Big Worries

So earlier this week, the shit hit the fan at Brandeis in the front page of the Boston Globe. If you didn't follow the link to the article, it says that Brandeis is liquidating the holdings of the Rose Art Gallery. There's about $350 million of art in there, with the de Koonings, Warhols, Lichtensteins, and Jasper Johns and I don't even know what all that have been donated to the university.

So that was all anyone was talking about this week at school. Of course. That is, until the big "don't worry your pretty heads" meeting for grad students last night. So the story is that the hit to the endowment and donors (jail is the safest place for you, Bernie Madoff!!!!) was big enough so that even if the economy started improving tomorrow we would still be unsustainable. And since they will have run through the reserves next year, they need the cash from the sale of the art to restructure the university and tide us over until the restructuring takes effect. Programs are getting cut, the overall size of the graduate program is being reduced, the size of the faculty is getting reduced, and they're going to reach further down the crap pile of undergrad applications to increase enrollment. And, most pertinent to me, dissertation year fellowships are drying up and so are teaching opportunities for sixth years. (Who knows?--maybe I can achieve the impossible feat of finishing in five... though there will be no jobs out there for me anyway.) And they wouldn't even admit to it, even though it was pretty clearly the case.

But to top off this crapcake, every time we expressed concern about how the university itself was changing as an institution, they told us it doesn't matter to us because we'd get our fellowships and our degrees and why would we care what happened to, say, university staff, or undergrads, or anyone or anything else? Is bad enough we all feel and are helpless as far as what's happening to the university--that's expected: we're grad students. But it's rather insulting to have your investment in the institution dismissed as irrelevant. Is no wonder they can't keep it together, public relations-wise.

I keep telling myself it could be worse--but I also worry that it will be...