[Cwgrad-announcements] Please email your support for this AWP-sponsored petition to the ASCCC by April 18, 2007--and please forward to your MFA candidates.

Mon Apr 2 08:08:08 PDT 2007

Recognizing Creative Writing as an Academic Discipline in California
Community Colleges
By Robert Vasquez

The Academic Senate for California Community Colleges (ASCCC) has before it
a petition to add creative writing to the state-wide Disciplines List.  The
ASCCC will vote on this petition this April at their Spring 2007 Plenary
session.  This action is 65 years overdue.

            According to D. W. Fenza, executive director of the Association
of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) which is officially sponsoring the
petition, graduate degrees in creative writing have existed since 1942 when
Paul Engle started the Iowa Writers' Workshop; soon, other institutions
developed similar programs:  "In 1946, Elliot Coleman founded the Writing
Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.  In 1947, Stanford University and the
University of Denver both launched graduate creative writing programs.  In
1948, Baxter Hathaway founded the creative writing program at Cornell
University" (Fenza).

            By 1984, over 150 graduate creative writing programs flourished
in the United States; currently, over 300 programs offer graduate degrees
and over 100 offer undergraduate degrees in creative writing (Fenza).  The
Writer's Chronicle routinely reports that more than 20,000 individuals have
earned M.A., M.F.A., or Ph.D. degrees in creative writing in the last twenty
years.  Obviously, creative writing as a distinct discipline has been a
reality at hundreds of educational institutions for many decades.  More
importantly, California Community Colleges (CCC) should officially recognize
this fact too, for they have done so with other disciplines in the past.

            Before English as a Second Language (ESL) and journalism were
added to the CCC Disciplines List, courses in those disciplines could be
taught by any community college professor with a graduate degree in English.
Fortunately for students and faculty, the ASCCC corrected this flaw by
recognizing both ESL and journalism as disciplines in their own right;
hence, ESL and journalism instructors must possess as a minimum requirement
graduate degrees in their respective disciplines.

            In contrast, English as a discipline in the CCC system currently
includes literature, composition, and reading-and creative writing since
it's not officially recognized via the Disciplines List.  As a result,
almost any California community college professor with a graduate degree in
English literature or composition can teach creative writing courses even
though he or she might not possess any substantial training in creative
writing.  How can this current situation benefit students?

            One could argue, "Aren't ESL, journalism, composition, and
creative writing courses the same?  After all, don't these students
compose?"  However, the student compositions in these unique disciplines
have different purposes and outcomes:  ESL students learn English reading
and writing skills as non-native speakers and writers of English; journalism
students aim to inform the public by reporting on various facts and events
considered newsworthy; English composition students write expository essays
controlled by thesis statements and/or research material and utilize
non-fiction prose; creative writing students produce poetry, fiction, and/or
drama.  In essence, each discipline requires instructors specifically
trained to help students achieve those different purposes and outcomes.

            Others could posit, "Shouldn't all English degree holders know
enough about literature to teach poetry and fiction writing courses?  Don't
English majors learn everything related to literature, including creative
writing?"  By analogy, degree holders in diverse disciplines should ask
themselves a similar question:  "Shouldn't all nursing degree holders know
enough about x-ray technology to teach such courses?  Don't nursing majors
learn everything related to health care, including radiology?"  Hopefully,
the absurdity of the latter question will help one understand the flaw in
the former question.  Students who wish to become radiology technicians must
study with experts in radiology who are licensed and recognized by the
state, just as prospective nursing students must study with nurses even
though radiology technicians and nurses often work on the same patients.
The same can be said analogously about English department faculty members:
We work with the same students, but we often have different tasks and goals.

            And for many decades potential English graduate students have
had to make conscious decisions:  "Should I choose the literature,
composition, or creative writing option in graduate school?"  If some
complain, "The university I attended didn't have a creative writing
program," such individuals must have lived rather academically sheltered
lives:  For some reason they didn't peruse the various college catalogues in
reference libraries; they didn't ask creative writing professors about
graduate creative writing programs; they didn't seek assistance from
guidance counselors regarding creative writing options at the graduate
level-in short, they didn't care enough about creative writing to do some
simple research.

            In California, many CSU and UC campuses offer-and some have been
doing so for decades-graduate degrees in creative writing:  CSU Chico, CSU
Fresno, CSU Long Beach, CSU Los Angeles, CSU Northridge, CSU Sacramento, San
Diego SU, San Francisco SU, San Jose SU, Sonoma SU, UC Davis, UC Irvine, UC
Riverside, and UC San Diego.  Of course, several private colleges do
likewise, including Antioch University (LA), california College of the Arts,
the California Institute of the Arts, Loyola-Marymount University, Mills
College, New College of California, Otis College of Art and Design, St.
Mary's College, the University of San Francisco, and the University of
Southern California.

