More UChicago programs are pausing new Ph.D. admissions for the 2026-27 academic year.
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The University of Chicago’s Arts and Humanities Division is now pausing new Ph.D. student admissions for the 2026–27 academic year across all departments except philosophy and one program within the music department. The move expands on last week’s announcement from the dean that about half of all departments would pause admissions, while the rest would reduce the number of admissions.
The departments that won’t be accepting Ph.D. students now include art history, cinema and media studies, classics, comparative literature, East Asian languages and civilizations, English language and literature, Germanic studies, linguistics, Middle Eastern studies, Romance languages and literatures, Slavic languages and literatures, and South Asian languages and civilizations, plus the music department’s ethnomusicology and history and theory of music programs.
The Social Sciences Division has also announced it will not admit Ph.D. students into four programs in 2026-27: anthropology, political economy, social thought, and conceptual and historical studies of science. The UChicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy and Practice had earlier announced it was pausing Ph.D. admissions and the Harris School of Public Policy said it was pausing admissions for the Harris Ph.D. (in public policy studies), the political economy Ph.D. and the master of arts in public policy with certificate in research methods.
The announcements reflect how the deeply indebted university is responding to budget issues. But UChicago is just one of multiple highly selective universities—including Boston University and the University of Pennsylvania—that have announced over the past year that they were freezing or scaling back Ph.D. admissions and programs amid financial pressures and other factors.
UChicago had formed committees of faculty and staff to plan over the summer for changes within the Arts and Humanities Division. But on Aug. 12, division dean Deborah Nelson announced the initial pause, stressing that “this decision is not the recommendation of any committee.”
Then on Wednesday, Nelson wrote a new email, obtained by Inside Higher Ed, announcing a revised plan “based on the strong recommendation of the PhD committee and department chairs.”
“After the announcement last week, I met with all department chairs and consulted with the faculty-led committee on PhD programs,” Nelson wrote. “Nearly all faculty leadership agreed that instead of admitting students to only a select number of departments, they preferred a broader pause for the division so we can spend time this coming year to collectively assess and better navigate the challenges we face.”
A department chair who asked not to be named confirmed to Inside Higher Ed that chairs met with the dean last Friday to discuss the pause, and most department chairs agreed it should be applied throughout the division to allow for more collaborative work during the academic year on the future of Ph.D. education at UChicago.
Nelson also wrote in her Wednesday email that she “heard from many faculty that the initial decision caught them off guard. The timing of my initial announcement about PhD cohorts was partly driven by deadlines to submit information to software platforms that would have made semi-public our decisions to open or close applications to programs. And I wanted to make sure our community knew about these decisions first.”
In an email, a university spokesperson simply said, “As Dean Nelson noted in her email, the decision to revise the plan for PhD admissions in the Arts & Humanities Division for academic year 2026-27 was based on the strong recommendation of the PhD committee and department chairs. Crown, Harris and SSD have also made announcements regarding pauses in PhD admissions for the 2026-2027 academic year.”
Clifford Ando, the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor of Classics, History and the College, told Inside Higher Ed Thursday that “we easily have the resources to support the humanities without inflicting cuts disproportionate to the humanities’ role in creating the financial crisis.”
“We are in the unique position of being a well-resourced university that has been so reckless with our resources that we now have to make decisions as if we were a poor one,” Ando said.
