University has “millions of dollars floating around and plenty of other people who are getting paid pretty well,” Andrew Clark said.
“We are very aware of the impact on the departments: the experience of the current graduate students, the departments’ teaching, academic community, research and programming,” Blume wrote. “We are working with departments to mitigate those impacts. The exact form of support will be determined with each department according to its needs.”
Ethan Schenker is a university news editor covering staff and student labor. He is from Bethesda, MD, and plans to study International and Public Affairs and Economics. In his free time, he enjoys playing piano and clicking on New York Times notifications.
Claire Song is a university news and science & research editor for The Herald. She is a sophomore from California studying Applied Math-Biology. She likes to drink boba in her free time.
