Boston University Suspends PhD Admissions in Philosophy & Other Fields (updated)
Boston University (BU) has suspended admissions to PhD programs in a dozen departments in its College of Arts and Sciences, including philosophy, according to its website and an article at Inside Higher Education.
From a screenshot of a Boston University webpage: https://www.bu.edu/cas/admissions/phd-mfa/apply/. Arrow added.
IHE was tipped off to the admissions suspension by a philosophy program applicant’s posting on Reddit of an email he received about it.
The BU Department of Philosophy website says, “This program is not accepting applications for the 2025-2026 academic year. Please reach out to the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences at [email protected] with any questions.”
IHE reports that BU sent them a statement that described the move as temporary:
part of our ongoing review of our doctoral programs… these actions are part of Boston University’s commitment to re-envision these programs to allow for their long-term sustainability. This temporary pause and cohort reduction will ensure BU is able to meet its commitments to currently enrolled students and to set up its future programs for success.
As for the reason for the decision, IHE suggests it may be owed to increased costs associated with the union contract that graduate student workers recently won via a seven-month strike. In an email among administrators in the College of Arts & Sciences, IHE reports,
The deans said, “It would be financially unsustainable to move forward with the cohort sizes discussed earlier this fall,” so the college is halting admissions “for all non-grant-funded doctoral programs” next academic year and reducing “cohort sizes of grant-funded programs.” This, they said, “will ensure that we have the financial resources available to honor the five-year funding commitments we have made to our currently enrolled doctoral students.”
The report from IHE is here.
UPDATES
1. Daniel Star, Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Philosophy at BU, comments on the decision here. He says:
I can confirm that a decision was made by administrators at BU to freeze applications to PhD programs in the humanities and social sciences for one year (and only one year). I can report that the department had no control at all over this decision, and it was delivered to us as a fait accompli. Prior to this decision being made, our department submitted a report to our administration on our PhD program, highlighting the many strengths of the program, and in particular our unusually competitive admissions process and our extraordinarily high academic placement rate (one of the highest in philosophy: https://lookerstudio.google.com/u/0/reporting/d0e72e02-3e03-4a95-b41b-a24aa6524529/page/6zXD?ref=apda.ghost.io ). The university administration has assured us that our status in the profession, and as a leading department in the humanities at BU, has not gone unnoticed, and will be taken into account in future decisions regarding admissions. We have also been assured that this is a temporary emergency measure needed for budgetary reasons. I do believe BU aspires to be a leading research university and will right the ship before the next admissions cycle. Meanwhile, we extend our sympathies to everyone who would have applied to our program this year.
2. A BU faculty member who prefers to remain anonymous wrote in with the following comment:
Although faculty don’t have a full sense of the situation, we do know some things. Here is my sense (I do not speak for my fellow faculty, though many of them would agree with at least parts of this):
First: BU (the University, not, importantly, the College of Arts and Sciences and associated Graduate School) has more than enough money to fund its own PhD students. Their net operating gain in FY 2023 was $84 million; their net operating gain in FY 2022 was $152 million (the giant difference has partly to do with an increase in commitment to financial aid; I have no idea if that is affecting the present issue). The university, while not mega-wealthy, is financially healthy and very stable. (https://www.bu.edu/cfo/controller/departments/general-accounting/financial-statements/)
Second: faculty have been told is that the provost is covering the increased cost from the Collective Bargaining Agreement this year, but is refusing to cover additional costs next year. So, it is accurate that the College/Graduate School are experiencing a budget crisis as a result of that decision. It is also true that all PhD programs that are not grant-funded are fully stopping admissions for next academic year (so that includes, I believe, every humanities and social sciences department except economics). It does not seem to be accurate that the university as a whole is experiencing any kind of budget crisis.
Third: some faculty believe that this is partly retaliatory for the strike. That is: we believe that there is a lack of money at the College/Grad School level; but we also believe that the higher level administration is trying to teach the faculty and graduate students in the College of Arts and Sciences/Graduate School a lesson by not covering the increased budget needs which, again, they are in a position to do.
Fourth: BU is a major R1 research university. It has consistently been “elite striving”. This move is obviously inconsistent with that self-conception, and is truly embarrassing for the university. There is no chance our higher administration is not aware of this, and there is no chance they don’t want to correct it. There is no chance they don’t know that this is a reputational step back, and they care very much about their reputation. It is their brand.
