Assessing the M.F.A in Photography

Abstract

Since 1983, U.S. News & World Report has published an annual special issue and standalone publication called America's Best Colleges that gives a numerical ranking to 1422 accredited four-year schools. This increasingly popular and profitable series -- over one million copies of book version were sold last year -- has prompted magazines such as Sports Illustrated, Money Magazine and Yahoo! Internet Life to publish college and university rankings for their constituencies. The of America's Best Colleges also paved way for America's Best Graduate Schools, which U. S. News issued in March 1995 and March 1997. Among institutions ranked in America's Best Graduate Schools are Master of Fine Arts programs in visual arts that offer specialties or concentrations in photography. These photography programs, as they're commonly called, can best be understood as a degree program within a photography program within an art program. Of roughly 375 photography programs in country, approximately 120 offer M.F.A. degree. As far as I've been able to determine, these rankings photography ever to be published -- a significant event in history of photography. According to 1995 edition of America's Best Graduate Schools, art schools, colleges and departments with best M.F.A. programs in photography, in rank order, are: 1. Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), 2. University of New Mexico (UNM), 3. School of Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), 4. Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and 5. Yale University. The 1997 edition of America's Best Graduate Schools showed changes in second, third and fifth rankings: 1. RIT, 2 SAIC, 3. UNM, 4. RISD and 5. California Institute of Arts (CalArts). How, exactly, does U. S. News & World Report define and measure in graduate photography education? By reputational survey. According to fine print in 1997 edition of America's Best Graduate Schools, in fall of 1996 questionnaires were sent to deans, top administrators, and senior at all 190 art schools and departments that offer M.F.A. Respondents (40% of those surveyed) were asked to rank the reputations of schools and their specialty areas on a scale from 1 to 5, taking into account a school's scholarship, its curriculum, and quality of its faculty and graduate students. Other measures -- placement success of graduates, for example -- were not used because U.S. News and World Report was told by some art school deans that art education is a different kind of animal and that reputational rankings are only way to go, said research director Robert Morse. Art school officials have good reason to prefer reputational survey to other measures because useful, comparative information about graduate art education either is not collected or is difficult to obtain -- or both. For example, we have no history of M.F.A. in photography, nor any sustained sociological, ethnographic or journalistic studies of it. The scholarly literature, at best, consists of one chapter from Barbara Rosenblum's Photographers at Work (1978), and a scattering of articles on selected issues by A. D. Coleman, Jan Zita Grover, Martha Rosler, myself and a few other writers. We might also include published reflections of retired or retiring M.F.A. faculty -- kind of writing published, for example, in Thomas Hess and Tony Frederick's anthology Teaching Photography (1981) -- though these essays offer remarkably little information about author's photography programs. The scholarly literature notwithstanding, there are basically only three other sources of information about M.F.A. programs in photography. The first source is numbers books, such as Graduate Education in Photography in United States, published by Society for Photographic Education in 1985; and MFA Programs in Visual Arts: A Directory, published by College Art Association of America (CAA) in 1987 and updated in 1995. …