This is a letter I was prompted to write after my hilariously unsuccessful attempt to apply to participate in the Master of Fine Art program at The New School in Manhattan. I was channelling Hunter S. Thompson, who was the master of this sort of thing.
Butch Dante, February 11th, 2023
To: Karl Ramos, Senior Associate Director of Graduate Admission, The New School, New York City
From: Stephen M. Saunders MBE (AKA Butch Dante), Brooklyn
August 5, 2022
Hi again Karl,
And thank you for your kind message.
I wonder if it might be useful for me to make a few observations about my experience in making my (unsuccessful) application to attend your Master of Fine Art program at The New School.
- Application Deadline (sic)
Your Web site says that applications for the MFA in creative writing are accepted until August 2nd. I believe this is what is known as “a deadline.” Literally, the words on your site mean that you will consider applications submitted up until that time, but not after. The words do not indicate that you will consider applications until you have sufficient numbers
(ka-chingggg!) to fill the course, and then simply stop, in July, before the published deadline – which is actually what you did this year.
There is a big difference between the former, which infers that a qualitative evaluation of the applications will take place, provided they are submitted by the deadline, and the latter, which is more of a hotel booking system (sorry Joseph, we’re full; try the stables).
- Transcript Requirements and Delays Caused by Same
There were a couple of weeks’ delay in my application caused by the confusion over your request for a “course transcript.”
In days of yore, back during the pre-Internet age of the last century, when I last went to school, colleges and universities did not keep course transcripts in hard copy. If Hull University had done so, the entire hamlet of Hull would by now be covered in a layer of brown cardboard binders (some might argue this would be no bad thing).
I received a message from your colleague, Annette Slaughter, on July 6th insisting that I send a transcript and replied the same day explaining the logic bomb of supplying a transcript that didn’t exist, but answer came there none (possibly she had been plunged into a fugue state by the concept of communicating with someone so antediluvian that they roamed the Earth before the advent of social media and digital storage).
As you know, I then embarked on an arduous and time-consuming effort to find out from others in your department how I could resolve this issue, with no success.
It occurs to me to wonder whether the MFA in creative writing was already full during that period, or whether it filled up while I was stuck in the comms miasma prompted by Ms Slaughter’s non-reply? That would seem… unjust.
- Communications with Admissions Dept.
Telephone non-comms:
- Many, many people work in your admissions team, but no-one answers their phone. Ever.
- There is voicemail (yes!) but no-one responds to it (no!).
- Might it be time to consider retiring your hard-wired telephonic apparatus/PBX as it seems that it is no longer in use? A significant saving would accrue – both in cost (to you), and in time (of people like myself).
Email comms:
- I got a bit of a run around from a few people, including yourself, who replied to my specific inquiries by pointing me to other people in your vast admissions administration, but without copying those parties in. This is not best practice for formal email communications, as it requires the inquirer to then start their inquiry again, as a cold call/email/inquiry.
FYI, the correct email practice is to reply saying, “Steve, this is not me, but I’ve copied my colleague who I believe can help you. Colleague, please could you help Steve?”
Not doing so cuts the chord of accountability (snip!) and sends a message that: “This is not my problem; it may or may not be this other person’s problem, I don’t know; I am no longer interested in dealing with your problem; go away/leave me now for I have work of greater import to undertake.” (Sound of sandals shuffling away into the darkness of the cloister, or wherever it is academics shuffle to…)
- Your automated email application AI bot is extremely attentive (I nicknamed it Sir Spamalot, which I thought was pretty funny) and it successfully kept me on track to meet the deadline (sic) for my application. I felt like we really got to know each other during the long process and enjoyed receiving its many “attaboy” messages and imprecations to “complete your application” – although in hindsight it would obviously have been better if the subject lines had included the more accurate: “Stop, Steve! You’re wasting your time!” or “Turn back, you fool, your application is doomed.”
- The automated email boldly titled “Steve, ask us anything!” felt like rather a bait and switch to me, as when I took it up on its offer, I received the more fallible human reply: “I have no idea.” I suppose that metaphysically you are correct, as there is nothing to stop me from asking you anything at all (Who played Ming the Merciless in the 1934 movie Flash Gordon?) but I do feel as if the message header strongly inferred that I would receive “an answer”.
- I don’t want all of my comments to seem negative, so I note that your president, Dr McBride
does himself great credit by not publishing his email. At all. I must give a tip of my hat to his academic honesty in this regard. By placing himself in a secure and impermeable communications DMZ he makes clear that he has no intention whatsoever of engaging in communication with anyone he doesn’t personally know already and deem worthy of his attention.
It is quite enough for us to know that he exists; we have his name and, bluntly, what more could we possibly need (or deserve?). He is the top banana in a very important organizational tree; how could we even think about sending him an email?
Bravo, President McBride!
As a journalist, the only other person I ever met who maintained the same untouchable email policy was Sir Tim Berners Lee, who actually invented the World Wide Web. Sir Tim would only consider fax-based transmissions – provided that they did not include irony, obviously.
So, Dr McBride is in good company, and once more, I must salute him (chef’s kiss!).
Note: The fact that I have sent emails to the published addresses of both the former President of the United States, Barrack Obama, and the rather grubby Prime Minister of Great Britain, Boris Johnson, and received replies from both should in no way discourage Dr McBride from continuing in his secret squirrel email mode protected from interruption by his vast Praetorian Guard of President’s Office staff.
- Admissions Portal of Doom
You correctly point out that when I uploaded all of my application documents to your portal the drop-down box did not include creative writing as an option. The inference is that I should have immediately realised that the course was unavailable.
But the absence of an option seems like an unnecessarily obscure way of telling applicants that a course is no longer being offered (notification via a vacuum; a null field that hints at the unavailability of other possible outcomes; requiring a CIA-type analysis of MIA data… “is it a software bug, Dr Watson, or could it mean… something more?”).
Would it not be more logical, when the course is full, to just – I don’t know – put a message at the front of the process? Words are our friend in this matter, and many options are available, from formal (“We wish to inform you that we are no longer accepting applications for the creative writing MFA in 2022”) to “street” (“Ohhhhh snap, friendo, looks like you were just too tardy!”).
Also, and this is important, the drop down does not appear until several screens into the application process. What I did, and I’m willing to bet I am not alone, is to make a list of all of the many, many pieces of documentation you require, and then go away and write and collate them and then upload them all-of-a-piece. Which means I didn’t see your riddle-wrapped-in-an-enigma-hidden-in-C-script “course may or may not be full” non-message until it was too late.
Conclusion
My experience applying to The New School was not a waste of time. As a writer I enjoyed creating my statement of intent; it’s important to take these things seriously, and by the second week, and the fifth draft, I felt I had really packed something meaningful into the 500 words I was permitted. (I also shared my final version with my friend, the novelist Jonathan Keates, who was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1992. He said he thought it was rather good, which I mistakenly interpreted as a positive portent!)
It’s obviously also helpful to have a new resume (my last one was written in 1999!). Ditto the personal references; always nice to know at least two people are prepared to say something not completely horrible about you.
And above all, it was useful to get a sense of just exactly how far the world of academia has changed since my time at University in the 1980’s. Amazing! Yes, really amazing.
Best regards,
Steve
Stephen M. Saunders MBE
p.s. I don’t believe I have received the $50 refund of my application fee. Could you please “check” for me that it is being processed?