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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

Written by Lee Relvas and inspired by conversations with Edie Fake, Ellen Schafer, George Egerton-Warburton, Julie Beaufils, Lauren Davis Fisher, and Sid M. Duenas

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Creative Time Summit

Lee from our group will be doing a talk TOMORROW Saturday Nov 14th at 12:35 pm at the Creative Time Summit about our experiences in and dropping-out of the institution. Please come! http://creativetime.org/summit/schedule/

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LAST WEEK TO VIEW:

Recesses with Edie Fake, Ellen Schafer, George Egerton-Warburton, Julie Beaufils, Lauren Davis Fisher, Lee Relvas, and Sid M. Dueñas

10 July – 8 August 2015

Park View 836 S. Park View Street, Unit 8 Los Angeles, California 90057 www.parkviewparkview.com

Hours are Wednesday to Saturday 12-6pm, and by appointment

Image above: Sid M. Dueñas

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Letter to USC from the Roski MFA Class of 2015

16 July 2015

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

We, the 2015 graduating Master of Fine Arts class of the Roski School of Art and Design, are writing to express our feelings of loss and alarm over the May 15th, 2015 withdrawal of our esteemed classmates and the events that have unfolded since that time. We echo our fellow alumni's recent letter expressing disbelief in the systematic downward trajectory that Dean Erica Muhl's tenure has steered the world-renowned Roski MFA Program.

Our experience negotiating Dean Muhl's unwillingness to reasonably communicate curricular changes significantly encumbered our degree progress at USC. Over the past year, we felt increasingly ostracized from our own program. After many meetings with Dean Muhl and her staff, it became clear that our investment was not one the Roski administration wished to understand or support. The administration’s consistent lack of transparency, evasive communication and persistent belittling of its students resulted in the significant loss of respected faculty members and staff during the 2014-15 school year. We struggled through the noise of a program in crisis that reached breaking point with the withdrawal of the class of 2016, which was unprecedented but not unexpected. During our final Summer 2015 semester, our studio facilities lay nearly empty, bled of a once robust community with ties to a broader cultural discourse and its accompanying support systems.

Dean Muhl has alienated students, faculty and alumni and offered convoluted and untruthful information to the public in an attempt to obfuscate the devastating impact of her actions and the failure of her administration. USC is sheltering a highly paid administrator who has operated unethically by breaking funding and curricular promises to its students. In continuing to allow Dean Muhl to maintain her position, USC is demonstrating that it does not honor its commitments to its students.

These disruptive tactics have made it clear to us, as well as the public at large, that Dean Muhl disregards and fundamentally misunderstands the needs of a graduate-level studio art program, despite the valuable advice of our committed faculty. In light of the stated losses, we are requesting that the University remove Erica Muhl as Dean of the Roski School of Art and Design, as she has proven herself unfit to uphold the charge of leadership in the field of fine arts higher education.

We celebrate the bonds we have formed with our peers and faculty, whom we thank for strengthening and engaging us beyond the limits of the institution. These relationships have proven unshakable in the face of the strategic dismantlement of a formerly renowned studio arts program. Following such a quick downfall, our sincere hope through this effort is for a reevaluation of the future of the program to which we enthusiastically dedicated ourselves the past two years.

Sincerely,

The USC Roski MFA graduating class of 2015

                                                              Jacinto Astiazarán                                                           Lena Daly

Orr Herz                                                                           Veli-Matti Hoikka

Sofía Londoño                                                                 Alli Miller

Alana Riley                                                                       Fleurette West

https://www.change.org/p/dean-erica-muhl-of-usc-roski-school-of-art-and-design-must-resign-now

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Letter of Support from USC MFA Alumni, 2005-2014

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

Kelly Sumiko Akashi, MFA ‘14 Carolina Caycedo, MFA ‘14 Becket Flannery, MFA ‘14 Julia Kouneski, MFA ‘14 Young Joon Kwak, MFA ‘14 Nevine Mahmoud, MFA ‘14 David Muenzer, MFA ‘14 Christopher Richmond, MFA ‘14 Chris Engman, MFA ‘13 Jibade-Khalil Huffman, MFA ‘13 Dwyer Kilcollin, MFA ‘13 Lila de Magalhaes, MFA ‘13 Paul Salveson, MFA ‘13 Rachelle Sawatsky, MFA ‘13 Barak Zemer, MFA ‘13 Karen Adelman, MFA ‘12 Tyler Coburn, MFA ‘12 Chris Coy, MFA ‘12 Erin Foley, MFA ‘12 Marc Horowitz, MFA ‘12 Sean Townley, MFA ‘12 Kristen Van Deventer, MFA ‘12 Patrick Walsh, MFA ‘12 Neal Bashor, MFA ‘11 Ryan Garrett, MFA ‘11 Onya Hogan-Finlay, MFA ‘11 Gelare Khoshgozaran, MFA ‘11 Vernon Price, MFA ‘11 Sarah Rara, MFA ‘11 John Seal, MFA ‘11 Andreas Warisz, MFA ‘11 Alyse Emdur, MFA ‘10 Cayetano Ferrer, MFA ‘10 Alex Israel, MFA ‘10 Sean Kennedy, MFA ‘10 Lisa Ohlweiler, MFA ‘10 Samantha Roth, MFA ‘10 Kenneth Tam, MFA ‘10 Tellef Tellefson, MFA ‘10 Christian Herman Cummings, MFA ‘09 Michael Hayden, MFA ‘09 Lee Lorenzo Lynch, MFA ‘09 Emily Mast, MFA ‘09 Nicole Miller, MFA ‘09 Dianna Molzan, MFA ‘09 Michael Parker, MFA ‘09 Nick Kramer, MFA ‘08 Joel Kyack, MFA ‘08 Maya Lujan, MFA ‘08 Mores McWreath, MFA ‘08 Lisa Williamson, MFA ‘08 Lawrence Rengert, MFA ‘08 Christopher Badger, MFA ‘07 Justin Beal, MFA ‘07 Patrick Jackson, MFA ‘07 Nick Jones, MFA ‘07 Jenn Kolmel, MFA ‘07 Elad Lassry, MFA ‘07 Jason Starr, MFA ‘07 Ann Trondson, MFA ‘07 Jonathan Butt, MFA ‘06 Lindsay Ljungkull, MFA ‘06 Ry Rocklen, MFA ‘06 Amanda Ross-Ho, MFA ‘06 Greg Wilken , MFA ‘06 Marya Alford, MFA ‘05 Chris Barnard, MFA ‘05 Paul Crow, MFA ‘05 Erik Frydenborg, MFA ‘05 John Knuth, MFA ‘05 Laura Riboli, MFA ‘05 Nicole Russell, MFA ‘05 Julie Shafer, MFA ‘05

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Statement of Solidarity from Roski Faculty, May 29th 2015

Roski Faculty, Students Call on USC to Prioritize Quality Education Over Profits

On Friday May 15, 2015, the first-year MFA class at USC’s Roski School of Art and Design dropped out in direct protest of the University’s refusal to deliver the funding and curricular promises made to these students.

The students’ decision to take this important action did not come as a surprise. For years, the University has been following a nationwide trend, shifting resources and focus away from the execution of our core educational mission and towards bloated administrative salaries, lavish infrastructure projects, and a business model of education.

We believe the University should honor its commitments to its students.

In their public statement, the first-year MFA class references the low pay and instability faced by non-tenure track faculty as a key example of USC’s misplaced priorities, and we couldn’t agree more. With a reported $3.8 billion in endowment, and $8.8 billion in total assets, the institution has the resources and capacity to provide stable, decently-paid jobs to faculty. Unfortunately, over 75% of faculty at USC work in contingent, part-time positions, which offer low pay and no job security. These are the jobs awaiting qualified scholars and practitioners, as well as debt-laden graduates.

For months, we have been speaking out about the personal struggles that many of us face, not knowing if we will have jobs from one semester to the next. And all too often, we have no voice in the decisions that affect our students and our programs. This instability and lack of transparency affects not only faculty, but our entire educational community.

To be clear, the decision by the first-year MFA class to drop out of school represents a failure by USC to retain and to engage productively with the students it recruited, and thus to meet its pedagogical mission. The University’s glaring focus on profits over quality education shows an administration disconnected from its own mission, as well as the needs and realities of its students and faculty.

We share very serious concerns regarding the University’s efforts to drive down the cost of instruction at the expense of providing quality education to our students in their fields of study, and good jobs to faculty.

