→2011→06→22→Comic Strip of the Day→CSotD: … and with a minor in Bohemian Studies
Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: … and with a minor in Bohemian Studies

Published: June 22, 2011 1 minute 5 comments

  Bliss

 

Harry Bliss, in his eponymous cartoon, touches a nerve.

A good friend moved to Japan to teach at a university there. He said that most Japanese colleges don't really do a lot of actual instructing so much as they provide a venue for students to meet each other, make contacts and prepare for life after college.

Which I guess is why Japanese grade schools and high schools need to provide so much instructional depth.

But there is an element of that in all universities, and always has been. If you read "Tom Brown at Oxford" (1861) or "Stover at Yale," (1911) or "This Side of Paradise" (1920), the theme of privilege versus merit runs through them, with the "moral" being that there are some deserving people there but the majority are simply playing around while waiting to step into whatever sinecure has been prepared for them.

"Oh, father and mother pay all the bills,
And we have all the fun.
That's the way we do in college life.
Hooray!" — Stover at Yale

That Wikipedia article on "This Side of Paradise" even includes a reaction from the president of Princeton, Fitzgerald's not-quite-alma-mater: "I cannot bear to think that our young men are merely living four years in a country club and spending their lives wholly in a spirit of calculation and snobbishness."

Well, it may have hurt his feelings, but there it was.

Somewhere between Dink Stover and Amory Blaine, my grandfather graduated from the University of Wisconsin. In much later years, I asked him what his father, a Danish immigrant who worked on the loading dock at an iron mine on the Upper Peninsula, thought of his going to college.

"He thought it was a waste of time," he told me, "because he had no contacts to help me once I got out."

A degree in mining engineering, of course, translates into work with more ease than does one in English or history, and my great-grandfather lived long enough to see his son the manager of a mine, though he didn't get to see that the elevator continued to ascend well after that.

Still, I think the old man was pretty perceptive, and I'm quite sure it wasn't because he had grown up reading novels on the topic.

When it comes to MFA programs, I'm not sure where realism, pragmatism and cynicism overlap.

I know, for instance, that, if you take an MFA, whether in graphic arts or in writing, you will have a couple of years of hanging out with people who share your interests, in a place where you will be exposed to visitors who, if they take an interest in you, can advance your work.

But I also know that moving to Portland, Oregon, for a couple of years seems to provide many of those elements, as well, and the coffee is likely to be better.

And yet another thing I know is that too much input, from instructors or from peers, can lead to a kind of homogenization of style. Are you learning to express yourself, or are you learning a type of mimicry that those who pay for your art have chosen to reward? (And which were you looking for?)

A lot of contemporary fiction seems to have been created on the assembly lines at Iowa and Stanford. While not quite as stylistically monotone as the tiresome personal essays on NPR, there are still too many marks of the Writers Workshop on the novels that emerge from these places. "Good literature," for all the bowing and scraping with which it is discussed, can be just as formulaic as detective novels, bodice rippers or any other genre.

And then there is this factor: The vast majority of people who get MFAs in acting don't become professional actors. But you can't put on very many plays –– aside from "Zoo Story" and "Waiting for Godot" –– much less staff your program, if you only admit the two or three students who will actually follow through when it's over. The defense is that you can't tell who falls into that select group until they go through the program, but, still …

I have no idea how any of this translates when it comes to MFAs in the graphic arts, but I'd be a little surprised if things were much different over there.

Maybe Harry Bliss is just a wise-ass, and maybe I'm just bitter. But I laughed at the cartoon.

There was a time, however, when my attempts at novel-writing were frustrated and I thought about getting an MFA. There weren't so many of them in those days, but I began the process of applying to a new program at San Diego State, until a friend asked this question:

"If 'MA' stands for 'More Academia,' what does 'MFA' stand for?"

Previous Post
New York Post denies access to site for iPad users
Next Post
Danish court upholds guilty verdict for Westergaard attacker

Comments 5

  1. I think you could make this argument about any higher ed program. But the point is to challenge students to think about what they are doing. If they learn to take charge of their own learning, and be critical about the world around them, whether it’s their writing or their science, they will make a contribution to their community. It’s the people who show up to class wanting to be entertained rather than who want to learn that are frustrating and who don’t get anything out of a course. Yeah, maybe you could get a similar experience out of hanging out in a shop in Portland, but the reason you attend a degree program is that they (should) have a track record showing that they help students think/become better writers/scientists/teachers.

  2. Your right about motivation, for sure — my grandfather also told me about a fellow in his Army outfit during WWI who got all the way through Law School and passed the bar before he realized he didn’t want to be a lawyer. He enlisted as a way out. And there are schools full of kids like that, but I would suggest fewer of them in things like mining engineering than in the arts.
    But I also think engineering and the hard sciences are places where there is more in the way of information and technique to teach — including directing research that is both useful and instructive — than you would find in the fine arts, which are a great deal less tangible. In their case, I would contend that spending two years in any community of like-minded artists would be valuable, whether it’s Portland or a degree program.
    I would also argue that there is also only so long that you can get valuable information doing that. At some point, you have to get out of the classroom or the coffeehouse and get to work. (I’m reminded of the cafe/artist community of Paris depicted in “Of Human Bondage.” After serving a certain term of apprenticeship, the really productive ones start producing, not sitting around drinking absinthe and talking about it.)

  3. That fellow in your grandfather’s WWI Army outfit wouldn’t have been Edwin Hubble, would it? Hubble had a law degree before entering service in the Great War, but abandoned law for astronomy afterwards.

  4. I think he’d have told the story differently if it were a case of the fellow having some other interest. His main interest when they met was getting out of his law practice without having to deal with having wasted so much time and money trying to do what other people expected of him. On the other hand, they missed the fighting and ended up just sitting around through the armistice and negotiations. Maybe they got a chance to sit and look at the stars. Grandpa spent the time playing poker, mind you, but …

  5. I think there’s a difference between coasting through to a previously-assured position and the making of previously-absent contacts. The latter can be a valid and important element, although perhaps less so in engineering and the sciences. (The degree to which “contacts” are at least perceived to be a dominant element in getting a job is evidenced by the extent to which America has monetized the networking process.)

Comments are closed.

Search

Subscribe to our newsletter

Get a daily recap of the news posted each day.
^ Top