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[Revised 3/24/03]

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA

Request for Authorization to Establish a New Degree Program

INSTRUCTIONS: Please submit five copies of the proposal to the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs, UNC Office of the President. Each proposal should include a 2-3 page executive summary. The signature of the Chancellor is required.

Date: 2/18/03

Constituent Institution: North Carolina State University

CIP Discipline Specialty Title: English Creative Writing

CIP Discipline Specialty Number: 23.0501 Level: B M X 1st Prof D

Exact Title of the Proposed Degree: __Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing__

Exact Degree Abbreviation (e.g. B.S., B.A., M.A., M.S., Ed.D., Ph.D.): M.F.A.

Does the proposed program constitute a substantive change as defined by SACS? Yes_X No__

a) Is it at a more advanced level than those previously authorized? Yes_X No__

b) Is the proposed program in a new discipline division? Yes____ No __X_

Proposed date to establish degree program (allow at least 3-6 months for proposal review):

month _August_ year 2003

Do you plan to offer the proposed program away from campus during the first year of operation? Yes No X

If so, complete the form to be used to request establishment of a distance education program and submit it along with this request.

I. Description of the Program

A. Describe the proposed degree program (i.e., its nature, scope, and intended audience).

The degree will be a 36-hour, two-year studio/research program. As a studio/research program, the NCSU MFA curriculum will require a balance of writing workshops and literary scholarship. The program will rely on the regular English department faculty for most of the literature course offerings, while writers on the program faculty will offer form, craft, and theory courses, workshops, and thesis direction.

As a fine arts degree, and like MFA programs in music, dance, and the visual arts, the MFA in Creative Writing is designed to train students for a career as professional artists, in this case writers of imaginative literature. But the MFA has also increasingly become the requisite degree for people intending to become college and university teachers of creative writing. Graduates of the program may pursue careers as professional writers, and will be qualified to teach in two-year colleges, four-year colleges, and universities. We anticipate some students will seek the degree as a means of life enrichment as well as for a professional credential. Our location in Raleigh will allow us to reach the highly educated and densely populated areas in and around Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill.

B. List the educational objectives of the program.

The objective of the MFA is to produce polished writers of fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, and drama. Graduates of the program should be well acquainted with the craft, theory and practice of contemporary literature, be prepared to pursue a life of letters, and have produced a publishable book-length creative work for their thesis. Elective courses, which may be selected both from within or without the English Department, will offer students the opportunity to pursue an area of interest such as linguistics and translation, historical fiction, etc.

C. Describe the relationship of the program to other programs currently offered at the proposing institution, including the common use of: (1) courses, (2) faculty, (3) facilities, and (4) other resources.

The NCSU Department of English currently has a creative writing concentration within the MA degree. The MFA will make use of resources developed for the MA program as follows:

(1) Courses: The current graduate workshop courses in poetry, fiction and studies in creative writing will remain as the foundation of the MFA degree program.

(2) Faculty: The four current full-time creative writing faculty are well-qualified to teach in and will be the fundamental faculty for the MFA degree. The program will need to hire one or two more people, in some combination of the areas of poetry, creative non-fiction, memoir, or screenwriting, as it develops.

(3) Facilities: Classrooms, offices, and computer labs currently existing are adequate to establish the MFA. The English department at present is suffering from some crowding problems, and as the university seeks to solve these problems, we would expect the creative writing programs to benefit along with all other English programs.

(4) Other resources: The MFA would use the existing MA program staff and infrastructure for admissions and other support. With an increased volume of applicants and students will come some need for dedicated creative writing staff and resources.

II. Justification for the Program—Narrative Statement

A. Describe the proposed program as it relates to:

1. the institutional mission and strategic plan

The mission of North Carolina State University is to serve its students and the people of North Carolina as a doctoral/research-extensive, land-grant university. As a terminal graduate degree, the MFA would advance the university's call for innovative learning and its stress on creativity, and its commitment to excellence in disciplines beyond its historic strengths in agriculture, science and engineering. The study of creative writing can foster demographic and intellectual diversity. The MFA would also enrich the College of Humanities and Social Sciences' academic and intellectual presence in the university, community, and state. By reaching out to life-long learners and post baccalaureate students, the MFA would help fulfill the university's historic land-grant mission.

2. student demand

The current M.A. program’s concentration in creative writing has 23 students enrolled. About one half of the applicants to our current MA program indicate an interest in doing the creative writing concentration. We have had steady interest from these students in the MFA degree and anticipate that a certain percentage of students who would previously have sought the MA will seek and qualify for the MFA degree program.

There is a continuing interest in creative writing from the highly literate population of the Research Triangle area, and as of now none of the three major local universities offers a fine arts masters degree to meet that demand. Without any attempt to publicize the prospective program, we already have a list of a couple of dozen people who have asked us to contact them if an MFA degree is established.

3. societal need (For graduate, first professional, and baccalaureate professional programs, cite manpower needs in North Carolina and elsewhere.)

The societal effects of a fine arts program in creative writing can’t be easily measured in terms of GNP. Certainly the writing and publishing of imaginative literature is a vital industry in our society today: according to a recent study on “The Changing Business of Trade Books, 1975-2002,” the number of new books published annually in the United States increased about 300 percent between 1975 and 2000, to 122,000 from 39,000. But need can perhaps be better measured by noting the number of people who are engaged by writing and reading imaginative literature, and by the increasing enrollments in fine arts programs in writing nationwide. For students who wish to become writers themselves, there is no better way to expedite their development than to study with accomplished and published writers, and MFA programs have become the most common path for students to get this opportunity.