United, we share a vision for the future of higher education. We are part of a nationwide movement organizing for good jobs for faculty and quality education for students. Together, we will continue the fight, and hold large institutions like USC accountable. We call on our colleagues across the country to join us as we rise to protect the stability of our students’ education.

Signed,

Current and Former Faculty, USC Roski School of Art and Design:

Emilie Halpern

Jean Robison

John Tain

Melanie Nakaue

Molly Corey

Nancy Lupo

Noura Wedell

Rachel Roske

Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer

A.L. Steiner

First-year MFA class, USC Roski School of Art and Design:

Julie Beaufils

Sid Duenas

George Egerton-­Warburton

Edie Fake

Lauren Davis Fisher

Lee Relvas

Ellen Schafer

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OPEN LETTER TO USC ADMINISTRATORS

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,

Julie Beaufils, Sid Duenas, George Egerton-Warburton, Edie Fake, Lauren Davis Fisher, Lee Relvas and Ellen Schafer

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DOWLOAD MFAnoMFA FACT SHEET HERE

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COLLECTIVE DROP-OUT STATEMENT

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.

The Roski MFA Program that attracted us was intimate and exceptionally well-­funded; all students graduated with two years of teaching experience and very little to no debt. We were fully aware of the scarcity of, and the paucity of compensation for, most teaching jobs, so this program seemed exemplary in creating a structure that acknowledged these economic and pedagogical realities. However, a different funding model was presented to us upon acceptance to the Program by the Roski administration: we would receive a scholarship for some of our first­-year tuition, and would have a Teaching Assistantship with fully­-funded tuition, a stipend, and benefits for the entirety of our second year upon completion of our first­-year coursework. We, the incoming class of 2014, were the first students since 2011 to take on debt to attend, and the first students since 2006 to gain no teaching experience during our first­-year in the program. Moreover, when we arrived in August 2014, we soon discovered that the Dean of the Roski School was attempting to retroactively dismantle the already­-diminished funding model that was promised to us, as well as make drastic changes to our existing faculty structure and curriculum.

The Dean of the Roski School of Art and Design was appointed by the University in May 2013, despite having no experience in the visual arts field. She, along with Roski’s various Vice and Assistant Deans, made it clear to our class that they did not value the Program’s faculty structure, pedagogy or standing in the arts community, the very same elements that had attracted us as potential students. The effects of the administration’s denigration of our program arrived almost immediately. In December 2014, Roski’s MFA Program Director stepped down from her position, and was not replaced with another director; in short succession that month, the program lost a prominent artist, mentor, and tenured Roski professor, her pedagogical energies and input devalued by the administration. By the end of the Fall 2014 semester, we quickly came to understand that the MFA program we believed we would be attending was being pulled out from under our feet. In January 2015, we felt it necessary to go to the source of these issues, the Dean of the Roski School.

In a slew of unproductive, confounding and contradictory meetings with the Dean and other assorted members of the Roski administration in early 2015, we were told that we would now have to apply for, and compete with a larger pool of students for the same TAships promised to us during recruitment. We were presented with a different curriculum, one in which entire semesters would occur without studio visits, a bizarre choice for a studio-­art MFA. Shocked by these bewildering and last-­minute changes, we reached out to the University’s upper administration. We were then told by the Vice Provost for Graduate Programs​ t​hat the communication we received during recruitment clearly stating our funding packages was an “unfortunate mistake,” and that if the Program wasn’t right for us, we “should leave.”  Throughout this ​g​rueling process of attempting to reason with the institution, the Roski School and University administration used manipulative tactics of delaying decisions, blaming others, contradicting each other’s stated policies, and attempting to force a wedge of silence between faculty and students. At every single turn, the Dean and every other administrator we interacted with tried to de­legitimize and belittle our real concerns, repeatedly framing us as “demanding” simply for advocating for those things the School had already promised us.

As of 5pm on May 10, 2015, after four months, seven meetings that we held in good faith with the administration, and countless emails later, we have no idea what MFA faculty we’d be working with for the coming year; we have no idea what the curriculum would be, other than that it will be different from what it was when we enrolled and is currently being implemented by administrators outside of our field of study; and finally, we have no idea whether we’d graduate with t​wice​ the amount of debt we thought we would graduate with.

