Note: I did a poll on Twitter asking whether or not it’s tacky to criticize your graduate program as an alum, and most people said it isn’t (is this like Elon Musk doing a poll asking if he should step down as CEO?). But one person pointed out that it is, in fact, tacky. So, if anyone reads this and feels it’s tacky or inappropriate, let me know and I will take it down. And the bottom line is that I do not blame the students or faculty in any MFA program, including the one I attended, for what is happening at MFA programs generally.
Burn Your MFA: On the need to dismantle the MFA industrial complex
Most of my writing since June of this year has been about forgiveness, and particularly about the complexities of deciding if we can ever really forgive an institution that failed us. That’s because I’m writing a book on forgiveness, but around this time of year, many of us turn to the new year thinking of what we want to leave behind, whether that’s bad a bad habit or a bad relationship, but to drink to “auld lang syne” is to raise a glass to the past, not the future. Perhaps this is because we need to acknowledge the past in order to be free of it. But that means ceasing to look at it through the rose colored glasses of nostalgia and instead being willing to admit when an institution we once trusted failed or betrayed us in ways that might not be forgivable.
Recently I went back to an episode of the excellent podcast Throughline about nostalgia, which explains that during World War, I nostalgia was thought to be an actual disease, something that corrupted the minds of soldiers who could not stop longing for their homes as they stood in the mud and rot of trench warfare. But there’s another kind of nostalgia some of us feel sharply when a year turns, and that’s the nostalgia for a time before something traumatic or painful happened that we cannot seem to let go of. But is that really such a bad thing? If you point out to an institution that it damaged people, doesn’t that create a chain of accountability that might lead to some justice being done? Ideally. But not necessarily.
Yesterday, it was announced that Holy Names University, a 154 year-old Catholic college in Oakland, will be closing after the spring semester. The reasons are not dissimilar from the closure of another Oakland college, Mills, which cited declining enrollments and a lack of interest in the particular kind of education it provided. For Mills, that was being a women’s college. For Holy Names, it was being a Catholic one. The Holy Names sisters, like many other orders of women religious, are shrinking in number and rising in age. There are also multiple other Catholic colleges around the Bay Area in competition for a shrinking number of students who want a small, liberal arts experience, often at a very high tuition cost.
Mills was saved (for now) by a merger with Northeastern University, but Holy Names was unable to broker a deal with any of the other small local Catholic colleges to stay open, although its students will be guaranteed transfer to Dominican college. Many of HNU’s students were low-income students of color who depended on financial aid to attend the school. Dominican, located in Marin County, is nearly 80% white, and almost totally inaccessible by public transit. How those students from HNU will be able to afford to get to Dominican or live in Marin County is unclear. Clearer, however, is the troubling picture of the future for many other small colleges around the country, including the one that I attended for both my BA and my MFA.
In the 1990s and 2000s, there was an explosive growth in MFA programs. In 1994, there were 64 creative writing MFA programs in America. In 2016, there were 229 (I wasn’t able to find a statistic for 2022, since AWP, the central organization for academic creative writing programs, has no easily findable data… which is pretty suspicious). Only 53 of those MFA programs, however, offer full tuition remission, which means that the vast majority of students who get an MFA will graduate with debt. The program I attended currently charges nearly 25K a year in tuition for a two year program and does not guarantee financial aid.
Any kind of graduate degree is expensive, but when we’re talking about creative writing, who benefits? The program I attended and and where I later briefly returned to teach doesn’t even have full-time faculty for fiction any more and only one full-time creative nonfiction faculty member. Instead, like many other schools, it depends on a rotating series of “distinguished visiting writers,” which is just a fancier way of saying “adjunct.” This means the school saves money by skirting having to pay benefits, but it also means the students work with a different writer every semester, meaning the idea of mentoring in any sustained sense – the real reason many writers pursue an MFA – is basically bullshit.
When I was invited back to be a “distinguished” visiting writer (in my case the parentheses are very necessary), I was paid for a 50% teaching load for one semester, and was expected to attend every single on campus event, sometimes adding up to multiple events a week, even on days when I wasn’t teaching, which required a drive of over an hour each way, often fairly late in the evening. I was also asked to read student theses, meet with every student at least twice a semester for no less than half an hour (there were nearly twenty students), and provide written comments on every workshop submission as well as commenting on the comments students wrote one another for workshop (when they wrote them).
When I grumbled to other faculty that it seemed like more than a 50% job and that I had to continue working part time at Berkeley (where I have a union secured full time position) in order to have health insurance, because distinguished visiting writers apparently don’t deserve that, I was told not to complain. Frankly, I made some mistakes as a teacher that semester that I regret to this day, and I do not blame my students, who were talented, good people, paying a ton of money, who deserved more dedicated faculty.
