This isn't really a productive post, I just needed to vent.
I am very grateful for finishing my MA this spring because my university has basically been either useless or actively hostile toward humanities. I have had countless missed opportunities because of this. They market the university as supporting graduate research (lie) across disciplines, and then do absolutely nothing to help us. Everything I have had to do to conduct research or visit conferences has been out of my own pocket.
Even worse is that the administration is doing everything it can to defund the liberal arts school generally while pushing money over toward more administrative positions. I have been extremely fortunate to be in a department of very motivated and supportive professors, but everyone (grad students and faculty) has to work around the insane demands of the admin. I was under the impression that academia was less susceptible to this idiotic "useless degree" narrative low information people talk about endlessly, but no, they are beginning to make it university policy and then lying about how they so much with humanities etc.
To make matters worse, our program director told me one day that admin asked her to build a PhD program when our library resources and funding is just barely adequate to support certain fields within my discipline (history). I have also had to pay additional money (not that much but still) to cover for language credits I absolutely need for my field because they are not counted as a graduate course. Yet, there always seems to be money for new administrative positions. My stipend is also not enough to cover living expenses at all, and when our grad student council (OUR REPRESENTATIVES) formally asked them to look into raising them they said that they hadn't gotten enough complaints about them generally to pursue that. Never mind that they are taking grad courses, socializing with other grads and know how we feel. Our council was also made up of people from all different fields, not just humanities.
Just to be clear, I am fine if they university decided they were transitioning to a more STEM/pre-professional focus because that is what most students are in. I understand that. In traditional humanities we have low enrollments overall. What I cannot stand is the lying and demanding our department do more with less money and less resources. The faculty I have worked with have all been great, I hope they can find an institution that values them more.
I'm sure these aren't unique problems but I'm just getting fed up and am glad I'm on my way out.
Submitted February 01, 2020 at 02:17AM by Sinan-Pasha96
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