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(Tenured Radical)

Wednesday, May 03, 2006

PAY TO PLAY

An article in Columbia University’s Spectator today provides more details about the messy situation in its School of the Arts. Some excerpts, with UD’s parenthetical commentary:



Unlike doctoral programs, the budget for the School of the Arts is determined entirely by the tuition that it receives from students and donations made directly to the school. This means that the vast majority of students pay full tuition, currently over $35,000 per year. [This is the big question we need to answer. Why do virtually all SoA students pay full tuition?]


…“The program is too big,” Heather Samples, a student in the Writing Division, said. “There are too many students for every faculty member, and I don’t think that is a radical statement. We have too many students, and I can’t help but wonder if that’s related to the funding issues.” [She’s beginning to get at the answer. A cynical decision, based on the desperate desire of affluent Americans to be artists -- or at least play one in graduate school -- has been made. We can soak these fools.]

According to Kleinman, the school gives about 30 percent of tuition to the University. Provost Alan Brinkley said that the budget arrangement—and the tax—is about equivalent to that paid by all professional schools such as business and law.

But as Thorn Hillsbery, a second-year writing student, explained, unlike law and business school graduates, most alumni from SoA do not go on to affluent careers. [That’s right. That‘s why I call the university‘s willingness to exploit these students cynical.]

“The arts don’t have a guaranteed pathway to make a substantial income,” Hillsbery said. “Building an alumni base is harder. It’s an issue of the marketplace that the school has no control over.”

And a number of students say there are systematic problems within the school beyond financial difficulties.

Robert Broadhurst, a first-year film student, praised his experience overall, but called the school a “flawed system in which good hardworking people are rendered less effective than they would like to be.” He said this was a “pervasive feeling that results from accumulated sound bites and conversations throughout the division.”

While he attributed much of this to the difficulties of dealing with the bureaucracy of a large university, he also said that part of it came from the nature of filmmaking.

“In the world of filmmaking especially, there exists a fundamental dilemma, and there are of course exceptions, which is that most filmmakers prefer to be making films to teaching filmmaking,” he said. “For that reason, it can be difficult to lock down potential instructors because, understandably, their own professional artistic pursuits take priority.” [Note what this guy is diplomatically saying. SoA is hiring unreliable people who’d rather be filming than teaching. I wouldn’t call this “understandable.”]

Also, he said, “often the best film-makers do not make the best teachers and vice-versa.”

Erin Soros, who graduated from the Writing Division last year, offered a slightly harsher view of the school. “I heard a lot of complaints in the program,” she said. “Columbia itself is failing its students in the arts.”

“It’s a systemic problem,” she said. “People are doing the best they can.”

As in any school, discussions of the quality of the program are difficult and controversial. While Ziegler [Writing Division Chair] refused to respond on the record to Slouka’s letter [Why not? That’s exactly what a responsible Chair is supposed to do.] , which was published last week, two students printed a response challenging many of the specific criticisms of the letter and pointing out what they said are numerous factual errors.

“There are very serious dishonest claims in that letter,” Hillsbery said.

He challenged the idea that the quality of students and instruction was falling, pointing both to recent successes of alumni and rising application numbers. “Despite the expense, [students] want to come to Columbia. Why would they come if it was a bad program?”

But a number of students, including Samples, said they felt the larger point of Slouka’s criticism was being ignored. “The whole situation saddens me because I believe Mark truly had the best interests of the health of the program and the future lives of his former students at heart,” she said. “The question of the arts in academia is a really important question for many people. [That’s right. But because the situation of the arts in academia is a scandal as big, in its way, as the scandal of college athletics, few professors and administrators are going to go on record about it. Look at the response -- total silence -- to Slouka.] As a graduate student who hopes to have an academic job, I’m concerned about the health of that organization and I’m concerned about us not being able to talk about it without it becoming a catfight.”