#mfanomfa

Link to video of Creative Time Summit talk above.

Text of Creative Time talk:

My name is Lee Relvas from MFA no MFA, and I’m here today speaking as one of the seven artists who made up the incoming class of MFA students at USC Roski School of Art and Design in the fall of 2014.  After nine months,  this past May, we collectively, as an entire class, dropped-out of the program in reaction to the school’s reneging on funding and curricular promises made to us, as a protest against the normalization of massive student debt, and to act on our desire to put our energies towards structures that encourage participation, agency, more weirdness and more joy. Before I begin, I want to draw a frame around our drop-out action and the larger context of this moment.  Actively talking about difference and privilege is particularly important in light of the violence of white supremacy and erasure that students and faculty of color are experiencing and confronting right now at the University of Missouri, Yale, and campuses across the country.  These communities cannot walk away from their experiences of and responses to racism any more than a person could drop out of her own skin.  We want to take a moment to acknowledge our privilege in being able to walk away from our institution -- in the midst of its dysfunction and dismantlement-- and to stand in solidarity with the students, faculty, and communities responding to these very urgent conditions. Zora Neale Hurston wrote: “Gods always behave like the people who make them”, and today I’d like to remix that statement by replacing one word so it goes like this: Educational institutions always behave like the people who make them. Over the past century, we have had many makers of the educational institution, resulting today in a University that is a shimmering juggernaut of contradiction, a site formed as strongly by notions of exclusivity, elitism, and profit as it is by access and emancipation, each conflicting and co-existing with each other daily.   In this specific moment, in addition to those histories, we have an educational institution increasingly made by, and in the image of, the corporation.  We see this corporate model in the simple facts that USC tuition, like other universities, has increased an astounding 92% since 2001, while compensation for USC’s top 8 executives has more than tripled since 2001.  Meanwhile, 80% of all faculty at USC is adjunct faculty, who are often paid less than the federal minimum wage.    This severe imbalance creates leadership structures which rarely feel the impact of the systems they manage, and are most often held unaccountable for the negative consequences of these systems on others. This distanced leadership is in thrall to a disembodied technocentric world-wiew that believes that everything can be measured empirically, assigned value, and monetized for maximum profit, and this worldview becomes more entrenched the more it ignores the concerns and conditions of the classroom.  These leaders are interested in short-term extreme changes - which mimic metric-tinged "results" - to serve as a false front of their "effectiveness"  and "innovation capabilities". This lavishly-funded leadership defends their actions by freely employing an austerity rhetoric while never experiencing the austerity measures themselves. The re-making of the educational institution in the image of the corporation is by no means complete, nor is it total.  I want to try to look at everything as complicated as it really is.  And yet this re-making, because it was so quickly, forcefully, and incompetently attempted at Roski, had clear effects to those of us experiencing them. Erica Muhl was appointed Dean of the Roski School in May 2013, despite having no background or expertise in the visual arts field whatsoever.  She was simultaneously named Director of the Academy for Arts, Technology and the Business of Innovation, a new school within USC birthed with a 70 million dollar donation.  Of this grand endowment, not a single dollar went to student scholarships. As this new Dean began to implement her systems over at Roski, there seemed to be a nearly immediate reversal of the tangible and the intangible.  It was the intangible activity of what happens in the studio that was quickly targeted.   New curriculum was proposed without studio visits, the thesis paper weighted over the thesis show, and the very idea of a close, longer-term mentorship with a Core Faculty jettisoned, because the work we did in our studios- the intangible processes of looking and learning and thinking, the intimacy of giving each other’s work our close attention, was dismissed, deemed irrelevant, without a place in the university because it couldn’t be easily measured, it could not be statisticized, and it could not be any further monetized. Meanwhile, every attempt was made to make our tangible, material concerns irrelevant.  We were suddenly, and almost offhandedly, presented with a new funding threshold that would potentially double the debt we thought we would graduate with.  When we pointed to documents clearly stating our existing funding packages, we were framed as being “demanding” simply for advocating for those things the School had already promised us.  As if we were employees who had gotten bad Yelp reviews, apparently, the problem was with our attitudes.  Contracts were broken by denying there ever had been a contract; promises were diminished into “unfortunate mistakes”.  It was almost hypnotizing, and certainly infantilizing, the way these administrators tried to make the reality of tens of thousands of dollars in debt just disappear from our minds. But ultimately, it was my body that remembered the debt.  When I started grad school, I had been paying off my undergrad loans for eleven years.  Every time I was tempted to just go with the status quo and pile on the debt, I remembered those envelopes from Sallie Mae, and later a collection agency, showing up in the mail, the black type flickering into red signaling delinquency, the distracting panic that smudged my vision when I didn’t have the money for it, the surge of adrenaline swelling the tips of my fingers when Kevin from the collection agency called and demanded $500 dollars, and the defiant embarrassment electrifying the skin of my cheeks when I offered them $50 instead.  This is the muscle memory of debt.  And it was this bodily memory of debt that was triggered every time the Roski administration attempted to make debt inconsequential and incorporeal. We talked so much with each other, the seven of us.  We were often huddled in the parking lot, or hunched around the kitchen table.  As we talked, we realized how different our various positions were: we were at different points in our lives, we came from different cultures and backgrounds, we had varying levels of support from the larger art world, we were taking on different amounts of debt to be in the program, we enjoyed different privileges and would suffer different losses.  And yet, finally, at different speeds and for different reasons, we all came to the decision to leave the program together. After we made our collective decision, we kept getting incompetent and contradictory emails from the administration, and instead of crying, like I often did at first, we would all start laughing! That’s when I felt like we had come to the right decision, when we all started laughing.  Our individual decisions transformed into one collective action, and I think our laughter was an expression of that sudden magic. Zora Neale Hurston also wrote: “The dream is the truth”, and I want to share a few of our dreams-slash-truths we came to in our nine months of collective decision-making: That education should give you more options, not fewer options. That debt on such a scale that is now “normal” is invisibly inscribed on and held in our bodies, and often limits movement even as it provides access. That there is work to be done from inside the institution, and that there is work to be done from outside the institution. That school should never be the only option for material and immaterial support for people who want to think and create. That refusal is not an absence but an elsewhere. That our decision of collective drop-out was deliberated by each of us at different speeds, for different reasons, and from different moments in our lives.  Our collective decision should not flatten these differences but instead highlight the incredible fact that collective action can be taken, and is taken, by people who exist in overlapping realities. This last one seems like the most important.  Being with people: there are no terms for this friendship. And we came to this dream/truth: It’s not a drop-out, because there is no “out”; we’re still in this stew of debt and autonomy, art and money, access and exclusivity.  No solutions have been found.  After the one-way movement of dropping out, since then, our experiences have become diffuse, dispersed, scattered, although we continue to gather together.  As the seven of us look for jobs again, look for new places to live, try to find new solutions to the old problems of time and money and art and resources, it is hard to know what the impact of our drop-out is, today, in the next week, in the next year. But simply, after nine months of attempting to speak back to the institution, after nine months in which our material realities were belittled and our immaterial work devalued, we actively choose to put our energies elsewhere.  We decide to be the makers of something else. We choose to ask a different set of questions, and I want to ask them here now: Not what are we up against, but where are the openings? Not where are the resources, But what is our resourcefulness? What can we do when we do it together?

