Summer Session
Summer Session – Sole Student in USC Roski School’s Struggling MFA Program Drops Out
Today for this Summer Session’s topic Back to School we bring you an article from our friends at artnet News, where Brian Boucher reports on USC Roski School’s dwindling admissions. With the notoriously high tuition of MFA programs and their insecure guarantee of success in the art world, the accusations of mismanagement levied against the Roski School by its sole MFA student highlight the political and economic issues that hover around higher arts education. This article was originally published on June 21, 2016.
University of Southern California Roski School’s campus.
HaeAhn Kwon, the one student who accepted an offer of admission to the MFA program at the beleaguered Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California last year, has now dropped out.
Kwon, who came to USC on an International Artist Fellowship from Seoul, received a BFA from the Cooper Union in 2009, according to LinkedIn. She distributed an open letter to provost Michael Quick that explains her decision, based on what she calls the school’s “downward spiral of predatory, wrongheaded, and woefully oblivious decision making,” and calls the administration “delusional.”
The news comes as the latest blow to a program that has been at the center of controversy over the last year.
An entire class of MFA students dropped out of the school in May 2015. Among other complaints about faculty and curriculum changes, students maintained that the school had rescinded financial offers (the dean denied the students’ claims). Many observers see the school’s problems as intimately bound up with its formation of the Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy for Arts, Technology, and the Business of Innovation, a program funded by a $70 million gift from record producer Iovine and rapper Dr. Dre. The school appointed composer Erica Muhl as founding executive director of the Iovine Academy and dean of the Roski School in 2013. The students who dropped out in 2015 pointed out that she has no experience with the visual arts.
