Duncker Hall, where WashU’s English department is located.

WashU’s Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing has ended its postgraduate fellowship, a one-year program where students in the MFA program had the opportunity to teach classes as a postgraduate fellow for a year following the completion of their two-year degree.

Students had the option of applying to the postgraduate fellowship at the end of their two years in the MFA program. The additional year was not built into the program itself, but was rather an additional opportunity the University provided. The cut comes in the wake of the Trump administration cutting funding to universities nationwide.

​Abram Van Engen, the chair of the English department, said the cut to the postgraduate fellowship came in response to the Trump administration’s federal funding cuts to academia. However, he stressed that the MFA program did not have to cut their overall number of students, unlike many other graduate programs around the country, just the fellowship.

“There’s enormous budgetary constraints on the University right now because of the Trump administration,” Van Engen said. “It’s not a world in which we can carry on business as usual. The graduate cohorts across the University have, in some cases, needed to pull back. One of the only graduate cohorts, as far as I know, that has not [had] to pull back is the MFA.”

The director of the MFA program, David Schuman, said the post-graduate fellowship program is funded solely by the College of Arts & Sciences budget, and the program did not receive funding for the upcoming year.

“It’s never been an official fellowship,” Schuman said. “There’s no outside gift that funds it, or  grants that fund it. It’s basically been paid for out of the Arts & Sciences budget. We always have to go to the administration every year and ask for it to be funded.”

According to Schuman, the program has been offered for around 20 years and has grown since its inception.

“What’s offered, especially in the last 10 years or so, is six of our second-year MFAs receive this postgraduate fellowship: two in poetry, two fiction writers, and two nonfiction writers,” Schuman said. 

Schuman said these students would stay on campus for an additional year and teach one writing course each semester. In the past, they have also contributed by helping teach pedagogy seminars, and they are able to work on their own manuscripts and projects. 

Van Engen said that while the third-year option had to be cut due to budgetary constraints, the University still understands the value of the writing MFA.

“[The MFA] has a very elite status,” Van Engen said. “It’s one of the top 10 programs in the country. And therefore, unlike other programs on campus, we want to have a full cohort of MFA students. And so they granted us the money to bring in, still, a full cohort of MFA students.”

Van Engen said that classes like Poetry Writing 1, Fiction Writing 1, and Creative Nonfiction Writing 1 are usually taught by MFA students in the postgraduate fellowship.

“The postgraduate fellowship was a one-on-one teaching load, and those classes still need to be taught, so we’re going to need to find people to teach those classes,” Van Engen said. “We’ll have good teachers in those courses, and that could be a place where we find some from among the graduating students to teach. It’s just not going to be under the same terms.”

Van Engen clarified that it will likely be adjunct professors who will teach those classes. The salary for the postgraduate program was $34,000 per year, but the salary of an adjunct professor is per class, and according to Van Engen would be less than the postgraduate program.

Fiction MFA student Amy Peltz, who is finishing up her final year of the program and had planned on applying for the fellowship, said the third year would have offered a valuable chance to work at the University while processing what she had learned.

“The time here goes by so quickly, and we’re so busy during the two years, that the idea of a year where you get to focus just on writing and teaching is appealing,” Peltz said. “The opportunity to have one year where you get to stay in place, without the upheaval of moving or or finding yourself in a new environment, [is appealing].”

Additionally, according to nonfiction MFA student Monmita Chakrabarti, the MFA students were notified about the postgraduate fellowship being cut shortly before the applications were due. The application for the fellowship was due April 11, and students were notified about the cut on March 25. 

“I don’t necessarily blame the English department for this, because it sounded like they were alerted at the very last minute too, but I was quite shocked,” Chakrabarti said. “Especially because I was in the middle of my application, and they alerted us [late].”

For Peltz, one of the main draws of WashU was the third-year fellowship, and she said that WashU now may seem less appealing to applicants in comparison to three-year programs. Peer institutions of WashU like Vanderbilt University have three-year creative writing programs and, while they are less common, other schools like University of Minnesota and Arizona State University offer them as well.

Peltz mentioned that having the fellowship application hanging over her head as she finished her final year of the MFA was an additional stressor.

“My personal experience was that there was this added layer of stress all year because there was this opportunity,” Peltz said. “I just wish we could have known at the beginning of the year that [the fellowship would be cut], just to have that added layer of stress lifted. Perhaps it helped me make great work, but I don’t know if it’s the right kind of pressure.”

For students like Chakrabarti, the school cutting the program has taken away a key opportunity, leading her to apply to other jobs instead.

“I’m applying to [compositional] writing programs in St. Louis,” Chakrabarti said. “I want to stay in St Louis too, because my partner is here, and I was hoping that this would have been an opportunity for me to stay … I want to continue teaching. I don’t know if that’ll look like teaching at a community college or a high school instead, but I’m applying to those opportunities.”