-November 14th, 2015

Free Cooper Union expresses solidarity with the USC Roski community and joins the call for Dean Erica Muhl’s resignation

MFA programs across America are compromised by their high cost of attendance. There is an implicit expectation that students can simultaneously take on massive debts, hold down jobs, learn, advance their practices, and reemerge intact. USC Roski is known for holding out against this paradoxical mentality, foregrounding the intrinsic value of education. The program’s focus on time, space, and proximity exists in opposition to a surplus of diploma­mill style programs that churn out credentialed art professionals into a saturated market. We see the Roski community as having taken on the work of standing against a broad financialization of culture and dispelling the notion that the model of education we share is anachronistic.

Under the auspices of cost reduction, USC’s administration initiated a reinvention of the Roski program, drastically eroding its unique character. Crucial information was withheld from the community as the administration drove stakes for austerity and expansion. Students were treated as collateral in a bait­and­switch, privileging a corporate restructuring over the sacrifices of students and faculty to be there.

When an entire Roski MFA class withdrew in May of 2015, Dean Erica Muhl undermined the potency of their action by recasting it to the media as a “voluntary leave” that she had granted. The students’ absence may be minimized by damage control consultants, but their actions inspire and speak louder than the business­as­usual mentality of MFA programs that pretend they’re not founded on the precarity of those they ostensibly serve.

Any institution, program, or community in resistance to financialization will be cannibalized to maintain the dominance of market forces. In this, we’re together: the Cooper community continues to fight for the reinstatement and perpetual improvement of a culture that advances free education. Education without barriers is grounded in an intersectional understanding of the imperative to learn. It’s not just Cooper. It’s not just undergraduate. It’s not just higher education. We must continually evaluate how all institutions shape society and work to re­center them. Deep connections between our communities will be the foundation of this effort.

To quote the Roski 2016 class, “Our collective and interdependent force is energizing as we progress toward supportive and malleable spaces conducive to criticality and encouragement. These sites are more important than ever in the current state of economic precarity​that reaches far beyond the fates of seven art students. We invite everyone to reach out to us with proposals, invitations and strategies of their own, dreams not of creating a ‘better’ institution, but devising new spaces for collective weirdness and joy.”

Dear President Nikias, Provost Quick and Mr. Edward P. Roski Jr., Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the University of Southern California:

In light of the grievous administrative damages that have incurred widespread disrepute to the Roski School of Art and Design, we, the Master of Fine Arts class of 2015, hereby present the attached public petition for the removal of Dean Erica Muhl. This petition has been signed in solidarity by over 760 concerned and invested voices from the international art and academic communities. Together, we continue the call for USC leadership’s accountability in acknowledging an administrator’s destructive actions and blatant disregard of the feedback and experience of its faculty and students in support of the future of fine arts higher education at USC.

Our legitimate concerns for the restitution of the MFA program’s quality and relevant contribution to the cultural community continue to be ignored. Erica Muhl has placed the school in a litigious position through the unethical manner with which she handled the withdrawn class of 2016’s funding and curricular offers, as we know intimately, having also been coerced by the administration to accept undesired curricular changes that were not endorsed by our core faculty. Provost Michael Quick’s reply to our initial letter made it clear to us and the public at large that USC leadership continues to delegitimize our experience as graduate students and irresponsibly minimize the public representation of our colleagues’ withdrawal.

Among the many distinguished signees of our petition, some resonating comments of support include:

John S. Gordon, Director of the Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe: “As a former Dean of the USC School of Fine Arts (1981-1987), I am deeply embarrassed by Dean Muhl's and USC's shameful treatment of the 7 MFA candidates whose resignations have brought national disgrace upon the once distinguished reputation of the USC Roski School of Fine Arts.”

Martha Rosler, preeminent artist, activist and educator: “The agreement under which students enter school is a contract, not subject to the whims of administrators. The conditions at SC were good for the top administrators, not for the art students.”

Catherine Opie, renowned photographer and educator: “As a professor at UCLA in art, I believe that the dean does not clearly understand how this has not only affected the students that the university is there to serve, but the ripple that has resulted in disbelief in the greater Los Angeles community.”

Judith Rodenbeck, recognized scholar: “‘Disruption’ of contractual obligations is unacceptable. And the casualization of the academic labor force--as well as, evidently, the infantilization of graduate students--is bound to dismantle what was a really interesting program. As a management strategy this is appalling, and the inverse of groveling for celebrity money in the name of innovation.”

Furthermore, it has been frustrating to witness USC leadership ignore the fact Erica Muhl was admittedly unable to recruit students to fundraise her new studio-based MFA program. She offered no dedicated graduate faculty, unlike previous years, or clear funding offers to prospective students during the Spring admissions process, yet expected the withdrawn class of 2016 to invest in this dubious program for their second year. Along with the level of public embarrassment her failure as dean has brought to the University, why does USC continue to support an unfit administrator?

This community’s call to action is an accurate, responsible and legitimate response to the Roski administration’s irresponsibility. Erica Muhl’s removal will be the start of USC’s effort to abide by their own educational mission and best practices to resolve the Roski School’s glaring crises. As it stands, the disinterest shown by USC to this very real problem will otherwise continue to be seen as an example of resounding negligence in higher education.

Sincerely,

June 18th, 2015

To the University of Southern California and the Arts & Humanities community,

As alumni of the University of Southern California Roski School of Art and Design’s Master of Fine Arts Program, we are dismayed to hear that Dean Erica Muhl’s actions and lack of support for the Program have caused the entire graduating class of 2016 to withdraw. This was an extraordinary and painful action for these graduate students to have taken, and presents evidence of serious wrongdoing and extensive problems in the School.

Over the past decade, USC’s MFA Program became one of the top programs of its kind in the nation. As alumni, we are heartbroken to see our once highly respected program so swiftly and grievously diminished. As former students, we see this renowned and intimate program’s finest attributes— Teaching Assistant positions and scholarships, committed MFA core faculty with a rotating Directorship and a robust visiting artist series— now depleted or removed altogether.

The Teaching Assistantships that set USC apart from other leading programs provided graduate students invaluable first-hand experience as educators, and greatly enriched the educations of both the MFA candidate and the undergraduate students whom they mentored. Furthermore, the provided TAships and scholarships helped offset tuition costs— an incredibly important and progressive incentive in assisting graduates to matriculate without the massive debt that has become the norm in higher-education. In the absence of extreme debt, coupled with experience in the classroom, Roski’s MFA graduates were able to immediately establish studio practices, apply for teaching positions, and pursue exhibition opportunities following their graduation. This fact is proven by the high percentage of USC MFAs involved in international exhibitions, public discourse, and post-graduate teaching placement.

The presence of a committed MFA faculty core and the promise of direct critical discourse—a benchmark of the program—has been removed, as seen on the current website promoting the Roski School’s transformed MFA program. Also transformed is the previously robust visiting artist lecture series, which ran weekly in the graduate building and provided on-site discussions, additional studio visits, and a broadly-engaged community of local and international visitors. The removal of the program’s commitment to a core faculty of renowned professional artists responsible for ongoing one- on-one interactions, as well as a rich and diverse lecture series, illustrates a complete disregard for the exceptional qualities of the program, and a lack of knowledge for what these personal and public components mean to artists and the art community.

The current dean’s documented extreme actions, severely affecting both students and faculty, have created a culture of distrust. The heart of any educational program does not reside in its administrative management, but rather in the energy, knowledge, passion and wisdom of its faculty, as well as in the transformative ideas and good faith of its students. This combined enthusiasm and sense of inspiration have been at the center of what made the USC MFA Program so special over this past decade. This is a history that has now been abruptly foreshortened due to a lack of vision, and a perverse misunderstanding of the community that feeds – and is fed by – such programs across the nation.

Over the past decade, the program had matriculated artists whose work has been presented in the Venice Biennale, Whitney Biennial, and the Hammer Museum, among other leading institutions around the globe, and has been the subject of extensive critical focus in leading art journals and publications. For a generation of Los Angeles-based artists, the USC MFA moniker on our CVs has been a badge of honor, representing immense educational, professional and personal value, as well as the support, commitment and trust instilled in us by the School and the larger University. We do not want to see this jewel of the University recklessly discarded, and neither should the President, Provost or the Board of Trustees of the University of Southern California. The damages incurred by the departed MFA students, along with evidence of reckless changes made to the MFA program we attended, has lead us to conclude that the current dean does not faithfully support USC’s internationally recognized program.

We stand in solidarity with the MFA class of 2016, and with the current and former MFA faculty that built, supported and defended the value of contemporary studio practice. We ask that the University consider the damage done to those who have left, and also to all of the MFA alumni that the University invested in over these past ten years. We strongly advocate that the legacy of our MFA Program be respected, and furthermore, upheld by prominent practitioners within our field of study at the University. As alumni, we sincerely hope that our collective voices resonate with those capable of implementing change for the better at The Roski School of Art and Design.

Sincerely, 

The MFA Alumni of the University of Southern California, Roski School of Art

We are a group of seven artists who made the decision to attend USC Roski School of Art and Design’s MFA program based on the faculty, curriculum, program structure and funding packages. We are a group of seven artists who have been forced by the School’s actions dismantling each of these elements to dissolve our MFA candidacies. In short, due to the University’s unethical treatment of its students, we, the entire incoming class of 2014, are dropping out of school and dropping back into our expanded communities at large.

