Administrators should save the linguistics graduate program

High-level administrators at Rice University are uttering half-truths to graduate students so that they stop asking questions about the alleged review of the linguistics doctoral program. Having gone more than six months with no official communication regarding the review, I and four other graduate students in linguistics met with Provost George McLendon, Dean of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies Paula Sanders, and Dean of Humanities Nicolas Shumway. The meeting, which occurred Oct. 22, was for us a simple fact-finding mission. What we found instead was a misrepresentation of facts clearly designed to portray our faculty as second-string and our program as underperforming.