Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.
—Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Twenty years ago the question “do artists need art school?” would have made a good rhetorical starting point for an MFA critique. Today, as the accessibility and quality of college-level art education are increasingly compromised by massive tuition hikes, institutional dependence on contingent faculty, and the prioritization of “culture-preneurism” over criticality, the inquiry is real and urgent.

Costs for art programs have risen approximately 300% (inflation adjusted) at the California Institute of the Arts since 1964, and are up 92% across the board at the University of Southern California (USC) since 2001; such hikes are consistent across the region’s schools. Contingent employees now comprise 76.4% of college instructors nationally while a nationwide faculty movement to unionize is being met by harsh administrative opposition. With PhDs likely to replace MFAs as the terminal art degree, the debt burden carried by art teachers and former art students, as well as the profits generated by their institutions, will increase accordingly.

Historically, artists have engaged a variety of processes to acquire their craft, learn its histories and discourses, and meet people who will support their professional life. Roughly equivalent to a medieval scriptorium or Renaissance master’s studio, contemporary graduate art schools are rooted in 19th-century efforts to democratize education, which required that professionalization become standardized, institutionalized and, most recently, monetized. By the mid-20th century, numbers of art schools were sustaining a largely symbiotic relationship between students, educators and institutions. Middle-class and better-off working-class students were able to access art education and, upon graduating, to enter a network of employment, discourse and support opportunities. Today’s art education is so thoroughly monetized that the balance has tipped. Far from working for students and artists, institutions parasitically thrive at their expense.

It is not only the profit potential of art schools that makes them a target for neoliberal “reforms,” but also the nature of the discipline. While art-making develops a capacity to engage complex issues, empathize with and feel responsibility for others, and “envision” not-yet-existing possibilities, the process of art education has long been informed by (often uneasy) combinations of modernist iconoclasm, liberalism and continental philosophy.

This is not to say that art, which has historically tended to support rather than undermine the status quo, is inherently revolutionary. A quality educational process that can, at its best, support paradigm-challenging criticality is being transformed to professionalize students and contain their visions within entrepreneurial parameters. A case in point, USC’s 2016 MFA class recently withdrew en masse to protest changes resulting from the USC Roski School of Fine Arts 2013 rebrand, which saw a nonvisual artist appointed as both dean of a renamed School of Art and Design, and founding executive director of the new USC Iovine and Young Academy for Arts, Technology, and the Business of Innovation. The dean in question, Erica Muhl, is now under pressure from the class of 2015, former students, faculty, and alumni to step down.

Should education support students in “the transformation of their world?” Or should it incubate them to perceive transformation solely in the context of market-stimulating, “revolutionary” product and practice? The apparently local battles in which art institutions, educators and students are currently engaged are part of a global struggle over shifting values and resistance to those shifts, which will significantly impact what it is possible to imagine and make in the future.

Occupying a spectrum from reformist to revolutionary, efforts to mitigate the neoliberal thrust include organizing against tuition increases and for collective bargaining, as well as demanding greater institutional transparency and widespread debt relief. In late 2014 for example, protests triggered by a proposed University of California tuition increase significantly influenced a subsequent two-year UC tuition freeze. Between November 2014 and February 2015, adjuncts and non-tenure-track faculty unionized at eight U.S. colleges, from California’s Dominican University to Boston University. The efforts of student debt-strikers and Occupy-affiliate The Debt Collective undoubtedly contributed to a June 2015 Department of Education decision to create a debt-discharge pathway for students of the defunct Corinthian Colleges.

In addition, students, teachers and unaffiliated artists around the world are generating alternative learning plans in the form of artist-initiated pedagogic projects, student-run academies and programs of public conversation. Some are fee-or exchanged-based, but most assert education as a right, not a privilege. Many draw upon established structures of educational hierarchy and appeal to the same demographic as traditional academic models, with varying degrees of porosity and access.

