Nice piece! Lots of insights I agree with here. I've always viewed the brutal grad school culture (especially online) as a primarily function of the "elite overproduction" (Peter Turchin's thesis). The fight for scarce prestige/elite status devolves into factionalism, aggression, and deception (material concerns are important but as a secondary factor that exacerbate status anxieties when relative comparisons are unfavorable).
Thank you! And I think the very term “elite overproduction” implies a supply-demand dynamic that we see in far greater misalignment for MFAs than, say, MBAs.
Any academic in a field with outside significance, such as, say, biomedical science, understood the Ponzi scheme nature of systematizing creativity with credentials that groom future employees of the same programs that provided the degrees. Frank Baum worked it directly into the character of the Wizard, no? A simple glance historically makes you wonder how humanity managed before M— degrees. Perhaps apocryphal, the story goes that a young writer asked Nora Ephron for advice in writing dialogue. She replied, “Read Jane Austen”.
What I’ve rarely (ever?) seen addressed in these debates is that the MFA itself most often has a negligible impact on the writer and their art. It’s two, sometimes three years, and unless one is lucky enough to have a real aesthetic connection with a professor or peer, it’s a pretty forgettable experience, and most of what writers “learn” about their craft and their evolving standards and taste is going to occur outside the confines of a program. For that reason I always thought the debate was a little silly.
I'd argue you're broadly adhering to the standard anti-MFA logic of (1) already great writers do not need MFAs to write, (2) MFAs cannot transform mediocre writers into a great ones, so, (3) with negligible impact on both groups, what's the point? Pro-MFAers generally respond to this with something along the lines of "funded programs give great writers the time & resources to hone their craft and kick-start their literary careers"...I'm less interested in either position than I am the desire to defend it. Like, I'm super-curious what compelled you to make this comment--especially if you think the debate is silly. That's the rationale I'm interested in here.
Something like that, perhaps. I mean, I agree with your points 1 through 3 (they don’t seem very controversial) but I don’t consider myself “anti-MFA.” (I did an MFA, and was one of the “lucky” ones I mention who connected with an aesthetically sympathetic mentor, whom I still correspond with.) My point was about how brief MFA programs are in the total lifecycle of a writer -- the tendency to place so much weight on their impact (on individuals, on broader literary discourse) still seems like an error to me. What I find more interesting re: the MFA debate are the economic and social conditions that saw such a proliferation of them (especially, uniquely, in the US). And maybe some of those conditions are related to a kind of compulsive, Puritan-adjacent justification for art, that it’s actually “work” (as in workshop), and therefore should be credentialed, and that this is at the heart of both these defenses and attacks.
Nice piece! Lots of insights I agree with here. I've always viewed the brutal grad school culture (especially online) as a primarily function of the "elite overproduction" (Peter Turchin's thesis). The fight for scarce prestige/elite status devolves into factionalism, aggression, and deception (material concerns are important but as a secondary factor that exacerbate status anxieties when relative comparisons are unfavorable).
Thank you! And I think the very term “elite overproduction” implies a supply-demand dynamic that we see in far greater misalignment for MFAs than, say, MBAs.
The biggest problem today may be the low stakes (combined with high debt), given what's happened and happening to literary culture overall: https://jakeseliger.com/2021/09/30/the-death-of-literary-culture/
Thanks for sharing this. Also, general to the blur of fact and fiction: https://joukovsky.substack.com/p/the-poleax-vzt07?s=w
There’s a reason I set The Portrait of a Mirror in 2015…
Any academic in a field with outside significance, such as, say, biomedical science, understood the Ponzi scheme nature of systematizing creativity with credentials that groom future employees of the same programs that provided the degrees. Frank Baum worked it directly into the character of the Wizard, no? A simple glance historically makes you wonder how humanity managed before M— degrees. Perhaps apocryphal, the story goes that a young writer asked Nora Ephron for advice in writing dialogue. She replied, “Read Jane Austen”.
I could not agree with Nora’s advice more strongly!
What I’ve rarely (ever?) seen addressed in these debates is that the MFA itself most often has a negligible impact on the writer and their art. It’s two, sometimes three years, and unless one is lucky enough to have a real aesthetic connection with a professor or peer, it’s a pretty forgettable experience, and most of what writers “learn” about their craft and their evolving standards and taste is going to occur outside the confines of a program. For that reason I always thought the debate was a little silly.
I'd argue you're broadly adhering to the standard anti-MFA logic of (1) already great writers do not need MFAs to write, (2) MFAs cannot transform mediocre writers into a great ones, so, (3) with negligible impact on both groups, what's the point? Pro-MFAers generally respond to this with something along the lines of "funded programs give great writers the time & resources to hone their craft and kick-start their literary careers"...I'm less interested in either position than I am the desire to defend it. Like, I'm super-curious what compelled you to make this comment--especially if you think the debate is silly. That's the rationale I'm interested in here.
Something like that, perhaps. I mean, I agree with your points 1 through 3 (they don’t seem very controversial) but I don’t consider myself “anti-MFA.” (I did an MFA, and was one of the “lucky” ones I mention who connected with an aesthetically sympathetic mentor, whom I still correspond with.) My point was about how brief MFA programs are in the total lifecycle of a writer -- the tendency to place so much weight on their impact (on individuals, on broader literary discourse) still seems like an error to me. What I find more interesting re: the MFA debate are the economic and social conditions that saw such a proliferation of them (especially, uniquely, in the US). And maybe some of those conditions are related to a kind of compulsive, Puritan-adjacent justification for art, that it’s actually “work” (as in workshop), and therefore should be credentialed, and that this is at the heart of both these defenses and attacks.
The Puritanism point is interesting (Batuman posits this too)
much ado about nothingthat wuld offput 98percent of the worlds 'writers