Fifth (and pure speculation, unlike the rest): I doubt it is entirely coincidental that we got this notice suddenly, and soon after the election. BU’s strategy has, at least since I have been here, to be fiscally conservative/cautious about perceived future shifts in funding, the economy, visas (very important for our university), etc. So I suspect it is partly anticipatory.
I would be utterly shocked if this is not corrected (at least to some extent) for all the humanities and social sciences, if not by next academic year, by the following one. (I do think we should anticipate slightly smaller cohort sizes across the board.) And, future prospective students should not be concerned about the long-term health of the philosophy department in particular (which, by nearly every objective measure, is a feather in the university’s cap; for example, our academic placement is among the very highest worldwide; we receive a very high number of applications and admit very few students).
There are a number of reasons (beyond what is implicit in the above) to think the situation will be corrected. One is that there is, I assume, a lag in budget planning; presumably part of what is happening is that the budget has been set for the upcoming two years, and so it is harder to move money around before the budget is re-done. A second is that, if the lack of funding is partly retaliatory, it is likely to be one-off; that’s because it seems to go against the actual long-term interests of the university, and our administration is not stupid. A third is that there was just a turnover in presidents/provosts and our new president and provost have inherited this whole situation. So, while these decrees have indeed come from them, and we are disappointed to say the least, I think we still have reason to believe that their long-term stance is not a humanities-bashing one. Indeed, I believe we have strong reason to think that our new president values the humanities (and the arts, and everything else non-STEM) and wants to support and fund us. She has an English BA and a philosophy and politics MA.
3. A graduate student in one of the affected departments at BU who prefers to remain anonymous sent along the following statement:
As a graduate student in Boston University’s Philosophy Department who was also involved in the unionization of BU’s graduate workers, I believe I can speak on behalf of many of us here when I say that we are deeply troubled by the University’s decision to suspend PhD admissions across multiple humanities and social sciences programs, including philosophy, for the 2025-2026 academic year. While the administration has framed this move as a temporary measure to ensure “long-term sustainability,” this decision undermines the core values of an R1 research institution, jeopardizes the reputation of our programs, and sends a disheartening message about the University’s priorities.
This decision does not exist in isolation. It is symptomatic of a broader assault on higher education workers and students, one that is increasingly visible in universities across the country. It is impossible to ignore the context in which this decision was made: the increasing corporatization of higher education, the erosion of labor rights, and the rise of austerity measures that treat the humanities as expendable and interchangeable. BU is a major R1 research institution, with a financial position that is stable, even profitable; yet, instead of investing in its graduate programs, the administration has chosen to suspend them, effectively cutting off access to opportunities for future scholars and undermining the very mission of the University. These choices are not financial necessities but political priorities, made at the expense of students, faculty, and workers.
BU’s administration has chosen to frame this decision as a necessity tied to our recent union victory, but it is difficult to not view this move as a form of retaliatory posturing that aims to “teach a lesson” to those who fought hard for fair wages and better conditions. By forcing individual colleges and departments to shoulder the financial responsibility of the new contract, the administration is effectively creating a manufactured crisis and then using it as a pretext to disproportionately harm humanities and social science programs. This is not sustainability. It is austerity.
Moreover, this decision undermines the hard-won rights and protections of organized labor on our campus. It signals to graduate workers, faculty, and undergraduates that the University is willing to retaliate against collective action, even if it means damaging the institution’s reputation and diminishing its future. Such decisions create divisions among workers in academia in pitting current students against prospective ones, STEM fields against the humanities, and faculty against administration.
We will not allow these divisive policies to continue unchallenged. Higher education is not a corporate product to be sold at the expense of its workers and students. Profit should never take priority over education. For it to do so would be at a detriment to the public good, justice, and equal access to education for everyone. We call on BU’s leadership to reverse this decision, to stop scapegoating graduate workers, and to invest meaningfully in its humanities and social sciences programs. To do otherwise would not only harm the University but also align BU with a dangerous and regressive right-wing trend in higher education. If the administration chooses to continue on this path, they will face an organized resistance of students, workers, and faculty that is stronger than ever.
Does anyone know what the relevant “cohort sizes” was for philosophy for BU? (If they were admitting more students than they could reasonably support under the current agreement, and this would help them get to the number they could support very soon, this might not be an obviously bad thing, but the details would clearly matter.)
They admit 5 per year prior to the strike (or that’s the running average that the department aims to admit per year). No idea what’s gonna be the new numer.
Just thinking out loud. Not too committed to anything here so lmk if you see it differently:
This is the predictable downside of winning a union contract. That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a bad thing.
Sounds like the university was trying to have their cake and eat it by having larger cohorts and paying phds less than they should have.
But I imagine the worry is that BU may be on track to cut the grad program entirely.
As someone in a grad program that is not admitting new students and is almost certainly getting cut once my cohort graduates, I suspect that BU will be fine at least in the short term. When a program is about to be cut, they don’t send a statement to IHE. They just quietly eliminate the budget entirely. If the programs were on the immediate chopping block, I suspect they would not be all that concerned about maintaining their funding solvency. Why wouldn’t they just admit as many people as possible and then lock the door behind them?
Not a great sign, obviously, and God knows Higher Ed budgets are going to retreat like the glaciers once Trump 2 kicks off in earnest, but I *think* BU will be back in ’26-’27. Though I could be wrong.
The details are much more complicated than this. But for now, I would just push back on “the predictable downside of winning a union contract”. In this case, the university can easily pay the grad students the (minimally) living wage they won. They are choosing not to. They could choose to, instead. When we say stuff like this is “predictable” it comes dangerously close to treating it as necessary, rather than contingent, as inevitable, and as though there isn’t another way forward. Capitalism constrains us all, of course, but it’s not always the case that there is a need for negative consequences for unionization. This is a case where it was not such a need.
I don’t feel like your certainty is warranted. The idea that the University can just flip a switch and pay hundreds of employees thousands more without any knock-on budget effects is not intuitive to me.
The University IS paying the grad students the wage they won, so this doesn’t suggest that they cannot pay it; rather, the point is that it’s reasonable to expect budget shifts in response to a large instantaneous change like this.
Perhaps it isn’t a necessary knock-on effect of winning a large raise in general, but the term “predictable” need only indicate some probability, rather than certainty or necessity.
Yes, ‘union sympathizer’ is engaged in some overstatement. You’re right that university budgets are very complicated things with lots of stakeholders with often competing interests, and making the sausage isn’t as simple as looking at the total operating budget, being impressed by its size, and concluding that grad student hiring ‘can easily’ remain on pace. (People like to do this with the federal government, too, for whatever their pet policy goals are.)
Also, and as any economist will tell you, making something (hiring grad students) more expensive is very likely going to result in less of that thing. This is because that thing becomes less attractive relative to whatever alternatives the relevant agent has. This isn’t a ‘capitalism’ thing; it’s a decision-making thing. And it isn’t a claim of necessity or ‘need’, either.
I am Director of Graduate Studies in the philosophy department at BU. I can confirm that a decision was made by administrators at BU to freeze applications to PhD programs in the humanities and social sciences for one year (and only one year). I can report that the department had no control at all over this decision, and it was delivered to us as a fait accompli. Prior to this decision being made, our department submitted a report to our administration on our PhD program, highlighting the many strengths of the program, and in particular our unusually competitive admissions process and our extraordinarily high academic placement rate (one of the highest in philosophy: https://lookerstudio.google.com/u/0/reporting/d0e72e02-3e03-4a95-b41b-a24aa6524529/page/6zXD?ref=apda.ghost.io ). The university administration has assured us that our status in the profession, and as a leading department in the humanities at BU, has not gone unnoticed, and will be taken into account in future decisions regarding admissions. We have also been assured that this is a temporary emergency measure needed for budgetary reasons. I do believe BU aspires to be a leading research university and will right the ship before the next admissions cycle. Meanwhile, we extend our sympathies to everyone who would have applied to our program this year.
Qua just-retired placement director at BU, just wanted to add a different link that is more easily readable and concerns our more recent placement: http://placementdata.com/blog
This is an example of the classic trend of union contracts coming at the expense of (future/not-yet-hired/not-yet-admitted) students/labor. The harm to them is hidden, because it is exacted on the counterfactual students rather than the actual ones. Some may be tempted to argue this harm is solely responsible for the university, who could ignore the increased costs. But the idea that the universities should respond inelastically by just maintaining (even upping) cohorts is an insane model of financial responsibility for a non-profit which seeks to steward itself for the coming centuries.
