Not Another MFA Essay | Hacker News Reader

Not Another MFA Essay

joukovsky.substack.com

12 pointsthe-enemy13 comments

Given that the author is presumably a writer, please, please, please! For love of all that is holy, when you're using an acronym, please write it out in full, followed by the acronym in brackets, the first time you use it!

I've rewritten the first sentence of this article to help:

> Master of Fine Arts (MFA) essays: there are so many of them.

I spent far too long figuring that MFA in this article stood for "Master of Fine Arts" and not "Multi Factor Authentication".

No doubt it was written for an audience that knows intimately what an MFA stipend is, but it's not accessible at all to people outside that bubble.

I'll note the author does follow this style in her footnote when defining MECE, so that's a good start: https://joukovsky.substack.com/p/not-another-mfa-essay?s=r#f...

It's really kind of hilarious because her intro has lots of material that could refer just as well to discussions about the online security meaning, like:

My subject today focuses rather on the absurdly heated discourse that invariably spins up online in reaction to the topic, a predictable cycle of outrage over the same series of arguments even as we lament, with excruciating self-awareness: oh my god we’re doing it again.

A DDG search for 'MFA good or bad' returns about 75% hits on the online security issue, and the rest are on academic degrees for writers. About equally contentious it seems.

Thank you for this, I too had to do multiuple searches before getting to the definition of MFA. Meeting an unknown acronym can be frustrating if it's not easy to find what it stands for.

Wait ... this isn't about Multifactor Authentication, yet it never says what it means be "MFA" O_o

Snap, I just posted a comment complaining about the exact same thing (It's Master of Fine Arts).

haha, thanks for expanding the acronym for me :)

Master of Fine Arts, most particularly, MFAs in creative writing.¹ There has been some long standing discourse on the subject for at least two decade (with its peak being Chad Harbach’s MFA vs NYC.

⸻

1. There are, of course, MFAs in other artistic disciplines from filmmaking to painting to music to drama. I believe that creative writing is the most common field for MFAs and this is likely because there is little need for any physical goods to support an MFA in creative writing and thus many universities tend to treat the degree as a cash cow.²

2. Many of the best MFA programs in creative writing offer tuition waivers and stipends, but not all do and some of those that offer tuition waivers/stipends may not give them to all students.

(Incidentally, I, in fact, have an MFA in creative writing from the now-defunct low-residency program at the University of Tampa. Ask me anything.)

Do you think multi factor authentication just provides the illusion of extra security for little real benefit?

No.

Background: MFA in Creative Writing is a degree taken by aspiring novelists. MFA stands for Master of Fine Arts (and not multi-factor auth ;-)). Poetry, fiction, novels, personal essays, and non-fiction are all sub-genres, but I think they are discussing creative writing in general.

The essay and the linked essays together seem to say the following:

Master of Fine Arts (Creative Writing seems to be the topic under discussion) [MFA] is a degree of the privileged.

A majority of those who graduate with an MFA, end up teaching MFA courses.

Those who teach, try to publish more via friendly publishers (university/independent). Pressure to publish for tenure. Quantity over quality.

Compares NYC writers vs writers who have MFA. NYC good. MFA graduate bad. (My thought: What about the rest of us who are not from NYC and have not taken an MFA?)

Actually only a small fraction of MFA grads end up teaching any kind of academic creative writing. The oversupply of creative writing grads is even more extreme than in other academic disciplines.

The author of this essay assumes a familiarity with the MFA v. PHD debate that might not be right for the HN crowd. If you're curious about this topic though, I would recommend Elif Batuman's Get a Real Degree: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n18/elif-batuman/get-a-r...

It's very funny writing, Batuman has a PHD in Russian Literature and she does a good job of giving a high-level overview.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com