            Still, others might say, "I took a few creative writing classes
in college; I even published a couple of poems in my college's undergraduate
magazine.  I have what it takes to teach creative writing."  Again, change
the discipline to another:  "I took a few painting classes in college; I
even had a couple of paintings in my college's student art gallery.  I have
what it takes to teach painting courses."  Nevertheless, if one takes the
time to study the various graduate degree requirements in any
practitioner-based discipline, one should immediately notice that taking "a
few classes" doesn't give one the kind or level of expertise that others
achieve when they finally earn such graduate degrees.  And publishing "a few
poems," often in questionable venues, doesn't make one an accomplished
writer.  With the advent of the internet combined with vanity presses,
people have no problem finding outlets for their works regardless of their
skill levels; such non-juried outlets often depend financially on the
uninformed and the untrained.

            If this petition is successful, California's community college
students would have a state-wide assurance that their English professors
would possess as a minimum requirement graduate degrees (M.A., M.F.A., or
Ph.D.) in creative writing if they teach such specialized workshops.  Of
course, these creative writing professors will continue to teach other
courses in composition and literature in their respective English
departments like their counterparts in the CSU and UC systems.

            And no community college, large or small, would be forced to
hire any full-time creative writing instructors:  Such degree holders
already meet the state's minimum qualifications to be hired as English
instructors provided they also hold B.A. degrees in English.  Hence,
probably every community college in the state already employs full- and/or
part-time English faculty members who currently possess graduate degrees in
creative writing (they will be "grandfathered" into the new discipline).
Given the large number of graduate degree holders in creative writing,
community colleges won't have any problems staffing their creative writing
sections with current or future faculty members.

            Please support this effort to add creative writing to the
state-wide Disciplines List for California Community Colleges by emailing
the Academic Senate before April 19, 2007, via the following email address:
asccc at ix.netcom.com.  And please contact your local community college's
representatives to the Academic Senate and urge them to vote for this
petition.  Tuition-paying community college students minimally deserve
appropriately degreed creative writing professors and nothing less.

Works Cited

Fenza, D. W.  "Creative Writing & Its Discontents."  The Writer's Chronicle.
March/April 2000.  26 October 2006.
            http://elink.awpwriter.org/m/awpChron/articles/dfenza01.lasso.

About the author:  Robert Vasquez was born and raised in California's
Central Valley.  The son of working-class parents, he worked in various
low-paying occupations from his high school years until he went to graduate
school at age 30.  He earned a B.A. in English from CSU Fresno and an M.F.A.
in English from UC Irvine, and he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Creative
Writing at Stanford University.  His poetry has received various awards,
including three Academy of American Poets prizes, three National Society of
Arts & Letters awards, a National Writers Union award, and-for his book At
the Rainbow (University of New Mexico Press)-the San Francisco Foundation's
James D. Phelan Award.  His poetry has been published in various journals,
including The Los Angeles Times' Book Review, The Missouri Review, The New
England Review, The Notre Dame Review, Parnassas: Poetry in Review,
Ploughshares, and The Village Voice, and in numerous anthologies, including
After Aztlan: Latino Poets of the Nineties, The Atomic Bomb: A Reader,
Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond to the Nuclear Age, California the Beautiful,
The Geography of Home, Highway 99, How Much Earth, Piecework: 19 Fresno
Poets, Proud Harvest, Under the Fifth Sun: Latino Literature from
California, and Writing Home: Award-Winning Literature from the New West.
He has a chapbook, Braille for the Heart (Momotombito Press), scheduled for
publication in 2007.  In 2004/05 he was the inaugural judge for the Andres
Montoya Poetry Prize, a first-book competition sponsored by the University
of Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies and the University of Notre
Dame Press.  In the 1990s he was the King/Chavez/Parks Visiting University
Professor in the graduate creative writing program at Western Michigan
University, and he has taught creative writing at three University of
California campuses, including a stint in 2000 as a Visiting Associate
Professor in the graduate creative writing program at UC Davis.  He
currently teaches at College of the Sequoias in Visalia, CA. 

A copy of his essay can be found at http://californiapoet.blogspot.com
<http://californiapoet.blogspot.com/> .

Maurya Simon

Professor 
Department of Creative Writing
University of California Riverside
900 University Avenue
Riverside, CA 92521-0318

TEL. (951) 827-2006 (office)

FAX: (951) 827-3619 
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