There is a reasonable question of whether it actually is a harm to counterfactual students that they don’t enter a PhD program. There are more philosophy PhDs produced every year than there are jobs looking for philosophy PhDs. Restricting the total number of philosophy PhDs produced every year deprives some people of the option of entering a PhD program, but makes it more likely for each person who does get a PhD to be placed in the kind of job they are looking for. Given the amount of randomness in the job market, it may actually be better for prospective PhD students that there be fewer total admissions, with higher pay, so that those who do enter the PhD have less precarity both during and at the end of their degree, and because a lot of people find it easier to change career plans earlier rather than later. If the union ensures this paternalistic treatment of prospective PhD students, that may be overall a good thing it is doing.
(Though it’s probably better if the reduction in admissions occurs more in the departments that have worse placement, while departments with strong placement records maintain their numbers.)
I think you’re probably right about this, Dr. Easwaran. And yet, as someone who has yet to make it through the door, it breaks my heart to admit it. Would you have any advice for students like myself who might very well wind up inscribed under the ‘necessary cuts’ column? (sincere question, not being glib).
I’ve done my best to make myself an attractive candidate for admission (5 odd publications, multiple presentations at professional-level conferences, 3 language minors (French, German, Latin) university-funded research projects, 4.00 major GPA, etc.). In short, I’ve been targeting this goal since my freshman year. And yet, according to my advisors it’s still a coin-toss as to whether any programs will give me a second thought. It’s a horrible, infuriating feeling, and if I weren’t so committed to the ‘dream’, I would have abandoned the discipline long ago. And having my prospects narrowed, even marginally, due to the internal machinations of university administrations, is equally frustrating.
What would you do, if you were in my shoes?
The advice for someone in this situation is the advice for someone at all further points in the academic humanities job pipeline:
1) You must (sooner rather than later) understand that the process is not a meritocracy, and dwelling on all the things you have done to make yourself an attractive candidate for your goal (grad school, a job after grad school, etc.) is only going to make you spiral. You have not failed because you didn’t do well enough; you’ve failed because there are more qualified people than there are slots, and it’s effectively random whether you’re one of the qualified people who gets chosen for the slot.
2) Stop freaking out until you have cause to freak out. That you can’t apply to BU this cycle is basically irrelevant. There are other grad programs. If you get into none of those, perhaps you can freak out. But getting bent out of shape about not having the possibility of applying to one of the hundred great places out there is not conducive to happiness.
3) Have a backup plan for what to do if academia does not work out.
4) (Exclusive to the graduate admissions phase.) Reflect on the fact that getting into grad school is the easiest and least stressful part of the whole pipeline, and so if you’re having trouble here, you will want to find some way to better gird yourself for the tough part, which is what happens at the end of grad school, when it’s still a “coin-toss” whether the jobs to which you apply will give you a second thought, and where the machinations of university administrations has much more consequential effects on whether there is any position to which you can apply in the first place.
My advice is – don’t identify you love for philosophy with a love of specific institutions and career paths. If you are willing to go to great effort to study and practice philosophical thinking and dialogue, there are many ways to do so that do not involve admission to or employment within academic departments at universities. The danger of pursuing philosophy without a graduate education is that you will lack the right kinds of community, challenges, and formative experiences to grow into a serious scholar and thinker. The danger of pursuing philosophy within the academic system is that you will, along the way, replace come to substitute your commitment to philosophy with a commitment to those institutions.
I’m curious about your model of paternalism here. Do you think the PhD applicants are misled about the chances of success? Seems unlikely given how much public info there is about how hard it is to succeed. Or is it dunning-kruger effects, so an analysis problem rather than a data problem? Or are they confused about their preferences? Or is it time bias, valuing the grad school lifestyle in the short term even though it has low long term salary EV?
Here’s my hunch, based purely on my own experience (so take it however you will): Most grad students begin graduate study in their early or mid 20s and finish in their late 20s or early 30s. One’s values and preferences, both for the short term and the long, can change significantly during this period of life. Speaking for myself, at 24 I was comfortable with the idea of spending 6-8 years in graduate school with no guarantee of a job afterwards. By the time I was 30, things were quite different, especially since I had found a partner and got married during this period. I now have to justify accepting dicey career prospects, location inflexibility, and lack of stability not only to my older and wiser self but also to my partner, who now wishes to have children, too. What seemed like an acceptable risk at the start of graduate school now seems unacceptable—but the problem is mind. I was appropriately informed of the risks by mentors, advisers, and my graduate program’s faculty; I simply didn’t fully *understand and appreciate* the risks until I gained a bit more life experience. I suspect I’m not alone in this.
