Crossing Genre and the Demise of USC's MPW Program

The students in USC's MPW program were alerted to the demise of our program last week. We were made to understand that it was a "business decision," and that the program will no longer exist after spring of 2016.

I was not surprised because of several reasons. MPW is not a classic master's program in that the initials, which stand for Masters of Professional Writing, might not be recognized on someone's vitae as having the same merit as MFA or PhD. I'll get to whether or not this is reasonable. Furthermore, more petty controversies not worth mentioning here might have tainted the new dean's opinion of the program. Moreover, in terms of what qualifies as a "business decision," one can only imagine the kind of talks surrounding reputation and finances that go on behind closed doors in a private university like USC, where it's all about public relations and endowment. Beyond all of this, changes in the structure of the Writing Program suggest that it won't be using MPW students in the future to teach composition. And some overlap with the theater program and PhD program in Creative Writing and Literature might suggest redundancies in the mind of a new dean ready to prove his mettle. To show that he means "business."

So I was not particularly surprised to get the announcement. Do I think this was a good decision? Regardless of how the students feel knowing that the education listed on their resumes and vita will be defunct and require explanation to any future employers, was this the right way to pinch pennies or swipe away a program in the interest of repute? All emotions aside-- even aligning myself with pragmatism-- I still think it was a terrible idea.

Because we need interdisciplinary, cross-genre writing programs like the Masters of Professional Writing, which has little to do with the "P" and more to do with the "M" and "W." I have an MFA in poetry, and the program I attended at the University of Washington is a very good program where I learned how to be a better poet, but I also know that the poets and fiction writers did our work off in our own little enclaves where we, to a certain extent, became more polarized in how we approached genre. Our poems became more poetic and our fiction became more polished, more exemplary of good fictive prose. This is all very valuable. Long live the genre-specific MFA.

Some of us, however, really thrive in an environment where we are encouraged to use the kind of precision and figurative language usually reserved for poetry in our prose writing. Some of us become better poets when we are made to remember that there is a whole cohort of readers out there that do better with poetry when it respects the role the sentence plays in the line, and when poetry gives a nod to the kind of accessibility usually reserved for prose writing. In other words, no matter what one's literary art, we can often benefit from working outside our comfort zone, and for some of us, our comfort zone is specifically in the gray area that exists between poetry and prose. Or between playwriting and poetry. Or between creative non-fiction and poetry. Etcetera and so on.

The demise of the MPW program, which encourages, even requires, experimentation and inter-disciplinary writing, is a true loss then. What a shame to see this original program go away. What a shame to value the intensive MFA model over one which, if we're doing the work and open to new experience, makes us better writers both within and without our chosen concentrations.