This is a long and very significant conversation between a number of artists and teachers in the States. There's a ton of quotes to pick out but I'll highlight my favorite here, a bombshell about the very school I attended!
- HELEN MOLESWORTH: You’re speaking about a very real part of this current crisis. We are living in a culture where some students get to college and still don’t know how to write, don’t know how to read, much less read critically. And then we have faculty who assign them twenty-five pages of Mille Plateaux and throw up their hands when it doesn’t go well. This is a kind of perverse version of the post-’60s fetish for de-skilling. Values that once seemed germane—like skills in draftsmanship or Cibachrome printing or color theory, as well as conceptual practices that confronted and critiqued traditional artistic skills and craft—have become profoundly perverted as they’ve been put through this corporatized, for-profit model that has no dialectical balance anymore. There is no counterweight.
FRANCES STARK: I was talking about undergrads, by the way. One of the main questions is whether there is a distinction between how you teach MFA and how you teach undergraduate. And what happens is that everyone starts to teach undergraduates like they’re graduate students. But that kid can’t even parse an episode of The Simpsons.
HELEN MOLESWORTH: Here’s what’s good. It’s trickling up. [Laughter.]
MIKE ESSL: I have taught at a place where—I mean, I probably shouldn’t say the name of the school, but I can tell you the initials are SVA. [Laughter.] I had a student who just never showed up. There was no medical reason, no explanation. When she did show up, there were just excuses as to why she didn’t do her work. I failed this student. And then I was called into the department chair’s office and I was told, “If you fail this person, she might not come back and we will lose $30,000.”
CHARLIE WHITE: Wow.
MIKE ESSL: And I said, “Well, that sounds like your problem. I’m not changing the grade.” And they gave the student’s mom my cell-phone number. She called me and said, “How dare you fail my daughter,” and I said, “How dare you raise somebody so lazy.” [Laughter.] And I hung up. And I have never been asked back to teach there again.
HELEN MOLESWORTH: But that is also evidence of a split—to tie Cooper and USC together again—between administration and faculty. There is a corporatization of the academy across the country in which the administration of the academy and the faculty are now increasingly at odds. There is no longer the idea that faculty is involved in the institution’s leadership, in self-governance, basically. A. L. STEINER: Eighty percent of USC’s faculty is now adjunct and contingent. This is part of an ideology of austerity being embraced at the school, even though its undergraduate program ranks sixteenth in tuition nationwide and the university is one of twenty schools nationwide responsible for one-fifth of the country’s graduate-school student debt. The dean’s thinking came down to a gamble—that the graduate faculty’s interactions, and the program’s funding and curricular promises, were unnecessary. There’s a bigger agenda in play, and it’s intertwined with the value and significance of an arts education in a technocratic regime, in a world where the nonprofit sector exists as a manifestation of the private sector. and (All of this drives me crazy.) Wow. That was a fantastic read. One thing that I think was interesting that was briefly touched upon is the student-as-consumer model. You go to college and are expected to graduate, you expect to receive a wide variety of services, and you expect to be able to be professional. Engineering as an example teaches you how to be ready for industry and to work a job, but it doesn't necessarily teach you how to be a good engineer. At times I have noticed a deep lack of critical thinking and a lack of desire to engage in dialogue in classes, such as a couple of history courses I took at college. Could that be tied in to a disconnect because it's not related to a persons major, and therefore is of little importance? (I am also a big believe in multi-disciplinary studies at this point in my life). This ties in to the discussion about college selectivity. It seems like acceptance rates at most institutions are < 60% (excluding Ivy Leagues and some other very competitive places) with graduation rates somewhere in that ballpark. To me, the former number is too high and the latter number is too low. But we have been in a spiral where the infrastructure of the public and private college in the United States will collapse without a steady stream of student-consumers and we are now witnessing the perils of an increasing prioritization of style and non-rigorous education over substance.Remember that this dismantlement took place after the university announced that it had raised almost $4 billion. The decisions made by Roski’s administrators were not based on reason or logic or an investment in learning. Those decisions are ideological. They’re cultural. They’re not financial. And this provoked deeper questions about the viability, even survival, of student and faculty voices in the fine arts within academia.
A. L. STEINER: How much does the cultural shift that we’re talking about—requiring the justification of the value of an arts education or the humanities—have to do with the tech and finance sloganeering of creativity, from “Think different” and “disruption” to the experience economy?
CHARLIE WHITE: Wow. MIKE ESSL: And I said, “Well, that sounds like your problem. I’m not changing the grade.” And they gave the student’s mom my cell-phone number. She called me and said, “How dare you fail my daughter,” and I said, “How dare you raise somebody so lazy.” [Laughter.] And I hung up. And I have never been asked back to teach there again.MIKE ESSL: I have taught at a place where—I mean, I probably shouldn’t say the name of the school, but I can tell you the initials are SVA. [Laughter.] I had a student who just never showed up. There was no medical reason, no explanation. When she did show up, there were just excuses as to why she didn’t do her work. I failed this student. And then I was called into the department chair’s office and I was told, “If you fail this person, she might not come back and we will lose $30,000.”
-This is amazing. I would have liked to have seen the mothers reaction. Entitlement sucks.