Increased union power is correlated with increased wages and benefits for all workers. No doubt there can be short-term and localized costs. But putting things the way you have here risks missing the forest for the trees.
I was planning on applying to the PhD program at BU this cycle, and had begun working on my application on the online portal. The office of admissions blasted out an email to everyone who had done this, informing them of the change, and this actually happened a while ago.
On a personal level, I’m extremely disappointed about this decision. I certainly understand the arguments occurring in this thread as to whether any ethical harm has been done to “counterfactual students”, or whether this decision was a good one, on a pragmatic level. But I’d simply ask that everyone also be sensitive to the fact that many of us have indeed been somewhat disheartened by this decision. This truly is a depressingly difficult time to be trying to break into the discipline.
In anticipation of the inevitable: Yes, I’m familiar with the dangers of trying for a career in the discipline. They have been belabored to me ad nauseam. I have other prospects to fall back on if needed.
We are deeply disappointed too, and I just wanted to say sorry to you and all of the other prospective applicants to our program. Our grad students are brilliant, hard-working, and crazily well-read. I am teaching the first year proseminar right now and the first year PhD students’ philosophical knowledge puts me to shame–as does the actual level the philosophical discussion is conducted at; every time I walk out of class I think about how grateful I am that this is my job and that I get to learn from these people! They also are wonderful people who form wonderful community. It is really sad for me and the rest of the faculty that we won’t get to introduce new students into our very special department to help keep that community afloat. I think it is also really sad for our current grad students. But I think it’s extra sad for students who were excited about applying to BU’s incredible PhD program.
For the students who were applying to BU, or planning to study there, you should keep this in perspective. Given what has been said in the thread, this cut means there are 5 fewer PhD places to apply to this year. That is quite negligible. If the top 100 programs in the US each admit 5 students (some admit more, some less), that means there are roughly 500 places per year. Now this year there will only be 495.
I am sure it is most disappointing for people who wanted to be in a program in the Boston area (a great area!). But there are many other options, and if you want a career in philosophy, you have to be prepared to move. I have now lived and worked in four countries that span 9 time zones across the globe.
Here’s another spin, if we’re being brutally honest: BU faculty recently learned that next year their grading duties will be less subsidized than in years prior.
Of course, not strictly true: these additional grading duties will be reassigned to currently enrolled students, as it can be difficult even to compel faculty to attend departmental graduate student talks not prescribed in their contracts, never mind take on additional grading work. (If you know, you know.)
The system is broken, and faculty are skimming from the top just as much as anyone else in positions of power in academia. Doesn’t mean they aren’t overworked; but it does mean they’re as complicit in structural exploitation as the Bad Guy administrators.
BU is no exception, and prospective students should evaluate carefully how serious such programs are about cultivating future colleagues rather than subsidizing their tenured faculty’s 2/2 loads.
This is factually inaccurate, actually. You could ask us what is going to happen instead of attacking us, but it is not what you are imagining.
The general point that faculty are nett beneficiaries of the system whereby way more people train for jobs than there are jobs available is accurate though. Faculty benefit both due to faculty jobs that exist only because so many postgrads enrol, as well as the cheap labour thereby secured.
Indeed, as was pointed out below, the original post does seem quite venomous in its tone. And, as you say, it is simply a bare-knuckled attack rather than a question or attempt to elicit dialogue. I, for one, would be interested to hear the BU faculty’s side of the story. So, if OP isn’t interested in doing so, then I’ll ask in good faith: What’s going to happen in response to this cut in grading subsidization? Is it the case that the cut will occur in the form suggested by OP’s post, and, if so, what changes to existing procedures would it entail, exactly?
I second what Michaela is saying. This post is highly inaccurate, and seems to be motivated by ill will.
An oddly cynical remark to direct at BU. But to address the last paragraph, specifically, it’s doubly odd to include BU among “such programs.” After all, given BU’s placement record, it would seem the faculty members, in fact, do a commendable job of “cultivating future colleagues.”
This doesn’t necessarily seem like a bad thing. There are not enough secure, permanent jobs for all the PhDs currently being produced by universities.
Are all PhD students really deserving of lifelong academic employment? At least from the perspective of undergraduates, I’m inclined to think not.
I’m not sure what the perspective of undergraduates has to do with it. My comment was about the institution of higher education more generally, and the fact that it is currently training many people to do jobs that don’t exist. Especially in light of the fact that in the U.S. one’s ability to access goods like housing and healthcare is tied to employment, it strikes me as unethical to push for more young people to enter PhD programs without also pushing for more secure, permanent jobs at the other end.