Sarita Dougherty’s Post-National Department of Transcultural Youth in Los Angeles, for instance, co-devises “methodologies for self-guided learning in groups,” which include a DIY PhD that’s currently in the first year of study. London’s School of the Damned was initiated and is run by its students “…outside institutional systems of funding as an active political position.” School of Echoes, an “initiative for learning and experimenting with organizing and popular education,” and The Mountain School, both Los Angeles-based, have influenced the development of the U.K.’s Alt MFA. Turkish artist Ahmet Ögüt initiated MASS in Alexandria, Egypt in 2010, partly to counteract the collapse of state-run government universities post-revolution. “In order for culture to thrive, you need nonprofit educational systems,” he claims. The Silent University, begun at Tate London in 2012, defines itself as “…an autonomous knowledge exchange platform by refugees, asylum seekers and migrants.” And Public School, an international network of 13 connected yet autonomous open framework systems for autodidacts, offers courses by anyone who will propose them. The flexible formations demonstrated by these few examples from a wide experimental field raise the question: Is a hierarchical educational structure more reflective of the commercialization of learning than the methodology of learning itself?

The desire for alternative, less formalized models of education may overlook the significance of a formal education for the less privileged. People who are systematically denied access to traditionally structured forms of learning frequently value academic hierarchy for the economic viability, class mobility, and social status the credential offers, not to mention the systems of support that can engender personal, intellectual, and cultural development.
The profit-minded model that now dominates art education is not inevitable; it arose in the late 19th century alongside such other options as low-cost night- and weekend-schools and anarchist free schools, which accommodated the needs of working people. Our current education crisis is an opportunity to re-evaluate existing pedagogical models and call forth alternatives that, while informed by the past, respond to 21st-century needs. In educating ourselves, we can hope to transform the logic of the present system.

SIDEBAR:
The Union Difference
Organizing Contingent Faculty

Adjunct educators across the nation are self-organizing. Banded together as “Faculty Forward” and working with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), they have elected contractual representation at 26 campuses since 2013, including in Washington D.C., the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, Albany, Boston, St. Louis and in LA at Otis College of Art and Design. Additionally, faculty at a number of independent Catholic institutions are fighting a 1979 Supreme Court ruling that exempts religious schools from recognizing elected representation or collective bargaining agreements. Current campaigns are underway in many more cities including New York, Philadelphia, Tucson and Los Angeles.

The stakes for teachers and students are high. Forty-five years ago, undergraduate tuition, fees and board cost the equivalent of $9,461 per annum, and 78% of higher education faculty were tenured or on tenure track. Today, students average over $20,234 for tuition, fees and board, rising to $42,224 for private institutions, where institutional spending on administration has increased 36% (beyond inflation) since 1989.

The three-decade trend to “ …invest in non-instructional student services” identified by the American Institutes of Research is coupled with a shift away from the tenure system. Today 70% of faculty does not have tenure. A full 50% are part-timers, many of whom work at several institutions. Contracts are frequently semester-to-semester, with low salaries, and few or no benefits. Speaking to the impact of “adjunctification,” artist Devon Tsuno, Cypress College’s Outstanding Adjunct Faculty of 2011, said: “Most adjuncts want to do everything they can for their students, but on a temporary contract, it’s harder to develop relationships and programming. Being contingent compromises quality.”

Resisting efforts to unionize, administrations use similar union-busting tactics in multiple schools. During unionization campaigns these frequently include efforts to delay or cancel the vote, calling meetings with adjuncts at short notice to “discuss” concerns, and criticizing SEIU as “not the right fit” for an educational environment. Allegations that administrators “bribe” individual faculty with promises of pay raises and plum courses are rife. Where faculty has already organized, contract negotiations are delayed to force a union withdrawal vote, or faculty representatives are required to negotiate with attorneys rather than school administrators.

Faculty Forward counters with statistics that speak to “The Union Difference:” 60% of unionized contingent faculty report access to retirement benefits through their employer, while only 27.5% of nonunion contingents report the same. Part-time faculty at Tufts University will receive a 22% pay increase by 2016 as a result of collective bargaining, while Georgetown University part-timers will receive a $300 course cancellation fee. As contract negotiations continue on 26 campuses, the union difference is likely to become more clear.

Nancy Popp is a Los Angeles-based artist and educator whose work addresses critical pedagogy and collaboration. Janet Owen Driggs is a writer, artist and educator who has taught for over 25 years at art schools in the U.K. and U.S.

Illustrations by Petra Larsen