The Understaffing Email
This is a document the Jones Lecturers called “The Understaffing Letter.” We emailed this to our Stanford Creative Writing directors on 10/31/23, outlining how the program needed new lecturers immediately, and many more of them.
This clearly disputes the university’s contention that the only way to hire new lecturers is to fire all 23 current Jones Lecturers. They shouldn’t have to fire any lecturers in order to hire many more new lecturers from the ranks of the Stegner Fellows.
Lecturer Letter to the Restucturing Working Group, about Understaffing, 10/31/23
1. In 2014, Stanford undergraduate Creative Writing had an average waitlist of 10 students per quarter. There’s a lovely article from this time, with many insights from Eavan Boland — https://stanforddaily.com/2014/01/21/creative-writing-program-allotted-850k/
2. Currently, our waitlists are running over 300 students each quarter. Since the new “rolling admissions,” sophomores and freshmen are often unable to find a place in any Creative Writing course.
3. There is enough student demand for our undergraduate courses to add 20 additional classes per quarter, aka 60 classes per year. These numbers suggest a need of 12 additional full-time Jones Lecturers in order to meet student demand. Accounting for program growth, lecturer attrition, and the robust demand for 9CE courses, a fully-staffed program over the next five years would potentially require yet more lecturers.
4. We’re concerned that Creative Writing is losing its ability to reach new students. Although the program requires more classes to meet the needs of our undergraduates, Richie Hofman, Rose Whitmore, and Michael Sears were terminated as lecturers last year. There’s widespread concern among the Joneses that the administration is asking the working group to solve for the problem of “too many Jones Lecturers” precisely at a time when the Creative Writing Program is threatened by understaffing and an unprecedented inability to meet student demand.
5. Stanford has announced a goal of increasing the student body by 25% in the upcoming years. Such an increase will create even greater enrollment pressure on Creative Writing courses.
6. Over the past 15 years, the Creative Writing Program has had an annual attrition rate of 1.25 lecturers. (This number is only for lecturers who leave voluntarily and does not include the lecturers termed out by the four-year rule). To meet undergraduate needs, these lecturers will need to be replaced.
7. We feel that if Computer Science or another STEM Department at Stanford had waitlists of 900+ students in a year, Stanford would be highly motivated to solve that problem. Indeed, such large numbers of unserved students would be seen as an immediate educational crisis, and resources would be allocated to address the problem.
8. The Creative Writing lecturers have created courses that are benchmarks to the undergraduate experience at Stanford. Examples include the Graphic Novel Project, the Novel Writing Intensive, Fiction into Film, the Screenwriting Intensive, the American Road Trip, Creative Nonfiction, and Creative Expressions. The severe enrollment pressures of the past few years are sapping our ability to innovate curriculum and create additional student-centric courses that meet the growing need for the teaching of creativity, creative work, and creative thinking.
9. In previous years, the Creative Writing classroom was a rare campus forum that brought undergraduates, graduate students, med students, law students, and visiting fellows into community and conversation. Because of recent, extreme enrollment pressures we are only able to offer places in the classroom to undergraduates, mostly juniors and seniors. The overall conversation on campus is impoverished by these restrictions.
10. Creative Writing is a central entry point for students from many STEM fields into the humanities. We are the largest minor on campus. We had over 1,729 distinct enrollments in 2022–2023. 70% of students who take our introductory 9CE classes return to take more Creative Writing courses. Our extensive waitlists constrain our ability to reach and retain students, particularly in their freshman or sophomore years, when they are more likely to become English majors. 2/3rds of English majors have a focus in Creative Writing. This pathway to English and the Humanities is under threat.
11. [Added 3/12/24] At a time when Stanford and universities across the country are desperately seeking to enhance the role of the humanities as part of a liberal education, the one program that is forging a successful path in the new model of participatory humanities is being deprived of the necessary resources to reverse the trend of humanities decline.]
