As we begin a new academic year, many departments on campus face uncertainty about the future of their graduate programs. It’s a surprising development for Johns Hopkins, created nearly 150 years ago as a university dedicated to graduate training.
Daniel Coit Gilman, the University’s first president, believed an educational institution’s mission was “to advance the arts and sciences of every sort and to train young men as scholars for all the intellectual callings of life.” That was the ideal around which he built Johns Hopkins, whose founding, according to one scholar, marked “the beginning of the great transformation in American higher learning.”
By centering the production of scholars and of scholarship in doctoral students’ training, Hopkins created the model that would spread across the country. A century and a half later, we still call ourselves “America’s First Research University.”
Today, we confront a question that cuts to the heart of our university’s mission: As we’ve grown wealthier than ever, with a ballooning endowment and majestic buildings sprouting up across Baltimore and Washington, will we maintain our foundational commitment to graduate education?
One fundamental problem now hampers our ability to maintain our world-class graduate programs: the transformation of our university into a rigidly hierarchical institution over the last fifteen years.
Traditionally, each school (Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, School of Medicine, School of Public Health and others) managed its own graduate funding with varying conditions and stipend levels. That autonomy conformed with the University’s budgeting approach, known as Responsibility-Centered Management (RCM). RCM lets divisions manage their revenues and expenses and gives deans the autonomy to pursue priorities established in partnership with faculty. Here at Homewood, that meant a firm commitment to doctoral education alongside undergraduate education.
In recent years, however, divisional autonomy has been sharply circumscribed. Under the banner of “One University,” President Ronald Daniels has assumed control over ever-greater aspects of university administration, churning through a revolving cast of deans, senior administrators and provosts, while undermining faculty governing bodies. Having lost most of their autonomy, deans are reduced to implementing policies developed in the president’s office while faculty are expected to take marching orders.
The result is that schools no longer have the ability to allocate their own resources. Instead, the president imposes his priorities across the University while passing the bills to the divisions. This combination of administrative centralization and budgetary devolution has created an acute dysfunction that now jeopardizes the School of Arts and Sciences’ ability to train graduate students.
Ever since January, 2023, when doctoral students voted 2,053 to 67 in favor of unionizing, it was obvious that their central demand would be a pay increase — as it has been across the national wave of graduate student unionization. Sure enough, the University announced an agreement to raise stipend levels this past April.
The central administration, which by law negotiated the contract, had more than fourteen months to prepare for this raise by leaning, perhaps, on the staggering operating surplus of $725 million the University generated over the last two years. By all appearances, however, it did not. Instead, the University leadership informed the School of Arts and Science’s deans that it would provide no support to mitigate the cost of the new graduate student contract, estimated at $11 million for 2025 and projected to rise to $16 million over the next two years.
Lacking any additional resources, the School of Arts and Sciences engaged in slash-and-burn cuts to graduate programs. Admissions were frozen halfway through last year’s admissions cycle, departments were barred from turning to their waitlists and the size of our entering classes plummeted.
Some of our best graduate programs are now at risk of collapse. Although we rank among the top in the country, my department (History) cut its graduate admissions by more than fifty percent last year. No one has told us how many students we can expect to enroll this year. Other eminent departments face similar reductions.
Only in late April — after the deadline for students to accept admissions offers had passed and the damage had become manifest — did the central administration belatedly change its position to announce that it would, after all, provide funds to the divisions, though it would not say how much each division would get. These abrupt changes in policy, although common under President Daniels’ tenure, make strategic planning by divisions and departments impossible.
To understand why the School of Arts and Sciences, with an annual budget of roughly half a billion dollars, cannot afford to cover modest increases in graduate training costs, we don’t have to look far. Cast your eyes across Wyman Park Drive to the giant glass cubes commissioned from one of the world’s most famous (and expensive) architects, Renzo Piano. Soon, they will house the glamorous new Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Agora Institute.
Remarkably, most if not all of the SNF Agora’s $150 million endowment has been spent on the building, whose cost was estimated at $100 million before the pandemic-induced rise in inflation.
