UPDATE (May 22, 2011): William J. Cobb, the Director of the creative writing Master of Fine Arts program at Pennsylvania State University, earlier this week issued the following public statement: "In this our 25th anniversary year, I'm glad to announce that our MFA Program is very much alive and well, and will continue to receive considerable financial support, including fellowships, teaching assignments, and full tuition waivers. To put this news in context: In March of this year the College of Liberal Arts announced it was withdrawing financial support for teaching assistantships in the MFA Program, due to budget cutbacks at the state funding level. Our faculty and students deeply disagreed with this decision, and lobbied extensively to mitigate its damaging effects. After numerous administrative meetings and much discussion, we've succeeded in our cause. In fact we are not retracting but expanding, with two new degree options in the works--an integrated BA/MA creative writing degree and a combined MFA/PhD--in addition to our traditional two-year MFA. In the last two years we've also welcomed new faculty members Toni Jensen, author of the story collection From the Hilltop (U of Nebraska Press) and Elizabeth Kadetsky, author of the memoir First There Is a Mountain (Little Brown), as well as a new Writer-in-Residence series, which most recently featured Susan Orlean and George Saunders. In these difficult times in which many universities are facing budget cutbacks, ours is a triumph of persistence and support for the creative literary arts."
ORIGINAL STORY (April 6, 2011): According to an article in The Daily Collegian, Pennsylvania State University is preparing to cut a graduate program ranked in the Top 5 in the world in its field.
In an article published on April 1, the undergraduate newspaper for the 45,000-student flagship campus of Penn State revealed that the university "will no longer have the funds to admit new candidates into the [Master of Fine Arts in creative writing] program." The creative writing MFA at Penn State offers concentrations in fiction, poetry and nonfiction.
The decision comes despite the program's prominence in the field's controlling national rankings, published annually by Poets & Writers magazine, a top trade publication. For the 2010-2011 admissions cycle, the nonfiction program at Penn State was ranked in the Top 5 in the world; overall, the nonfiction program ranks in the Top 10 globally among all graduate creative writing programs in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and China.
Little explanation has yet been given for why the University elected to cut one of its most prestigious graduate programs.
The rankings for the fiction and poetry MFA programs at Penn State are almost as strong as for the university's nonfiction program: in the 2011 MFA rankings, published by Poets & Writers in September of 2010, the creative writing MFA program at Penn State ranked in the Top 50 overall, the Top 50 in poetry, the Top 40 in fiction, the Top 10 in selectivity, the Top 25 in funding, and the Top 40 in graduate placement. In fact, the program has improved its relative standing in the field every year rankings have been published since 2003, and is scheduled to be ranked in the Top 40 overall (at #34) in the 2012 MFA rankings forthcoming later this year.
College of the Liberal Arts Dean Susan Welch explained the decision to make deep cuts to the university's English Department, saying that the department has a smaller enrollment of undergraduate students than other departments, according to The Daily Collegian. The university's larger Psychology Department, for instance, will suffer few budget cuts, according to Welch.
The university's English Department has long been one of the crown jewels of the University. Last year, the English Literature doctoral program was ranked in the Top 15 by the National Research Council, the leading doctoral-program assessment body in the United States.
A graduate of Dartmouth College, Harvard Law School and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Seth Abramson is the author of two collections of poetry, Northerners (Western Michigan University Press, 2011), winner of the 2010 Green Rose Prize, and The Suburban Ecstasies (Ghost Road Press, 2009). Presently a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he is also the co-author of the forthcoming third edition of The Creative Writing MFA Handbook (Continuum, 2012).
Universities also have to look at the ROI for the programs that they offer. They don't want to churn out grads who can't find work... especially a prestigious, public university like Penn State.
MFAs are artists and art gallery administrators, writers, book illustrators and publishers, symphony performers, conductors and directors, ballet dancers, etc., etc. -- and the people who get hired to do graphic arts, package design and advertising for whatever business you may be in.
Also, relations between English Department students in Ph.D. and MFA programs is pretty horrific _everywhere_. That's an old, old story, I'm afraid.
An excerpt:
"Nearly two months after [the University of California at Berkeley] reinstated three other [athletic] teams that were slated for elimination, the school said Friday that baseball would survive after a massive fundraising effort by alumni, former players, parents of current players and other team supporters.
Cal said financial commitments totaling $9 million were presented to Chancellor Robert Birgeneau on Thursday by former Golden Bears pitcher and fundraising leader Stu Gordon. The total was short of the initial $10 million goal, so additional money is still needed in this effort -- but the Cal administration was confident enough to say the program would be saved."
