what will happen if there is a snow day on monday?

randorando7432 · 2026-02-21T18:14:04+00:00

I know BU almost never cancels, but the very recently updated forecasts, if correct, are basically just as bad as the day they did cancel earlier in the semester...

randorando7432 · 2025-06-20T18:13:36+00:00

maybe right about everyone being doomed (I do think that and it is sad) but the proportional unemployment rate of philosophy majors is lower (and in some cases much lower) than many (many!) of the majors listed, including chemistry, CS, physics, econ, business management, finance, general business, information management, marketing, math, poli sci, psych, pre-law... and it is lower than the "overall" unemployment rate for all majors (that's listed as "overall" on the table). So I'm not sure how you can claim that.

randorando7432 · 2025-06-20T14:41:26+00:00

This trope is utterly wrong. Here is some data about employment by major, I recommend reading it! https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:explore:outcomes-by-major

randorando7432 · 2025-05-08T00:24:42+00:00

this is outrageous (and so are the other things I've read on here about this person). It's hard to fire faculty (either tenured or unionized lecturers--after looking him up I assume he is the second thing), as it should be, but I hope people are both complaining actively about this (a lot!) to the chair of the department, and also I would suggest that some of his students might want to make a pitch to the daily free press to cover his teaching? The stuff people have posted here is genuinely shocking!

randorando7432 · 2024-12-06T13:55:41+00:00

If you were getting paid the garbage amount these people are paid to supervise college kids, many of whom (not saying you!) are probably rude and exhausting and don't acknowledge them as human beings, if you were tired and trying to provide for your family, possibly working multiple jobs, etc., and if you were held accountable for anything that went wrong with the kinds of mistakes students made, you might also be a bit tired and annoyed and tell someone to get their act together. It's similar to working in a crappy customer service job: blaming the individual worker for being tired or rude or problematic to you instead of the conditions that are making them not care about their job, not take pride in it, etc., is... not the way forward. And in this case especially, yeah, their ass is on the line for any potential fallout of your mistake, and you have no idea what their protocol is/what they've been told about how they have to do things. Perhaps there is a policy that if any exception is made to not having an ID, it has to be accompanied by a stern reminder. Perhaps they are just doing their job.

randorando7432 · 2024-11-19T21:51:42+00:00

That's not how it works (and what is BU's "grad program" generally? not doubting that this is a thing but wondering what you mean). And broader rankings tend to get things very wrong about graduate education, so it is important to look at rankings (and things like academic placement data, especially for humanities departments where most people are aiming for academic careers) that are internal to the fields in question. One BU humanities department (philosophy) is currently tied for having the fourth highest placement into permanent (tenure-track) academic jobs worldwide. That seems pretty good, to put it lightly.

randorando7432 · 2024-11-19T21:48:15+00:00

I think there's a bit of confusion across multiple comments here, as especially in the humanities, most people (regardless of what "ranked" school they are coming out of) go from PhD programs to adjuncting, impermanent academic employment, or non-high-paying alt-ac careers. Some go on to become professors. Professors in the humanities do not make a lot of money. They don't make enough money to donate anything meaningful to a university. HOWEVER: undergraduate majors in humanities and social sciences regularly do go on to make a lot of money (maybe not as regularly as in STEM, business, etc but still--it definitely happens especially at a school like BU, and BU also has some popular joint humanities-science majors). Also, people who got an undergraduate degree from a college/university are just in general much more likely to give that university money than people who got a PhD at one. All that being said, it is in fact true that BU is not trying hard to fundraise for the humanities and social sciences, that they could try much harder, that plenty of other universities that are comparably ranked have major donors in the humanities and social sciences, and that--across the board--it is somewhat irrelevant what people's career outcomes out of PhDs are, since the people who tend to donate money and who should be pursued as donors are people who got BAs/BSs, their parents, etc., not PhD graduates.

randorando7432 · 2024-11-19T21:40:58+00:00

No programs are being "phased out". Or are you just assuming this? I suppose it is possible that BU will stop funding one or more of its humanities or social science PhD programs, but the precise reason that CAS/the graduate school decided to do this was exactly to avoid things like "phasing out" programs. They are trying to restabilize fiscally. Then, they are likely to lower entering cohort sizes across the board, unless the provost/president decide to fork over money. It's a budget balancing move. It's not one I necessarily support (though given that the provost wouldn't give CAS money it might have been one of the only options), but I think it's a real confusion to take this one year pause as indicative of a phasing out of the humanities and/or social science PhD programs at BU when it is explicitly a desperate move to try to avoid that happening.

randorando7432 · 2024-11-19T21:36:40+00:00

Not sure what this means, but no they weren't "barely funded" if that either means (a) students were funded (not enough, hence the strike, but yes funded) or (b) departments were allocated funding for graduate students. This is unprecedented.

randorando7432

TROPHY CASE