Those of us who work and/or study at colleges and universities — and those who live in towns dependent economically upon same — are anxious as to the fate of those institutions, come fall. My own has already lost 26% of its general operating budget, enrollments are down 12% from the same time last year, and things will get much, much worse if in-person classes cannot resume in August. We will see program discontinuance (a.k.a. the liquidation of the humanities, social sciences, and arts departments) and possibly layoffs of tenured faculty (with or without a “Declaration of Financial Exigency,” by which the Chancellor would be tying his own hands voluntarily).
All of which raises the question of the future of the MFA industry. We are welcoming a grand total of four graduate students to our creative-writing graduate program this coming year. That’s both MFA and PhD, in all genres. Four. It’s not for lack of applications. But it is for lack of undergrads for the grad students to teach — in other words, we can’t fund them with GTA-ships (which is the only way we can). This was happening before the current Crash, which has vastly accelerated it. And my department, bless our hearts, won’t admit people unless we can fund them. That’s the right thing to do. And, as is so often the case, the right thing to do is also the most costly. No good deed will go unpunished. We enrolled two poets last year and one, this. Meanwhile, the College is demanding that there be at least 6 students in any graduate class, in order for it to go forward and not be cancelled. How does one offer a graduate poetry workshop, under these circumstances? Probably by including “exceptional” undergraduate poets (provided we even have enough of those). Whether graduate-student poets will want to apply to a program that only offers one upper-level poetry workshop, every other year, that is composed mostly of undergrads, is an open question. This was to be expected — eventually. The tag-team of neoliberal capitalism and global heating would have brought about a financial collapse eventually. Add political extremism and a pandemic, and you’ve got an even four horsemen, riding abreast, riding at you, right now. I’ve harped a lot, on this blog, about what the structural changes brought about by the climate crisis will mean for the institutions of writing and literature: the means of production and distribution, in particular. But consumption, too: what happens to the literary world when those two venerable institutions, the MFA Program and the English Major, go by the boards? They account for a lot of book sales. Will virtual book clubs pick up some of the slack? It takes a lot of time to earn a living in the gig economy; it takes a lot of time to grow a food garden that actually produces food. Who’s going to have time to write or read? And what? These were theoretical speculations, when the time frame was years or decades; now they’re urgent questions of months or weeks. The heat has been turned up suddenly. But will the frogs jump out of the pot? And into what? The only thing that will save education, esp. public education, is a massive mobilization on the part of the citizenry. Some people around the world have taken to the streets to protest increases in gasoline prices; some, to protest inaction on climate change. But it’s not clear to me that the citizenry in the U.S. wants formal education, least of all literary education. They have other things to worry about. They're being (or have been) reduced to the level of serfs. And if you’re a serf, you expect to remain a serf, so an education is an unnecessary, even unattainable, extravagance. “Villeins you were and villeins shall you be,” as Richard II supposedly said, in reference to another (possibly pandemic-induced) rebellion, after double-crossing the rabble. What the bards thought of it, we do not know. But we shall see: we don't know the full effect of this pandemic or of global heating (or of the coming pandemics caused by global heating). In the meantime, I can’t figure out anything better to do than to chronicle it. And read up. And maybe do a close reading of the Burpee seed catalog.
1 Comment
Alan Perry
5/28/2020 09:37:23 am
Yes, dammit. And the same problem, possibly less immediately acute, plagues my field, History. I imagine it prevails throughout the entire liberal arts field.
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |