Grassroots/Hank Kalet

Save the Humanities

Fairleigh Dickinson University is closing its low-residency creative writing MFA. It no longer fits within the university’s mission, officials say, and it now joins a list of shuttered programs that deserved better.

I received my MFA in 2012. It was an important part of my writing growth and planted the seeds for my shift into creative nonfiction (I’m still a poet). I’m a better writer and teacher because of the experience.

To many, creative writing programs might seem unnecessary, catering to navel-gazers and elites while doing little to improve job prospects. This is not only wrong — writers and artists in these programs come from various backgrounds and cut across racial, class, and gender lines — but misses the larger picture.

These cuts are evidence of the neo-liberal winds that are blowing in academia and that interest with a right-wing effort to neuter what they think of as overly liberal institutions. These ideas are not new. Republican administrations dating back to Ronald Reagan (with help from Democrats in Congress and little clawback from Democratic presidents — have been starving higher education of funding for years. This loss of public revenue — both in direct aid to schools and aid to students — has gone hand in hand with tuition hikes and student debt that, no accident, enriches banks and finance institutions. At the same time, Republicans in Wisconsin, Florida, and other states have targeted the humanities for more than a decade, arguing that they are not cost-effective and do not prepare students for employment. Proposals have been bandied about that would link tuition to public schools in some states to how well these students do after graduating.

Fairleigh Dickinson follows the shuttering of dozens of smaller MFA programs in recent years, according to Poets & Writers. There is “no single cause” that explains the closures, the magazine speculates, but “they likely stem from a confluence of factors—monetary pressures on universities and waning interest in the humanities being two of the biggest issues.”

“Waning interest” is a fuzzy phrase, though, because it seems to imply that this is students’ fault and not a result of the neo-liberal winds blowing in academia and a cultural and political emphasis on business and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) classes. Students are told early on — by parents, teachers, elected officials, and television — that classes like philosophy and English and American literature are frivolous. “What are you going to do with that?” they asked rhetorically, assuming there is no answer. Students take this to heart, and many are dissuade from entering fields that make us better as a culture.

The ultimate goal is to turn higher education into into a factory for the kind of compliant workers the corporate sector desires. It’s hitting private and public institutions — Rutgers gutted its writing program and is targeting foreign languages. Others are engaged in deeper cuts.

Academic unions have taken up the fight, but most of these closures will be permanent, as will the decimation of other humanities classes. Rutgers is laying off dozens of adjuncts and pushing writing instruction onto other disciplines. This both shortchanges students who are not getting specific writing instruction, the instructors laid off, the new instructors who now must take time from their discipline to teach writing, and the other programs on campus. My union at Rutgers has been fighting the cuts, but academic workers and students hold few cards — especially if they lack union protections (see Florida’s targeting of academic unions).

At Rutgers, we have active and unified unions, but the laws make pushing back difficult. So, as strong as we are, it’s still a slog and university management continues to hold disproportionate power over our lives and the lives of students. We need to start thinking beyond individual unions and individual schools, beyond public and private, and begin organizing as a sector. We have to think beyond just wages and benefits and work to ensure we have academic freedom and that we can preserve the kinds of classes and programs that give students a deeper sense of life and learning.

Money has distorted the formerly liberal university and the humanities are becoming an endangered species. We can’t allow this to keep happening. We are starting to see small efforts at this kind of sectoral unification — from Higher Education Labor United, some of the work from the American Association of University Professors — and more of it is coming. We will not allow the diminishment of American higher education to continue — not without a fight.

Hank Kalet is a poet, essayist and journalist in New Jersey. He teaches journalism at Rutgers University. Email: hankkalet@gmail.com; Facebook.com/hank.kalet; Instagram, @kaletwrites; X (Twitter), @newspoet41; Substance, hankkalet.substack.com.

From The Progressive Populist, September 15, 2024

Populist.com