Help Save Excellent Film, Media, and Comparative Literature Programs at Iowa!

Corey Creekmur, a professor at the University of Iowa, has recently sent this call to alumni and friends asking for help in supporting this distinguished, innovative, path-breaking program.   It is incomprehensible that a Provost's Task Force would think you would save money now, in the 21st century, at the height of what historian Robert Darnton calls human history's fourth great Information Age, but doing away with the program that helps hundreds of students to understand and deal with this momentous era of change in all of the arrangements of human communication, publication, broadcasting, and interaction.  

Talk about making a short-sighted decision that cheats the taxpayers of your state?  This is a deep program, that has had a profound impact on how we understand this mediated world we live in.  If you lose humanistic and comparative aspects of the program at this moment in history, you lose all the perspective a program needs to make sane analysis of the present and have a reasonable chance of understanding the future.    Please, reblog this post, send it to friends, and write letters below.  

With newspapers failing, tv and radio stations in trouble, with publishers in trouble and no one undertanding the future of reading and the book, with every parent in America concerned about how much time his or her child is spending on media, we need vital programs like this more than ever.   This is irresponsible behavior by a committee charged with Graduate Education and Selective Excellence.   This Provost's Task Force is making a selection that fails their students.

Please pass this on, everyone!   Make sure, when you do, to also state who you are--whether a graduate student or a faculty member--and your affiliation.  All of this will help out our colleagues in this important program at Iowa.  Thank you.

--Cathy N. Davidson

(I was Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies, Duke University, 1998-2006. I am currently the Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English and John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, and co-founder of HASTAC and co-director of the HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition, currently running a competition on "Reimagining Learning" in conjunction with the White House initiative on Educate to Innovate. My most recent book, with HASTAC co-founder David Theo Goldberg, is The Future of Thinking:  Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, MIT Press, 2010.)

Duke University

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LETTER FROM PROFESSOR COREY CREEKMUR

Dear Alumni and Friends,

An ad hoc entity called the Provost's Task Force on Graduate Education and Selective Excellence has just recommended the elimination of the PhD program in Film Studies at the University of Iowa, along with the MA and PhD programs in Comparative Literature. It has also recommended that the MFA in Film and Video Production be moved to a newly proposed Division of Communications (with Journalism and Communication Studies), and that the MFA
in Translation be moved to a newly proposed Division of World Languages and Cultures (with the foreign languages). These undesirable and illogical moves would in effect dismember the current Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature. Ours are not the only programs under threat, but ours is the only department that would be obliterated if the committee's recommendations
were to be followed.

The committee was made up of mostly non-Humanists, and it did its work mostly on the basis of statistics like time to degree, GRE scores of applicants, and years of support offered to grad students. It identified the placement of Iowa Film Studies graduates as "good," but did not note
that our graduates can be found at many of the world's finest universities, including Yale, Brown, Harvard, and the University of Chicago, among many others. It did not employ any outside evaluators. It did not collect information on the work of faculty. It did not collect information on
program costs (the members of the committee know very well that Humanities grad degrees are dirt cheap by comparison with degrees in lab sciences). In short, the excellence of our programs was not something the committee had any basis for evaluating. We are preparing a response -- due very soon -- and would like your help, in part because you are in the position to offer an evaluation.

Clearly, the impressive legacy and ongoing vitality of the Film Studies program at Iowa were ignored in this decision. We are enormously proud of the accomplishments of our graduates, who have been crucial to the development and continued growth of Film Studies as a scholarly discipline in North America and beyond. Our current students promise to continue that legacy into the future. Former Iowa students are among the most productive scholars and influential teachers in the field, and while we do our best to continually inform the administration of this fact, we would now greatly appreciate your helping us to clearly and forcefully articulate the
importance of the excellence of our programs to those who will be deciding on the future of our programs.

Please send me a brief testimonial - a few lines would do it - about the importance of the program/s, Iowa's place as a leader in X (your choice), how study here helped you, etc. While the MFA in Film and Video Production is not currently threatened, the committee did not consider the MFA as connected to Film Studies, although the programs have always benefited
enormously from close cooperation and linked interests. Its recommendations suggest in fact that it saw all the programs as separate entities that can be shoved around without affecting the program health of the others. If they do this, I think it will destroy not only Film Studies and Comp Lit but harm Film and Video Production and Translation as well.

Corey Creekmur
Director of Film Studies
Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature
The University of Iowa

I know many in the Film and Media Studies field read this blog. I am hoping that you will join me in expressing your dismay and concern over these developments and lending our support to Corey and the other faculty and students at Iowa. Destroying the Film Studies PhD at Iowa would be a tragic mistake!