English May Add Writing Faculty

In the face of student and faculty frustration with the high selectivity of the English Department’s creative thesis program, Department Chair James Engell has requested another full-time faculty position charged with teaching and advising creative writers.

Engell’s proposal would give his department a sixth Briggs-Copeland lectureship—a five-year appointment for professional writers that requires them to teach two creative writing courses every semester and advise two creative theses every year.

According to Briggs-Copeland Lecturer Kyoko Mori, who coordinates the English Department’s creative writing program, Engell’s push comes partly in response to an unusually high degree of dissatisfaction from students whose creative thesis applications were rejected this year. Playwrights in particular, she said, were “really upset.”

Engell and other faculty identified limited resources as the crux of the problem.

“We don’t have enough faculty to take on all of the creative writing thesis applications that we feel merit attention,” he said.

The dearth of advisors has been felt by applicants such as Jillian E. Gagnon ’06, whose application to write a novella was rejected this year. Gagnon, who has taken two semesters of creative writing, first began formulating the idea for her creative thesis “about a guy in the fifties” last December.

Engell’s proposal represents an attempt to expand the creative writing program without compromising its intimate system of advising. The program, he said, has come under two departmental reviews in the past six weeks.

Students stressed that an emphasis on workshops and one-on-one advising, along with access to esteemed faculty, have contributed to high student demand, which has routinely exceeded the resources of the department.

“The creative writing department here is small, but full of such luminaries,” Gagnon wrote in an e-mail. “I’m very disappointed that I won’t have the help of someone who’s been through the trials of writing a major work.”

While no figures on acceptance rates were available last night, students this year were particularly vocal about their frustration with the selective process.

“I personally know a few students who were extremely unhappy with the department,” said David H. Hill ’06, an English concentrator who did not apply for a creative thesis. “I know of a few students were considering dropping out of the English concentration.”

But aside from hiring further luminaries, both students and faculty were mostly at a loss for solutions that would improve the program and keep its intimate character.

“If we were to make larger changes it would require a lot of brainstorming to create something else without more resources,” said Elisa New, an English professor and director of undergraduate studies for the department. “It will probably mean a kind of creative writing course that doesn’t depend upon absolutely individual attention.”

This year, in order to accommodate the high number of promising applicants without sacrificing individual attention, Engell asked creative writing faculty to supervise more creative theses than the two their contracts call for.

“We have a situation basically in which I am asking faculty in my department to do extra work,” Engell said.

According to Mori, several members of the department are now advising three thesis writers and one Briggs-Copeland Lecturer, Bridget Mullins, has taken on four.

Nevertheless, the application process remains unpredictable and, some students claim, unfair.

“I personally felt like it was a crapshoot,” Gagnon wrote in an e-mail.

Gagnon has decided not to write a senior thesis at all, and plans to write her novella on her own.

Emily S. High ’06, whose proposal to write a fiction thesis was accepted, said she felt “beyond lucky to snag one.”

High said she, like Gagnon, would not have written a non-creative, or critical, thesis had her creative proposal been rejected.

Engell made his request for an additional Briggs-Copeland lecturer to Dean of the Humanities Maria Tatar earlier this month. He said his proposal had been well received by the administration but he did not know when a decision on the new position would be reached.

Mori noted, however, that a sixth creative writing lecturer would not increase the number of possible creative theses by more than two or three.

“I think it’s fair to say that there will always be competition for this program,” she said.

—Emily G.W. Chau contributed to the reporting of this article.

—Staff writer Allison A. Frost can be reached at afrost@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Anton S. Troianovski can be reached at atroian@fas.harvard.edu.