But I wasn’t paid enough to be dedicated, and saw a lot of how the MFA sausage gets made, and it ruined my desire to ever teach in an MFA program again. I guess that I have not forgiven the school for starting a program that they couldn’t really afford to fund, promising the students that they’d support them after graduation, and did nothing to prepare them for the real hard work of being a writer, like finding an agent, writing pitches, and building a platform (at the time, there was no discussion of this at all in the program, so I offered a workshop to my students on these things in my free time). Like a lot of people, I had a vision of what teaching in an MFA program would be like, and the reality was nothing like that vision. I’d had such amazing teachers in my own MFA days. How did they do it? Back then, they had tenure, I guess. They were paid enough to expend the extra effort their students deserved.
The experience also destroyed my relationship with the college. Soon after I taught there they added an addendum to their advertisements for visiting writers that alumni weren’t allowed to apply for those jobs (I’m sorry, fellow alums). I went on to publish several books and even won some awards for my writing, but none of this got listed on the MFA alumni publication page (and I don’t blame the program staff, who were similarly underpaid and overworked). I never heard from the program again unless they were raising money… and yet, they still couldn’t seem to afford to pay health insurance for their visiting writers, offer students a full tuition ride or, from what I could tell, provide any sort of helpful networking opportunities with agents or editors.
Again, I don’t blame the students, and I don’t blame the faculty. I blame the administration, which approved the program knowing that it wouldn’t be fully funded, told students they’d have jobs teaching writing after graduation and then treated alumni who did get jobs teaching composition at the college like shit (this is not just me… I’ve spoken off the record to many other alums about this). And the administrations at many small colleges right now are also likely to blame for the schools’ collapses. It’s true that we can easily point fingers Covid and the economy for many small colleges closing. But we can also point fingers at colleges for adding hundreds of MFA, MBA, and MA programs that charge high tuition for degrees people arguably don’t even need.
This MFA industrial complex is essentially a cash grab taking advantage of students, parents, and faculty desperate for jobs in a brutal market. Instead of focusing on building a robust education for undergraduates and shoring up their endowments, so many small schools have instead added more and more graduate programs, including MFAs, in an attempt to make money, and then relied on part-time, poorly paid faculty to prop the programs up.
To be fair, public universities aren’t much better. The UCs, after all, are in the midst of a protracted strike by graduate students who can’t even afford to eat. And while Berkeley, for example, has resisted the impulse to add an MFA, it offers plenty of expensive credentials and graduate degrees through its extension program, but at least they can argue that it's attached to a highly ranked school. The average school with an MFA is likely to be one you haven’t heard of, and the top ten MFA programs will continue to produce most of the students who will go on to the Big Five publishing contracts and distinguished visiting writer gigs so many people dream of when they submit an application to an MFA program, and students will continue to graduate with debt, and having had an unfulfilling experience.
I’m not really interested in arguments about whether MFAs produce good writing or not. But I wonder if this is really about a reckoning about the soul of an educational institution. Who is a college for? In The Idea of a University, which I read as an undergraduate at the same college where the MFA disaster took place, Cardinal Newman writes:
“A university training is the great ordinary means to a great but ordinary end; it aims at raising the intellectual tone of society…It is the education which gives a [person] a clear conscious view of [their] own opinions and judgments, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them and a force in urging them.”
It seems that a school which puts the bottom line above the well being of its students and faculty is failing to really educate its students in the sense that Newman describes, which is also what the Jesuits call “cura personalis,” or care of the whole person. Very few small liberal arts colleges can really provide that any more. What students might be learning instead are the hypocrisies of an institution which will so often trumpet its small class atmosphere, caring relationships with faculty, and all of the other features which make a liberal arts education so appealing, but not really providing any of those things. I bought into this vision. So did thousands and thousands of other students. In some ways, I still believe in it. I recently traveled to Princeton for a talk and saw how that vision still so clearly exists for the very privileged very few, and frankly, when I returned to Berkeley with its sprawling, trash strewn campus and chaotic, noisy halls, it might as well have existed in a different universe (but for the record, I really do prefer Berkeley).
But for much, much, much less money, you can take a writing class at a community college, join a writing group in your town, or just check out a lot of library books. In a society obsessed with credentialism, maybe what’s happening right now is that a lot of Gen Z students who might in the future pursue an MFA are instead looking at rising educational debt and vanishing returns of schools that won’t fund them and saying “no thanks.” I work with Gen Z students and can tell you right now they are much, much smarter than those of us who bought into that vision.
I hate to hear about schools closing because it’s an erasure of history, and I also hate to hear about schools starting MFA programs because it’s an erasure of the reality of what those programs really offer for what they cost. And it’s not just a financial cost – Matthew Salesses, among others, have begun to advocate for a change in the way MFA workshops are taught because students, and students of color in particular, are graduating from MFAs with psychological symptoms that resemble PTSD. So what can we do? Well, I’ve stopped writing recommendations for students who are applying to any MFA program that doesn’t offer a full ride. And I talk a lot in my undergrad creative writing classes about the cost/benefit imbalances of MFAs and how students can build and sustain a writing life without one. Of course, my own MFA, which took forever to pay off, is how I landed my job. But I don’t want my students to go into any more debt than they might already be in. It’s just not fair to ask that of them in exchange for something so nebulous in value as an MFA.
When we’re too forgiving of institutions, that’s what happens – they don’t change, and people get hurt as a result.