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| Hearsay: |
A professor on the outs at Columbia decides to out the whole process of cloning that is the MFA pyramid scheme. There are whole parts of this I can’t follow, which makes me think it was written in anger. How fun and sad!
There is no point in being coy. Despite the presence of a small minority of talented and committed faculty members and an equally small core of serious, gifted students, what prevails at the writing division in the School of the Arts, and to some extent at the School of the Arts as a whole, is an institutionalized and self-perpetuating culture of mediocrity so out of step with the general climate of excellence for which Columbia is rightly known that most would be shocked to be apprised of the details. A senior colleague of mine recently put it quite neatly: “Leaderless, rudderless, standardless. The worst among us sense the vacuum and rush to fill it with their own kind. So sad. How I wish I could believe there will be some surcease, some righting of the ship in the foreseeable [future]. Alas, I fear it will not be so.” I would like to believe otherwise.
Allow me to elaborate. A short list of documentable facts—I’ll begin with the smaller issues and proceed to the larger ones—would include master’s theses that are routinely passed despite the fact that the level of writing exhibited in them is remedial at best and virtually illiterate at worst, tenure-track hires of close personal friends of the chair who have, quite literally, not a single publication credit to their names and who are hired over candidates with two and three books—resulting in a situation in which students often have more experience and more publications than their instructors, and an institutional culture in which those who have done nothing for 10 or 15 years hire others like themselves in order to make their own lack of accomplishment less visible and, for the same reason, discriminate against those who are active in their fields.
Thoughts, people? I know you have them. (From Backwards City)
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April 24th, 2006 at 2:23 pm
Hmm this is sad and interesting.
Hopefully it will spark some more balanced debate, as a professor denied tenure and apparently writing in anger is maybe not the best judge.
My main question is how does Columbia compare to other large programs here? It seems to me like there are a lot of adjunct professors of questionable qualification and such at other big schools. (Small schools tend to have only a few professors so mostly quality ones.)
At the same time, for me, Columbia is one of the few schools out there with at least some really exciting faculty members. Most schools seem to have nobody interesting, even if they are qualified.
The cash cow problem is certainly spot on, though at least everyone is aware of that.
April 24th, 2006 at 2:55 pm
Oh man, people love to hate MFA programs. I mean, what he’s saying isn’t un-right. But it’s like, I don’t know, why don’t people get all bent out of shape about MFA visual art programs, and unleash the whole “you can’t learn to be a great artist there” bit?
I spent 3 years in an MFA program, not nearly as revered as Columbia’s, but very serviceable. I learned a lot. I did a lot of writing. I did this mostly by keeping my head down, ignoring my classmates’ constant bellyaching about how terrible the program was, etc, and staying out of the program politics.
And you know what? It was GREAT!
April 24th, 2006 at 2:57 pm
Likewise, my impression has universally been that EVERY MFA program, from Iowa and Columbia to Podunk State has a ton of mediocre students. I think you have to accept that goin anywhere.
Is the author implying Columbia has more than its peers? I’d like to know…
April 24th, 2006 at 3:56 pm
I recently received an MFA from Columbia in poetry. It was expensive even though they offered small discounts for some of the students. I had to decide between Columbia and Ann Arbor’s poetry program–which would have paid me a decent stipend to go. But at the time, I didn’t know any of the poetry profs at Ann Arbor. I think, in fact, the school didn’t even know who would be there the following year.
The visiting profs at Columbia were almost all fantastic. And the two tenured profs (Richard Howard and Lucie Brock Broido) devoted a tremendous amount of time to the students. They were good editors and they made our poems better. Yes, they had favorites. But, look, all teachers do. Yes, they liked a certain type of writing but if a poem was good, solid, they saluted it.
Was it worth it for the tens of thousands I now owe to the gov? I don’t know. Would I do it again, probably yes.
There was one HORRIBLE writer in my program. The teachers privately acknowledged this and said they “had” to let that person in (they wouldn’t say why but I am guessing some sort of recommendation politics). Everyone else was pretty good. We all wrote bad poems at times. But even great writers do. It happens. Maybe one problem was that a few students were just wealthy slackers whose parents paid the bill. They were just cruising along after college and not working really hard. But all of those kids–at least in my year–were decent writers. Every once in a blue moon they came in with something pretty good. I’m sure their application portfolio was good.
Also, it was great being in the School of the Arts. With the film school upstairs there were often lots of interesting films showing for free and directors, screenwriters, and actors who would come to talk to the film students and some of us writers would sneak in. One time David Lynch came and gave a fantastic talk about his process.
April 27th, 2006 at 6:08 pm
Columbia’s great for rich kids… the ones who can afford to spend over $100,000 for art school ($35,000 a year tuition for three years, plus the costs of living in NYC). So, no, I don’t think these arguments apply to all MFA programs — just the ones that refuse to fund their students.
I’m in a funded MFA program and there are a handful of spoiled rich kids here. God, their writing is tedious and pretentious. I can’t imagine a whole program full of those people.
April 28th, 2006 at 1:43 pm
The idea that only rich kids are willing to pay money to go to art school is too naive to really comment on. Maybe it is stupid to pay a lot of money for an art degree, but many non-rich people do it.
Anyway, the counter article appeared in the Columbia Spectator today:
http://www.columbiaspectator.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2006/04/28/4451c71991adc
April 28th, 2006 at 10:03 pm
Re: comment #3
Actually, Amy, people are saying that all the time about visual arts programmes. Writers tend not to notice because they’re too busy listening to each other bitch about their own MFA programmes, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. Regardless of whether the students are rich or poor, anyone who shells out for an MFA is only proving the old chestnut about a fool and his money. Virginia Woolf said that a writer needs a room of one’s own and an income–paying money to write doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in that light.
April 28th, 2006 at 10:03 pm
Sorry, that should be comment #2 above.