It is, so far, usually. Elite schools, the ivy league, etc. often don't care about any credentials for artists and I know people who are/were tenured full professors without having a college degree at all, neither undergraduate nor graduate. Generally the MFA is the standard credential for most college level art faculty. But even then some combined art studio-art history programs frequently reserve the chair position or deanship to someone with the PhD (typically art history or art theory).
As I said earlier, colleges with lesser research reputations, and consequently reliant upon tax or private funding, and tuition-driven, are coerced to appoint as many PhDs as they can across the disciplines as one measurable way to proclaim quality and obtain accreditation. Still further, artists have always been at a disadvantage re college level teaching. One reason is the longstanding American idea that the arts are not central to a democratic society and don't rest on scholarly abilities but instead foster impractical, outsider, unproductive pursuits. Another reason is that artists in the academy need to obtain tenure from boards or administrators often comprised of non-artists who can't see any way to measure artistic success or quality and thus feel "safer" by refusing tenure or devising varied "clinical" positions (fixed term non-tenured contracts). Tenure is rarely granted for teaching excellence alone and almost always the fixed prerequisite for tenure is research-publication-career visibility, professional status). Almost universally tenure is the requirement for advancement to full professorship in the American academy. If artists cant obtain tenure they can't advance and as predominantly part-time or contract clinical, unranked instructors they are absolutely second-class faculty, subject low pay, the whims and budgetary expediencies of administrators. Nowadays, most teaching artists have an MFA but most of them, in vastly increased numbers over the past 20 years, are in part-time, untenurable positions. The proposed PhD in studio art is a mostly pragmatic concept to help even the playing field between artists and other faculty in the academy. Trouble is, what is a studio-based dissertation? What constitutes studio centered "new knowledge" the threshold for the PhD in all fields. What special knowledge or skills does it represent? Is a PhD in studio practice necessary to research and creativity in art as it is in, say, physics? Absent the pragmatics, the studio PhD seems inauthentic and and meaningless in the artworld where achievement is essentially a market feature. But it was only a few generations ago that most teaching artists were "artists in residence", an honorific status but entirely lacking in any faculty authority. The emergence of the MFA was the postwar answer to that. (Univ Iowa granted the first MFA, c. 1945, to a black woman) It too was a pragmatic license enabling artists some role in the academy. So why should we be adverse to a studio PhD since it is conceived to do ensure artists a valid place in academia, just as the MFA once was? Not only is the role of the artist in our society a very vexing issue but the identity of the artist in academia is perplexing to an extreme. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: Michael Brady <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Fri, February 26, 2010 2:23:56 PM Subject: Re: REFINE SEARCH FUNCTIONALITY On Feb 26, 2010, at 3:19 PM, William Conger wrote: > The lack of the PhD has hindered some teaching studio artists -- almost always in lesser schools forced to petition allocation of funds determined by numbers of PhD faculty -- from obtaining promotion, tenure, even full-time status. I was under the impression that an MFA was known to be a terminal degree and a sufficient credential for a professor and departmental chair in a curricular program. Is that not the case in general?