An active MFA program becomes a focal point for public engagement with literature and the fine arts. Through public readings, discussions, festivals, book sales and meetings of writers and teachers it broadens the cultural life of the community and state. More fundamentally than that, people who come to understand literature in the particularly intimate way that the study of writing fiction and poetry promotes also learn more about society and their fellow human beings. No other art form puts its citizenry in closer communication with the social concerns at all levels of society. A populace well-educated in literature is a strong electorate.

4. impact on existing undergraduate and/or graduate academic programs of your institution. (e.g., Will the proposed program strengthen other programs? Will it stretch existing resources? How many of your programs at this level currently fail to meet Board of Governors’ productivity criteria? Is there a danger of proliferation of low-productivity degree programs at the institution?)

The MFA degree program will bring in first-rate students who will enroll in regular literature classes as a part of their studies. Creative writers frequently bring a fresh perspective to their literature classes, the perspective of prospective practitioners as much as critics. They will naturally enhance the place of literature in our university and community, and we expect this program to bring favorable attention to the English Department and College of Humanities and Social Sciences. The MFA degree has increasingly become a commonplace sign of a strong graduate program in English at major universities, as witnessed by the proliferation of such degrees across the country in the last twenty years.

The current faculty is sufficient to staff this program in the beginning, though we must hire one additional full-time poet, with a secondary area of expertise (in creative non-fiction, memoir, screenwriting, etc.). We expect to fill this need in poetry by hiring a distinguished visiting writer for the first year, and to see a tenure-track hire in the second year of the program.

The experience of other universities that we have consulted (such as New York University) that offer both the MA and MFA degrees in creative writing, is that students prefer to seek the MFA degree, and that enrollments in the MA decline as MFA enrollments correspondingly increase. We believe that we will be able to continue to meet the needs of MA students and the non-degree students our current program serves, while we build a first rate MFA program for dedicated writers. The total number of graduate writing students we teach will increase slightly over the number we graduate now.

Graduate students in the program would teach introductory composition and creative writing classes, adding an economic resource for the college and university while bringing to our undergraduate classes a cohort of committed writers of poetry, fiction, screenwriting and biography.

We are actively seeking to establish an endowment to support the creative writing program at NCSU, and have already made a good start, having established with the CHASS development office a plan for several endowments to support the program [see attachments]. The endowment has raised $100,000 to help establish a fund for the Lee Smith Visiting Writer and has received a commitment of $50,000 over ten years to fund other aspects of Creative Writing. The program would require some resources in support staff and infrastructure (computers, offices, etc.).

B. Discuss potential program duplication and program competitiveness.

1. Identify similar programs offered elsewhere in North Carolina. Indicate the location and distance from the proposing institution. Include a) public and b) private institutions of higher education.

Public: Within the University of North Carolina system, UNC Greensboro and UNC Wilmington offer the MFA degree in Creative Writing. UNC Greensboro is located 80 miles from Raleigh, and UNC Wilmington is 130 miles from Raleigh.

Private: The only private institutions in North Carolina offering the MFA in Creative Writing are Warren Wilson College, located in Asheville, 247 miles from Raleigh, and Queens University of Charlotte, 170 miles from Raleigh.

2. Indicate how the proposed new degree program differs from other programs like it in the University. If the program duplicates other UNC programs, explain a) why is it necessary or justified and b) why demand (if limited) might not be met through a collaborative arrangement (perhaps using distance education) with another UNC institution. If the program is a first professional or doctoral degree, compare it with other similar programs in public and private universities in North Carolina, in the region, and in the nation.

Our program would be smaller than that of UNC-W, would offer more opportunity for elective study than the UNC-G MFA, and would be a residency program operating on a regular semester basis unlike the Warren Wilson or Queens University programs. No institution in the Research Triangle area, a metropolitan area of about one million people, offers a creative writing MFA. We would offer an MFA to both non-traditional students and to full-time students whose residency in the Triangle for career and other reasons does not allow them to relocate to study at UNC-G or UNC-W, and which would build upon the existing faculty and program at NCSU. The NCSU Department of English receives numerous inquiries yearly from prospective students who explicitly state they would be interested in enrolling an MFA program here, and who are not enrolling in the programs at UNC-G and UNC-W.

The UNC-G program currently accepts about 13-14 new students a year into its MFA program, or less than 10 percent of its approximately 200 applicants per year (see headcount breakdowns below). The UNC-W program accepts about 20, or about 16 percent, of its approximately 120 yearly applicants. Given these rather low acceptance rates, there is a demonstrable desire for MFA training in the state that is not being filled by UNC-G and UNC-W. An MFA degree at NCSU would also draw from prospective students in the Research Triangle area who are not now applying to UNC-G or UNC-W because of the physical distance of those programs from Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill. We do expect to draw students from all parts of the country (as UNC-G and UNC-W already do). This is not simply a regional program.

The Warren Wilson program is a low residency MFA under which “residency sessions” consist of intensive 10-day workshops. The Queens University program is also a low residency MFA, with residency sessions of seven days twice a year. There are no resident students in either the Warren Wilson or Queens programs; the proposed NCSU MFA is a residency program and would therefore meet the needs of a different student population than either the Warren Wilson or Queens programs.

Finally, MFA programs have become usual assets to English departments across the USA. This is a direction adopted by many major universities, including schools noted more for their technical than their humanities emphasis like Purdue, Pittsburgh, and the University of California, Irvine.

C. Enrollment (baccalaureate programs should include only upper division majors, juniors and seniors ).

Headcount enrollment

Show a five-year history of enrollments and degrees awarded in similar programs offered at other UNC institutions (using the format below for each institution with a similar program); indicate which of these institutions you consulted regarding their experience with student demand and (in the case of professional programs) job placement. Indicate how their experiences influenced your enrollment projections.