May 28th, 2015

To Dean Muhl, Provost Quick, the Registrar, and President Nikias of the University of Southern California:

It has come to our attention that Dean Muhl made a public statement on May 21st “granting” our class a two year “Leave of Absence” from the Roski School. It is inappropriate for the dean or the University to coerce us into this leave of absence, which was not requested or desired. On May 15th, our entire class sent official letters of Withdrawal to all pertinent USC administrators, and released a public statement regarding our withdrawal from USC as a collective act of protest.

Seven students do not drop out of an MFA program, tens-of-thousands of dollars in debt, without cause, hardship and dismay. Rather than engage with the University’s PR campaign to discredit our statements, we invite the public to examine the documents in our Fact Sheet outlining the funding and curricular promises made to us during recruitment, and how each of these were intentionally reneged upon by Roski administration once we were enrolled in their MFA Program (documents below and also available to download at http://mfanomfa.tumblr.com).

Regardless of how many times the dean repeats the phrase that the school “honored in every respect the 2014 offer letters”, the fact remains that our class was recruited with information provided in detailed correspondences from representatives of the Roski School (such as the one exemplified by Assistant Dean Penelope Jones in our “Funding” Fact Sheet), prior to our acceptance of the School’s offers and our receipt of offer letters.  The Roski Administration represented to us that if we enrolled, we would receive second-year TAships, without further application or qualification.  Each of us reasonably relied upon those representations in order to make a major life and career choice to attend USC’s MFA Program. The Roski Administration’s representations in the offer letter, in conjunction with recruitment communications, created a legally enforceable contractual obligation which was materially breached by the University’s administrators in the Spring 2015 semester.

USC’s PR spin that nothing was wrong and that the dean was offering us “90% funding” is an outright lie. Under the terms with which the Roski School recruited us on, 82% of our tuition would have been covered by scholarships and TAships; each of us planned to graduate from the two-year MFA Program with an average of $37,626.20 of debt for tuition and living costs. However, due to the University’s attempt at a forced renegotiation in Spring 2015, each student was faced with the possibility of leaving the two-year program with $75,252.40 in debt for tuition and living costs. If we had acquiesced to the terms of this forced renegotiation, only 65% of a student’s tuition would have been covered. Our class was 100% united in our refusal to participate in this illegal and unethical bait-and-switch scheme.

As we experienced before we publicly and collectively withdrew, USC continues to attempt to reframe our cohort’s promised funding, curricular and faculty structures as special “accommodations”; furthermore, the description of these promises as  “exceptions to long-standing university policies” is public evidence of the University’s ongoing attempt to dismiss their legal and ethical obligations to our class. We had never asked the University for anything other than what was reasonably promised to us by the Roski School as matriculated graduate students. The debt we have already incurred in the Program will affect us for decades to come, and our financial loss does not begin to measure the unquantifiable loss of the promised mentorship with valued Core faculty, our promised curriculum, and the close engagement with the work of our peers.

Since releasing our statement, we have received hundreds of emails of support because our experience resonates so strongly with faculty and students worldwide. Our situation is far too familiar, and far too typical among institutions of higher learning, for any amount of USC’s PR spin to succeed in discrediting our statement or our experiences. The University has entrenched itself in an insular bubble of lies and manipulations, shirking responsibility for their illegal and unethical treatment of our cohort and abuse of our trust.  By making our withdrawal a public collective act of protest, we trust that the facts will bring some measure of accountability to the institution.  By making our withdrawal a public collective act of protest, we hope to create a more flexible and dynamic space for criticality and engagement beyond that insular bubble.

 The Dean’s latest public statement is further demonstration of USC’s administrative dysfunction.  She may wish to obfuscate the truth and refuse to recognize our group’s Withdrawal purely for administrative and statistical benefit; however, we have released thorough, factual responses and documents to counter the dean’s false and misleading statements.  We already officially withdrew from USC on May 15th, but the dean’s statement forces us to withdraw once again.  We wish to fully withdraw from the University of Southern California, effective immediately.

Sincerely,