Why can't this happen at Penn State? If the primary concern is for the integrity of the MFA program there, i.e. the vitality of the Arts at Penn State -- as I know it is; this is certainly about more than just faculty jobs and giving undergrads a chance to attend a non-competitive MFA program -- why isn't there a fundraising effort under way to salvage the program? Certainly faculty and students might play a role, but even more importantly alumni and other friends of the program -- not to mention PSU officials (and there _should_ be many of them) and other local community members who care about the Arts.
I am outraged.
From what I’ve heard, the decision came from very high and no one was prepared. The English department has slimmed back the program in the past few years, but this cut was a shock to everyone. For many adjuncts, grad students, and faculty, it came as a line item in departmental meeting minutes, and they were as blindsided as the undergrads who found out when the courses they expected to take were not listed in the spring schedule.
While I *definitely* appreciate your article bringing light to the story and generating discussion (thank you!!), I have to say that comparing our situation to an athletic program isn't quite accurate. Let's face it: people in the U.S. care more about sports than they do about arts. If this were a problem of a Penn State sports team facing cuts, you can bet the fans and alums would scream. But writing?
Right now, I'm reaching out to fellow MFAers so we can understand what happened and what is happening so we can write and shout to whoever will listen about how &$%#& pissed off we are.
Do the MFA alums have money? No. Do we have supporters? I hope so. In the three years I attended, there were two-dozen MFAs. The beauty of the program was its size and now that size is a liability.
But can we write? Yes. I am writing to President Graham B. Spanier (president@psu.edu); the dean of the Liberal Arts College, Dr. Susan Welch (swelch@psu.edu); and the head of the English department, Dr. Robin Schulze (rgs3@psu.edu)--who thinks the program can be salvaged with this 5-year BA-to-MFA B.S.
I may also write to the Centre Daily Times (cdtonline@centredaily.com) and the Daily Collegian, (Penn State's undergrad paper: collegian@psu.edu).
I encourage anyone saddened by the destruction of an excellent arts program by an esteemed university to help us fight the good fight and encourage Dr. Schulze to give tenured writing faculty more say in how the program is restructured. Because now, they have none, and a once-terrific program is being re-designed by people who do not value writing as art.
On an institutional level, how can Penn State call itself a university when it is cutting an important programs. A university is not a business, nor should it be run like a business. While university budgets needs to be maintained, that does not mean university resources should be allocated to those departments that can bring in money from selling intellectual property. Academic departments should not justify their existence based on their market value. After all the market is fickle, and unpredictable, and it is naive to have blind faith in it. A major that may not be hot today, may be the most lucrative major 40 years from. We won't know. So when Penn State drops its MFA program, it should change its name to the "Pennsylvania Technical School" because that's what it will be.
But if you want to talk about economics, and the market, the fine arts have an important role in the development in the American economy. The one thing the Chinese and Indians cannot and will not beat us at is creativity.
But at the risk of diverting the discussion, may I ask where the "Top 5" claim comes from? The link to the rankings takes me to a Top 50 listing that puts PSU MFA at 44 overall rank; 48 poetry; 38 fiction; and 10 nonfiction. Not that this affects many of the arguments for keeping the program, but it's a little misleading to call it "a graduate program ranked in the Top 5 in the world in its field."
"Our accomplished faculty writers have earned some of the most prestigious writing awards and honors, including Guggenheim, NEA, Ingram Merrill, Stegner, Dobie-Paisano, Bunting and Fulbright Senior Scholar Fellowships; Lamda Literary, Whiting Writers and O. Henry Awards, as well as numerous Pushcart Prizes. They have been in residence at places like Breadloaf, Yaddo, Millay and MacDowell Colonies and have had their work published in journals such as Poetry, The New York Times, Esquire, The Village Voice, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Antioch Review, Epoch, New Letters, Gulf Coast, The Clackamas Literary Review, Descant and Texas Bound among many, many others.
Current MFA faculty includes fiction writers William J. Cobb, Charlotte Holmes, and Toni Jensen, poets Robin Becker and Julia Spicher Kasdorf and nonfiction writers Toby Thompson, Elizabeth Kadetsky, and Brian Lennon."
Still,April 19 is McDonald's Nat'l Hiring Day
I think you've admirably summarized the sort of Neolithic view of the Arts that leads directly to the death of entire civilizatiÂons.
Thank you.
S.
I'm guessing that, of all the cockamamie reasons PSU gave for axing one of its most prestigious graduate programs, the argument that the program is now and always has been producing bad work (or homogeneous work) was _not_ one of those considered -- ever. Probably because it's preposterous. There are bad writers inside and outside the MFA system -- but unlike living in abject poverty, having two or three funded years to write is something that talented writers _can_ take advantage of to the betterment of their writing.
Seth
/off topic Anyway, I didn't apply to Penn State because they required the TOEFL.