You might wonder, as I have, who will pay to maintain the ostentatious facility, cover the salaries of the dozens of SNF Agora faculty appointments and support the Institute’s administrative staff and programming? The answer, I’m afraid, is that most of those costs fall to the School of Arts and Sciences, imposing severe constraints on its budget.
But SNF Agora is only the beginning. Last year, the University opened its majestic building in Washington, D.C., named for Michael Bloomberg, who funded the $650 million cost. Now that Hopkins owns the building, which nearly bankrupted its previous owner, the central administration is desperately encouraging faculty in Baltimore to use it. The Provost’s office has even committed $15 million in annual funding to “support universitywide endeavors anchored at 555 Pennsylvania Ave.”
Our dean has no choice but to play along. Now, the School of Arts and Sciences is incurring ever-growing costs to support conferences in Washington, administrative and pedagogical expenses for the “DC Semester” and no doubt a number of other expenditures so the president can brag about how the university is using its flashy new outpost, which, alas, doesn’t respond to a single KSAS strategic initiative.
But that’s still not all.
In 2013, President Daniels launched the Bloomberg Distinguished Professors program, which introduced cross-divisional faculty appointments. More recently, he announced a second and third round, growing the total number of selections to 130.
Despite their name, Mr. Bloomberg’s donation covers only part of the salary and benefits for these appointments. The rest falls to the divisions... even though the selection of faculty runs through the president’s office and may not conform to divisional priorities.
I could go on, but these examples should make it clear that when it comes to the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, at least — and, I suspect, other divisions too — there is no budgetary autonomy. The RCM model is an illusion that masks a dysfunctional reality: Major resources are siphoned out of the School of Arts and Sciences to fund the president’s pet projects. The result is that we can no longer sustain the University’s core mission of graduate training.
University leadership will of course argue that the graduate students’ higher stipends are the reason we have to slash their numbers. Some may find that claim persuasive. As for me, I just follow the old adage: tell me what your budget is and I’ll tell you what you value.
If the above examples don’t persuade, consider that according to the latest available information, the University’s five highest-paid executives earned nearly $14 million in compensation in a single year. That figure exceeds the entirety of the deficit created by the growing stipends of approximately one thousand doctoral students in the School of Arts and Sciences.
This summer, Bloomberg Philanthropies donated $1 billion to support graduate education. It looked, for a brief moment, like a lifeline. So far, however, it appears that very little will support doctoral training in basic research. Much of the money will support financial aid for medical students.
It does not bode well for graduate education at Hopkins that faculty have been left in the dark. Many fear that Mr. Bloomberg’s money will not shore up the basic research that helped make Hopkins one of the world’s great universities, but will instead advance even greater intrusion by the president’s office into doctoral education, as the donation is deployed to “innovate” graduate training by turning it away from pure research and more toward industry and profit-driven applications.
In this regard, President Daniels’s announcement sounded ominous: particularly his promise that “the gift will support the development of a program to send more impact-focused interdisciplinary leaders into the worlds of research, industry, and government through innovations in Ph.D. education and training.”
There is a searing irony here. Although faculty are expected to train graduate students — and although we are best positioned to understand where disciplines are moving and what approaches may produce the most innovative new research — we are rapidly losing our autonomy to determine how to train them.
Our university has lost sight of one of its most basic missions as it chases the latest fads, contorts itself to conform to the puerile dictates of university rankings and throws astronomical resources at glamorous vanity projects.
The only way forward is to restore a healthier balance of power within the University. Our divisions need greater autonomy to determine their strategic priorities. Empowered faculty bodies collaborating deliberately with divisional leadership must have the primary say in determining how graduate training is to evolve at Johns Hopkins. Here at the School of Arts and Sciences, that means first shoring up departments’ ability to fund graduate students so that we can once again afford basic doctoral training and compete for the country’s best minds.
Only thus can we maintain fidelity to one of our University’s founding principles: to advance the arts and sciences and train future scholars.
François Furstenberg is a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University and secretary of the University’s American Association of University Professors chapter.
