By Julie FrenchThe Daily Northwestern
A graduate-level film production program in the School of Communication has been suspended for the past year, and current students say they are still waiting for an explanation.
“I feel so in the dark, it’s embarrassing, but they don’t communicate at all,” said Dan Zox, who is completing his final year of the three-year Master of Fine Arts in Production program. “At one time I was frustrated that they weren’t telling us anything, but that’s just the norm.”
There are eight students still in the program, which accepted no new applications for the coming year. Although officials stress that the suspension will be reviewed each year and that the program could return eventually, only four students will remain after this year’s senior class graduates.
“The suspension comes down from the dean’s office,” said John Haas, a program assistant in the Radio-TV-Film department. “It was originally suspended due to a faculty change, but it’s just a decision that’s been made by the department.”
Communication Dean Barbara O’Keefe wrote in an e-mail to The Daily that she is traveling abroad and did not answer any questions about the program.
Prof. Michelle Citron, the program’s former adviser, said she left Northwestern because she knew the suspension was looming.
“It was an amazing program,” said Citron, who is now the chairwoman of the interdisciplinary arts program at Columbia College Chicago. “It was ranked in the top 10 MFA production programs in the country out of over 80 programs. We had huge application pools. It was very hard to get into.”
Citron said the suspension of the program also would affect production undergraduates because production graduate students served as teaching assistants and even took some upper-level classes with undergraduates.
Additionally, the school is changing how it assigns TAs to classes, Haas said. Instead of giving positions to production graduate students, some undergraduate production classes will be assisted by Ph.D. students and students in the Writing for the Screen and Stage master’s program.
“There are a number of students in our MFA in writing (program) that are accomplished, award-winning directors, so they do have that experience,” Haas said.
But production graduate students are questioning the logic behind these changes and wondering why administrators never made an official announcement.
“In general, it’s a little unconventional to have people specializing in one area teaching in another,” said Sarah Carlson, a third-year student and student representative at faculty meetings. “On an individual basis, there might be some that can handle classes in production.”
Elizabeth Hoffman, a second-year production student, said she is teaching students who will become TAs next year.
“They’re going to be in charge of teaching the labs next year, which is just really bizarre,” she said. “They don’t really have the know-how to teach the class.”
Some upper-level classes will do without TAs next year, Hoffman said, which could stretch already over-burdened professors and allow less hands-on time for students.
Communication junior David Lassiter said decreasing the number of TAs won’t have much effect on undergraduate classes. Instead, he said, it’s more important to have professors with real production experience.
“My biggest issue is that we don’t really have production professors that are filmmakers themselves,” he said. “They themselves are rarely on film sets, and while they have a lot of good stuff to say, they lack practical information on how to light and shoot scenes, for example.”
For production graduate students, the loss of TA positions translates into a loss of funding. Carlson said although she is glad students in other programs will now receive funding as TAs, she is frustrated that her own department isn’t receiving more resources or an explanation.
“It’s almost as if the plug is being pulled while we’re still here,” she said. “I know they can’t inform us at every point, but some kind of regular announcement about the state of things would be a real asset.”
Reach Julie French at [email protected].
