Yale Daily News has another ridiculous article about my department. I can’t get rid of a suspicion that there is an administrator with a vendetta behind all this onslaught of absolutely idiotic, dishonest pieces about the department.
I could discuss many of the department’s problems but these articles are simply deranged.
I googled and read the most recent article they had about the Spanish Department.
You might be right about administrators with an agenda promoting this. Two years without any new graduate students is not good, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a campus newspaper print an article about graduate student recruitment problems in a single department. They usually write about broader trends and programs that are doing really well, but not the ones that are struggling to get students. And publicizing the fact that no one wants to do Spanish at Yale in the newspaper is just going to make it that much harder to recruit the next few classes. The kind of people who get in at Yale are going to get in at other top universities and those other places are going to steer those applicants to this news if they haven’t already found it themselves. And with the limited information incoming graduate students have, the ones with other good choices will take those other good choice because why take the risk with whatever might be going on at Yale.
A few years from now they will have a sudden drop in PhD production and that could very well be used against them. My university has nothing like the money at Yale, but the number of PhDs produced over five and ten year periods has been used to justify major program cuts and money reallocation, even in situations where departments could reasonably argue that they just had a short string of bad luck with recruitment and students who didn’t finish for reasons (death, illness, sick family members) that had nothing to do with the program’s quality or actions.
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It’s the fourth article on the subject! It’s like the university has no other news. There is definitely something going on your warrant this kind of am obsession.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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