If the price of pretzels goes up, you can afford fewer pretzels. If the price of graduate students goes up, you can afford fewer graduate students. That part seems pretty straightforward.
Whether there’s “other” money that can be taken from somewhere else sort of misses this basic economic point. The BU budget was substantially affected by the new contracts, and that’s going to have consequences.
“If the price of pretzels goes up, you can afford fewer pretzels.”
This sounds like common sense, but only because of an implicit equivocation in how we resolve the meaning of “fewer pretzels.”
It is of course true that – holding your budget constant – the higher the price of pretzels the fewer the maximum number of pretzels you could afford. But of course almost no one is currently buying the maximum number of pretzels they can afford. Indeed, given my rate of consumption of pretzels, the price could easily double or triple or more without affecting my ability to afford to buy pretzels whenever I want them, given the flexibility in my snack budget and the relatively small percentage of that budget consumed by pretzel purchases.
As is so often the case, the tautological version of the claim is obviously true, but not particularly relevant to evaluating the substantive point at hand. Whether the university can afford to support the same or a greater number of graduate students as it did before graduate student compensation increased is very much a matter of whether and how money can be redirected from other sources.
Yes, if something costs more, you’ll have to spend more money to get it, and that money will have to come from somewhere. But no one is missing this point.
I think people who automatically dismiss the university’s decision as ‘retaliatory’, and who say that BU ‘can easily’ keep bringing in as many students, purely on the basis of the BIG NUMBER that is their operating budget, might be missing this point. Or, more precisely, they are missing the fact that (or pretending it is not a fact that) the higher marginal costs of grad students has to be covered by foregoing other good things the budget could be spent on if the number of grad students is to stay the same.
The actual point of the common sense pretzels remark has to do with this last point. If you raise the price of some option, that makes it less preferable relative to whatever your alternatives are (all else equal). It is not about affordability per se — whether the university *can* do this or that — but comparative attractiveness of the things it can do.
What you’re saying is all reasonable, but the cost of grad students is just not that comparable to grocery store dry goods. Grad students are a signficant part of how BU maintains and possibly increases their social status as a university, and their social status as a university is also a real part of how money money BU has. What are the other comparably attractive alternative here? Becoming more undergrad-centric? Shifting to a more physical/life science grad population (since they are usually less pro-union)? Banking more on faculty research and research centers for that social status? For most of these altneratives, having a competitively good grad population usually boosts the value of them and is sometimes softly required for the alternative to work. Obviously there are exceptions (top tier SLACs with few or no grad programs like Haverford), but they’re exceptions.
Could you say more about what these now more attractive alternatives with a smaller grad population are for BU?
I think the thrust of that (useful) comment is that the answer would be “literally anything else that the University spends money on,” because the relative cost ratios have shifted. As one thing gets more expensive, then any other thing becomes (comparatively) less expensive.
For example, suppose the university wanted to hire more faculty, but was “out of money” in that regard. If graduate students get more expensive, then those new faculty get (comparatively) less expensive, so that’d be an opportunity to redirect resources.
The same would be true for new buildings, landscaping, green work spaces, or whatever else: if something somewhere/anywhere in a budget gets more expensive, resources will get reallocated somewhere/anywhere where they aren’t.
Despite others’ comments, I’m still confused why BU would do this. A lot of universities have had new grad unions with first contracts that demand more money for grads without temporarily suspending new admissions (or even contracting cohort sizes in many cases). Just to name a few very recent ones: Syracuse, MIT, Johns Hopkins, Minnesota, Northwestern, UChicago. I’d have to look at the contract, but maybe BUGWU’s is more “expensive” than others, but my guess is that it’s not that much more than the ones listen above. Endowment size also doesn’t seem to be a big issue since some of the above schools are firly close to BU (although maybe BU has some sort of yearly cash flow problem? Well endowed schools sometimes are overly austere about their yearly cash flow). If it’s not a not-enough-money issue, I also highly doubt it’s a financial logistics problem since the contract negotiations have been going on for more than a year, during which time university finance depts. definitely have enough time to figure stuff out. But I hesitate to call this retaliation because BU seems to be shooting themselves in the foot more than effectively retaliating against any college of dept. they’d be hypothetically aiming at. Some public justification from BU seems to be called for here!