'I believe that there are times when collegiality must take a back seat to honesty­—when one’s natural desire to avoid unpleasantness must be set aside in the name of what one believes to be the greater good. This is one such moment for me.

As a second-generation Columbian, I am writing in the hope that I can help correct a situation which I believe to be an insult to the Columbia name and to the tradition of excellence I hold dearly. I should note that as a tenured professor in the department of English language and literature at the University of Chicago, and chair of the creative writing program, I have little to gain by this exercise.

Though I was denied tenure at Columbia last spring in a process rife with procedural irregularities — and then denied an appeal in a process notable for its lack of transparency and its cavalier disregard for the University’s own rules — I regret to say that I no longer desire that distinction. That said, I retain enough respect for the University I was associated with for so many years to hold it up to its own standards. Having failed to institute reform from within, I am left with no choice but to bring the issue to the public eye so that reform can be brought about from outside. Toward that end, I will be mailing a version of this letter to the Trustees of the University this week.

There is no point in being coy. Despite the presence of a small minority of talented and committed faculty members and an equally small core of serious, gifted students, what prevails at the writing division in the School of the Arts, and to some extent at the School of the Arts as a whole, is an institutionalized and self-perpetuating culture of mediocrity so out of step with the general climate of excellence for which Columbia is rightly known that most would be shocked to be apprised of the details. A senior colleague of mine recently put it quite neatly: “Leaderless, rudderless, standardless. The worst among us sense the vacuum and rush to fill it with their own kind. So sad. How I wish I could believe there will be some surcease, some righting of the ship in the foreseeable [future]. Alas, I fear it will not be so.” [Note to readers, if UD ever starts saying things like "How I wish I could believe there will be some surcease, some righting of the ship," take her out and shoot her.] I would like to believe otherwise.

Allow me to elaborate. A short list of documentable facts — I’ll begin with the smaller issues and proceed to the larger ones — would include master’s theses that are routinely passed despite the fact that the level of writing exhibited in them is remedial at best and virtually illiterate at worst, tenure-track hires of close personal friends of the chair who have, quite literally, not a single publication credit to their names and who are hired over candidates with two and three books — resulting in a situation in which students often have more experience and more publications than their instructors, and an institutional culture in which those who have done nothing for 10 or 15 years hire others like themselves in order to make their own lack of accomplishment less visible and, for the same reason, discriminate against those who are active in their fields.

What makes this self-perpetuating cycle of mediocrity possible, in large part, is a variation on the standard academic advancement process, virtually unique to the School of the Arts, called Professor of Professional Practice. Originally intended to offer the equivalent of tenure to distinguished practitioners in the arts who lack the standard academic credentials associated with tenure — a worthy idea — POPP has instead evolved into a convenient in-house mechanism by which those who in some cases have done nothing for a decade or more advance themselves and others like them. Though some of the SOA’s most distinguished faculty — the poet Richard Howard comes to mind — hold the title of Professor of Professional Practice, the fact remains that the standards of review for POPP are laughably low — no one, to my knowledge, has ever been denied renewal in the history of the School of the Arts — while those for tenure are dramatically higher and, what is worse, stunningly arbitrary.

The overall climate of mediocrity to which I refer extends to the standards — or, more precisely, the lack of standards — to which students are held. Grading options for all courses are pass/fail. No one fails. The few theses that are failed because they are unreadable — by mavericks like myself and a few others — are often mysteriously changed to a passing grade after a few cosmetic changes have been made —a process which undeniably cheapens the value of a Columbia MFA and does a profound disservice to the truly outstanding students Columbia still manages to attract.

When I inquired at a faculty meeting last spring, whether there was finally any level of writing low enough to merit a failing grade in the Columbia writing division, I was told by one tenured colleague — to general nervous laughter — that she felt bad failing anyone paying so much money. This is shameful enough. Add the fact that when compared with its peer institutions the writing division at Columbia is an unconscionably bloated program which brings in more students every year — with the predictable effect on quality — while offering a minute amount of financial aid, what we have is something resembling a diploma mill hiding, unbelievably, under the Columbia name.

Why has this situation been allowed to continue? I’m afraid I have no answer. When I wrote of these matters to University President Lee Bollinger, whose verbal support for the arts is well known, I received no reply. When I explained the situation prevailing at the School of the Arts — both verbally and in writing — to Provost Alan Brinkley, he seemed patently uninterested, just as he seemed uninterested in the manifest procedural irregularities that marred both my tenure process and my appeal. It is possible that this lack of interest might have something to do with Provost Brinkley’s attitude toward the place of the arts in academia; during one of our conversations he told me that some members of the University faculty simply did not believe that individuals in the arts should be awarded tenure, and added that this was a point of view he himself had some sympathy for.

I mention this ambivalence — or antagonism — towards the arts not only because it has direct bearing on my own case, but because it also explains in large part the University’s fiscal stance toward the School of the Arts. To speak bluntly, despite the administration’s — and particularly President Bollinger’s — much-touted support for the arts, fiscal reality routinely puts the lie to the administration’s rhetoric. The writing division’s essential function is to serve as a financial udder; every year, the division’s students are milked and a large proportion of the money produced is promptly siphoned off to other parts of the University, thus perpetuating the cycle of impoverishment and mediocrity.

I mention this not only because it is unethical to charge students $35,000 a year to be taught by writers who don’t actually write, can’t conduct a seminar, or, even more absurdly, teach classes on the teaching of writing — though they themselves do not write — to students who have not yet learned how to write, but because this climate, tacitly supported by the administration, has already harmed the University’s ability to hire and retain qualified junior candidates. Having just completed three hires for the University of Chicago — which has asked me to institute precisely the kind of rigorous, text-based program so strenuously resisted at Columbia, and whose support for the arts is genuine and tangible — I know well that many candidates are aware of the mediocrity of Columbia’s program as well as the randomness of the tenure process, and they are going elsewhere despite the appeal of both the Columbia name and the advantages of living in New York City.

For the sake of the University and the students it serves, therefore, I ask that the powers that be take whatever steps necessary to correct this situation: that they stop the absurd cycle of mediocrity and impoverishment I have described; that they correct the climate which has let slip away the likes of Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Cunningham and American Academy of Arts and Letters novelist Maureen Howard while retaining people in senior positions who have never published a book; that they give some thought not only to the multimillion-dollar arts building slated for construction in Manhattanville but to the quality of the programs it will contain. I ask, in short, that they insist that the University live up to its own reputation, as it so obviously, in this case, has not.

The author is a professor in the department of English language and literature and the chair of the creative writing program at the University of Chicago. '