The program is not without its critics. Virtually all of the first year s crop of students came from people rejected by the U of C English Ph.D. program. Acceptance to MAPH came as a consolation prize in the same envelope as the rejection. Although the particular focus of MAPH is a product of Graff s interest in the culture wars and his pedagogical experimentation with teaching the conflicts, the real reason for its existence is financial. In an era of campus capitalism,graduate programs in the humanities and the social sciences have become the first ones invited to the guillotine.
Graduate students are, virtually by definition, a money-losing prospect.
While grad students in the physical sciences are crucial to complex money-making research projects, the humanities and the social sciences offer far fewer opportunities to turn a profit from scholarship. Graduate study traditionally has been a charitable enterprise. When John D. Rockefeller poured millions after millions into the University of Chicago, he did it to create a graduate institution with the best scholars in the world undergraduates, which today are the focus of every university, were largely an afterthought. Even during the era of President Robert Hutchins, deemed a golden age of undergraduate education, graduate students vastly outnumbered their counterparts in the College. Innovators like Hutchins have been replaced by a new managerial class of fundraising experts as university presidents like Hugo Sonnenschein.