Since February 2015, we have communicated in writing to the Provost of the University, the Vice Provost for Graduate Programs, The Dean of the Roski School, and other USC administrators that we could not continue in the Program if the funding and curricular promises made during recruitment were not honored; thus, the University is not blindsided by our decision, nor has it been denied ample time and opportunity to remedy these issues with us. Perhaps the University imagined that we would suffer any amount of lies, manipulations, and mistreatment for those shiny degrees.

Let’s not forget about the larger system of inequity that we paid into to try to get our degrees. USC tuition has increased an astounding 92% since 20011, compensation for USC’s top 8 executives has more than tripled since 20012, and Department of Education data shows that “administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009”3. Adjunct faculty, the jobs that freshly-­minted MFAs usually get-­ if they’re lucky-­ are paid at a rate that often does not even reach the federal minimum wage4 while paying off tens of thousands of dollars of student­loan debt. USC follows this trend of supporting a bloated administration with whom students have minimal contact to the diminishment of everyone else.  Despite having ultimate power over the program structure and curriculum, our experience has shown that the administration has minimal concern for their students. Meanwhile, faculty voices are silenced and adjunct5 faculty expands, affecting their overall ability to advocate for students. We seven students lost time, money, and trust in a classic bait­-and­-switch, and the larger community lost an exemplary funding model that attempted to rectify at least some of these economic disparities. What we experienced is the true “disruption” of this accelerating trend.

We each made life­-changing decisions to leave jobs and homes in other parts of the country and the world to work with inspiring faculty and, most of all, have the time and space to grow as artists. We trusted the institution to follow through on its promises. Instead, we became devalued pawns in the University’s administrative games. We feel betrayed, exhausted, disrespected and cheated by USC of our time, focus and investment. Whatever artistic work we created this spring semester was achieved in spite of, not because of, the institution. Because the University refused to honor its promises to us, we are returning to the workforce degree­-less and debt­-full.

A group of seven students is only a tiny part of the larger issues of the corporatization of higher education, the scandal of the economic precarity of adjunct faculty positions, and the looming student­debt bubble. However, the MFA Program we entered in August 2014 did one great thing: it threw us all together, when we might not have crossed paths on our own. We will continue to hold crits ourselves and be involved in each other’s work. We will be staging a series of readings, talks, shows and events at multiple sites throughout the next year, and will follow with seven weeks of “thesis” shows beginning in April of 2016. 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​ t​hat 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.

Julie Beaufils, Sid Duenas, George Egerton­Warburton, Edie Fake, Lauren Davis Fisher, Lee Relvas and Ellen Schafer

http://mfanomfa.tumblr.com/

mfanomfa@gmail.com

1 “Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System”, Final Release Data,National Center for Education Statistics, accessed January 2, 2015. 2 IRS 990 Forms FY 2001­2007, Part 2, Item 25, and Schedule III and IRS 990 Forms FY 2008­2012, Part IX, Line 5 3 “The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much”, Campos, Paul F. The New York Times, April 4th 2015.

4 http://www.adjunct.chronicle.com

5 75% of USC faculty is contigent https://about.usc.edu/files/2015/01/FY­2015­faculty­count­for­factbook­corrected.pdf

Image: detail from Access Points, Lauren Davis Fisher, 2015

http://www.artandeducation.net/school_watch/entire-usc-mfa-1st-year-class-is-dropping-out/

http://conversations.e-flux.com/t/the-entire-usc-mfa-1st-year-class-is-dropping-out/1664

http://hyperallergic.com/207235/entire-first-year-mfa-class-drops-out-in-protest-at-the-university-of-southern-california/

http://artforum.com/news/id=52175

http://artfcity.com/2015/05/15/in-protest-of-unethical-treatment-uscs-mfa-students-drop-out-of-school/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/15/entire-firstyear-mfa-clas_n_7293510.html

http://www.aqnb.com/2015/05/15/usc-mfa-1st-year-class-drops-out/

http://thenewinquiry.com/and-meanwhile/our-collective-and-interdependent-force-is-energizing/

http://www.artnews.com/2015/05/15/entire-class-of-first-year-mfa-students-dropping-out-of-usc/

[mfanomfa]

accepting proposals: mfanomfa@gmail.com

#mfanomfa #unfortunatemistake