If you are a faculty member at an American University and are doing or have completed a PhD you know what I am talking about. Are you wondering, how on earth your students will ever correct an essay having hardly ever written much themselves? Wondering how to be polite when they ask about the PhD and you can barely not roll your eyes. You think this as your freshly minted MFA student imagines him/herself as a PhD student next....: eeehrm - did you read those books I gave you? Can you name 10 artists let alone 10 philosophical ideas in detail? - You say this: Well why do you want to do a PhD - I mean you don't need one or more debt. I did not know you were into reading and writing - you are an activist, a maker. Besides you can teach with the MFA. Your know your program is inefficient. You most are, you know because you struggled, too - to go from hardly any knowledge about writing, academic indexes and databases, research and peer review, episteme and what research really means later in life after decades of work and admin experience (research you now know is not looking things up at the library - MFA art folks!).
Meredith Davis has written a new paper for Leonardo about the shortcomings of the MFA as preparation for the PhD. The idea that there could be an impending push back effect to the quality of the MFA - it is one issue that was much discussed in 2012 and beyond at those heated CAA sessions. Personally I believe that the American MFA lacks rigour, lacks career preparation in some cases, varies greatly and needs to include more academic rigour, as we call it in England. With an OU. Rigour is the adherence to specific formatting languages, peer review and academics, methodology and real training in research questions and how to formulate them. Writing and researching is a craft and if the MFA should prepare students for teaching then it must include more rigor to prepare others for teaching or the PhD, or for publishing. As Davis notes: Students graduate from professional MFA design programs often unprepared to pose truly researchable questions, recognize multiple research paradigms and their corresponding standards, structure methodologically rigorous investigations or even author papers longer than a few pages.
Their faculty are equally clueless when asked to help regarding these matters and struggle themselves at times to have their proposals accepted at conferences (with the exception of the anecdote heavy "artist talk"). Anecdotally I can say that the PhD made me a 10 times faster administrator, reader and writer, faster deeper more complex thinker, meaning I can get more done in general and I can get work done faster than my peers in art. We must change and upgrade the American MFA. It is already problematic because some professors teach what they were taught which leads to watered down programs... It is most definitely not a preparation for a PhD application of any kind.
Meredith Davis is Professor Emerita in the College of Design at North Carolina State University, where she served as Director of the interdisciplinary PhD in Design and Director of Graduate Studies. She is an AIGA national medalist and fellow, NASAD fellow and Alexander Quarles Holladay Medalist for Excellence in Teaching. Read the paper here: