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Friday, April 28, 2006

Pallid, though commendable...

...effort to respond to Slouka's attack on Columbia's MFA. Two students in the program write a stiffly bureaucratic though perfectly acceptable piece of English prose to defend the place.

Yet they've got quite a job on their hands. There's the lack of letter grades, which they can only spin in the way everyone tries to spin it:

The pass/low pass/fail system (a correction to Slouka’s piece) allows students to experiment and take risks with their writing, a core belief of the writing division. Slouka’s desire for excellence in advocating a letter-grade-based system is laudable. However, it overlooks the benefits of more complex methods of literary evaluation such as extended written critical feedback and the individual conference. Columbia’s faculty provides both, thus anticipating the responses we writers will receive from the outside literary community. This approach fosters a collaborative environment in which students are encouraged to help one another cultivate a variety of literary skills rather than merely competing for grade point averages.


That two writers who write like certified public accountants would also talk about taking risks with their writing is funny. And don't tell me that writing short stories is different from writing opinion pieces -- both forms can either exhibit or fail to exhibit interesting, risk-taking style.

If the program has increased in size, it is because a higher percentage of accepted students has enrolled each year.


Which is not an answer to the charge that the program is cynically accepting too many students in order to take their money, since admissions committees, knowing that their number of acceptances is growing, are supposed to offer fewer acceptances.

Moreover, Slouka’s attack on “teaching the teaching of writing” to “students who have not yet learned to write” implies that there is a fixed point at which a student will have finished learning how to write.


Slouka's point, as the quotation suggests, was that some students have not yet begun to learn to write.