In defence of the much malinged creative writing degree
Why writing and arts degrees are not "rip off degrees"
We're entering that liminal zone between late summer and early Autumn. The point where I begin to consider folding up my shorts for a few months and wearing big man trousers again. It's also the time when people working in academia, particularly associate lecturers, wait to see if their hours have been cut or whether their degrees have been scrapped completely. This is particularly apt for those of us in the arts and humanities, where the previous government decided that any degree that didn't lead to a well-paying career was a "rip-off degree". The current administration have done nothing to reverse or contradict this, or much else for that matter.
This is to be expected from right-wing libertarian business graduates but it was quite a shock for me to read similar takes from professional writers on the subject of creative writing degrees. I just about managed not to engage reply-guy mode on reading a post along these lines the other day. It seemed to be a bit tone deaf, considering the number of lecturers currently finding out if they are about to lose out on a substantial chunk of their livelihood. Other than that, the post was harmless enough. Just a take. This essay isn't intended as an extended sub-tweet (or sub-skeet in this case). So I will not be referring to it in any capacity. I will instead divert my righteous subtweet energy into something that I hope is more constructive and maybe have a little argument with a younger version of myself.
A few people with sharp memories of my non-stop bellicosity in the earlier part of this century might point out that I wasn’t always a cheerleader for Creative Writing courses. I gravitated towards the autodidacts and blue-collar moonlighters of the literary world. But even though my earlier heroes might have spurned the academic path, it was often the case that the academy played a big role for the writers that influenced them. There were also more than a few blue collar writers who pushed their academic backgrounds further down their bio page in order to further enhance the romantic dignity of their elbow-grease ways.
I never studied writing myself, I studied art. There might have been a modicum of talent within me as far as handling a paintbrush was concerned, but moving up to degree level made my limitations pretty clear. It wasn’t long before I went from painting to making short films instead. If YouTube had been around at the time, I might have stuck with filmmaking. But it was the late 90s, so there were no video editing suites on hand beyond the campus and a computer that could play video files, let alone edit them, was way beyond my means.
Poetry was always there in the background, in my notebooks or sometimes scrawled in the occasional white spaces in my sketchbooks. It was never my intention to become a full time poet, even though it was my most trusted and immediate form of expression. As I started to make myself known on the live poetry circuit, I owed a lot of my development to a community of contemporaries and mentors, many of whom owed their knowledge of the craft to higher education.
My years at art college were far from wasted. One of the most transformative moments of my life came when I first saw a real Picasso in at the old Tate Gallery, now known as the Tate Britain. It was a painting I already knew from glossy textbooks and exhibition catalogues in the college library. Something about being able to stand in front of the real thing changed my sense of reality. The world that the painting existed within felt utterly separate to the one that I lived in. Bringing my world and the world of the painting together helped me to entertain the idea that I didn't have live a certain life that most in the place I grew up in lived. My mind had been retuned or was perhaps a little bit broken. It was a tiny little moment that still feels like it was a major gear change towards the life that I live today.
I've tried to involve a similar standard with my own teaching – to gently prime my students towards having a similar kind of experience. One particular poem or line of a poem might be enough to snap somebody out of the hypnotic state that they had unwittingly been placed into by their family or peers since childhood. This might seem like I'm presenting myself as a melanin deficient version of Morpheus from The Matrix, but it's more the case that a lot of students developed a life-long love of poetry that they carried beyond the degree, even if it simply meant that they might occasionally miss a stop while reading a poem on the underground. Some students went on to get published or carried on through their masters to a doctorate. Some went on to live in little towns and ended up founding the first open mic or writers group to run there.
One of my earliest students turned out to be heavily involved in gang culture at the time that I taught him. I found this out from his brother during a live stream that I was running during a 2020 lockdown. He had finished his degree and moved on to a new life as a schoolteacher. I was then told that the module that I taught was a major factor in him knuckling down and becoming more engaged. This resonated because there were similarities to my own story. While I wasn't really a gang member in those early college years, I was caught up in petty crime and the slippery slope was slick beneath my heels. For whatever reason, I course corrected and my education was a major reason for this.
You might have noticed that I haven't mentioned numbers and grades. That's because I don't really think they're that important within a creative arts degree. They might make or break an academic career in STEM subjects but things work differently in the arts. If you get lucky with a literary agent and luck out again with a publisher, nobody's going to bring in a specialist to forensically scour your academic record before the deal is done.
Most graduates, bar a number of career specialisms, don't go on to have a career in their field of study. I've known a lot of philosophy graduates who are great for long, deep chats but not one of them is a professional philosopher. Many jobs just want someone with a piece of paper that proves that they knuckled down to something serious for three years and saw it through to the end.
The intrinsic value in gaining a thorough understanding of the works of Hegel, or any other non-STEM subject, is not found in how it kicks down doors to a lucrative career in dialectical reasoning. It is in enabling people from a range of backgrounds to gain a deep understanding of challenging ideas through the guidance of those who also went through the same process.
It should be noted that this is probably one of the best ever times to be an autodidact. There have never been as many freely available educational resources. But none of those will go on to test your understanding of the subject or give detailed feedback to the essay or presentation that you probably cobbled together the night before.
The value of higher education, for me at least, doesn't lie in giving people access to lucrative careers, though that's not to be sniffed at, of course. I find value in how it nurtures and challenges people to become more thoughtful, creative and knowledgable in a way that also enhances the lives of the people around them. I can see why the powers that be can be so against this – it's harder to pull the wool over the eyes of an electorate that can see the rhetorical sleight of hand that spin doctors and speech writers are dab hands at (I wonder where they could have learned it?)
Right now there are malevolent actors who want nothing more than an uneducated population with a poor command of critical thinking and communication – willing to throw away whatever remaining rights they have in order to feel like they are striking back at some ill-defined other. Attacking the arts and humanities is a major wedge of this strategy and sadly, it seems to be working. Disaffected graduates and proud autodidacts might feel moved to cheer the destruction of the ivory towers but, in the aftermath of that fall, they might suddenly discover that the foundations of their art form have also been reduced to rubble.
Thanks for reading this
I had something else lined up for this week, three cuttings from my digital garden to be precise, as I didn’t feel that my writer brain was really in a productive space for writing essays. Then I realised a foolproof formula: scroll through social media posts until you find yourself penning a reply to one of them and then, instead of hitting send, copy and paste it into a text editor and keep going.
But I don’t think I’ll be able to do that every week so I’m still planning to use this newsletter to compile snippets and cuttings from elsewhere into a kind of weekly/bi-weekly/monthly digest. The post I had ready to go will show up next week so it will be interesting to gauge how readers feel about getting an essay one week and some poems and micro-essays the next.
I keep having to scroll back and remind myself about what kind of project Rusty Niall was when I kicked it off in 2021. It was originally intended as a way to keep off social media and let others know what I’m up to. Social mediaa seems to have died a little death in the interim so the job seems to have been done for me. But I still feel like I have a lot to share so the mission remains the same.
Thanks for coming along for the ride,
Niall
If you enjoy my writing and would like to support my work, please consider becoming a supporter for £3 a month (there are no percs or paywalls, it’s just an automated tip cup), or buying me a coffee if you prefer to make a one-off donation. If you want to read more poems and micro essays, there are plenty available in my digital garden.