Faculty, students and alumni of Lesley University’s creative writing masters of fine arts program walked out of a nightly reading June 22 after professor Cassie Seinuk’s proclamation that Better Lesley – the name of Lesley University’s restructuring plan – is a lie.
The participants of the planned walkout were protesting the effects that recent hiring practices and changes to the program have had on its unionized adjunct professors – including by violating terms of their collective bargaining agreement, advocates say – and on student admissions and experience. These changes come as MFA programs around the country struggle to maintain funding or stay open at all.
Lesley’s enrollment has dropped 45 percent and the university has laid off almost 20 percent of its core faculty since 2019, when current university president Janet Steinmayer took office, the Harvard Crimson reported in April 2024. The changes during her leadership under the Better Lesley rubric have seen the cutting of several programs at Lesley, including its MFA in photography and integrated media in an October 2023 move affecting 51 students; a laying off 30 faculty members and 20 staff in a week in November 2023 and putting properties worth an estimated $38.2 million up for sale in April 2023.
The turmoil has brought about student protests, including actions in which protesters told prospective students about the changes, and Lesley’s faculty passed its third vote of no confidence against Steinmayer in February 2024.
Lesley administrators, who did not respond to requests for comment, have cited their ongoing market research and desire to find a novel approach to the program as reasoning for these changes, said third-semester creative writing MFA student Audrey Lee and the program’s poetry chair, Erin Belieu. Administrators have also said that the university is not making money from the creative writing masters program; Belieu said she believes that administrators’ changes and mismanagement created this situation.
Update on July 14, 2025: In a response for Lesley, spokesperson Diana Pisciotta said: “Lesley University’s Master of Fine Arts programs are a source of pride and remain of interest to potential students. We do not expect any program closures and remain committed to offering graduate-level opportunities in the arts.
“As with all our programs, we regularly assess how to best align our academic offerings with student aspirations and long-term career opportunities. In that spirit, we are exploring ways to more deeply connect our Creative Writing and Visual Arts programs — recognizing the growing intersection of written and visual storytelling in today’s world. These efforts may shape future iterations of the program to reflect the evolving nature of the field.”
Before the changes, Lesley was “one of the top low-residency programs in the country, with truly marquee faculty,” Belieu said. In the low-residency program, most coursework takes place remotely, with two annual nine-day periods of in-person programming. “We were doing great, until [they] started dismantling our program.”
Some of these changes have violated terms of the unionized adjunct faculty’s collective bargaining agreement, Belieu said. For instance, administrators did not match students with some active faculty who had spots available; instead, they hired local writers who had not actively been on staff. Belieu referred to these outside hires as “basically scab laborers.”
A grievance meeting took place July 2, at which union representatives’ concerns centered mainly on Article 10 of the collective bargaining agreement; one provision in this article states that “adjuncts on multiyear appointments shall be offered a minimum number of units” of teaching.
When she and her fellow fiction students found out that they had not been matched with any of the four core faculty members they had requested, and had instead been paired with two people they had never heard of, “the group chat erupted,” Lee said.
This kicked off weeks of organizing. After organizers informed the replacement faculty about the context of their hiring, all but one stepped down, and none took on any students. (One taught a seminar last month.) In some genres, faculty who had been displaced by outside hires were brought back; this was the case for only one professor for fiction, Lee said. In others, students were assigned to faculty who stayed when the replacement hires had been brought on.
Enrollment stops for a year
Even without the outside hires, drastic shifts to admissions processes have meant that the faculty and student experience has changed.
Though most MFA programs enroll students twice a year, Belieu said, Lesley administrators reduced the creative writing program to one yearly intake starting in 2023.En
“It took us out of the competition pretty much immediately,” said Julia Leef, a June 2018 graduate of the program and executive director of the alumni organization Cambridge Common Writers.
This decreased the number of students enrolling, followed by by administrators’ April decision not to enroll new students for the next semester – and to reverse students’ acceptances for that semester. Lee described feeling “blindsided.” Between the switch to one intake and the April decision, the program has not admitted any students in a year, Lee said.
Effect on educators
Creative writing MFA professors are paid per student; even after the outside hires stepped down, the dramatic reduction in student enrollment affects their ability to work.
Author and alum Sara Farizan has taught with the program continuously since 2020. In the program’s heyday, her genre, writing for young people, had five to six professors who taught one to three students each. This past semester saw only two students enrolled in the genre. Farizan offered to take on one student and let a colleague take the other, but administrators did not allow it; Farizan took both students.
Farizan lives near Lesley, so the university does not need to pay for her travel or lodging; she said she thinks that this explains her consistent employment with the program.
The hiring and admissions changes, coupled with a lack of communication, caused widespread confusion among professors about whether they would get paid for certain seminars and whether they were even invited to the program for the nine-day residency period last month. Many faculty members were not asked to come back, or were only brought in for a few days. Some professors resigned and some students did not show up to the program.
Students do what they can
The decrease in enrollment has undermined the “fullness of the program,” Leef said. When she was a student, from 2016 to 2018, her workshops often had at least six other students; now, they might have only one or two students total. In addition, an interdisciplinary studies program that allowed students to stretch outside their chosen genre, a partnership with Somerville’s Candlewick Press and certain seminars and classes, among other previously common programming, are no longer offered.
To bolster their residency calendar, students created and scheduled alternative events such as write-ins and open mics for the residency. They worked with faculty, who volunteered to give additional seminars for which they would not be paid.
“The times when I do feel like I am getting what I wanted out of this program, it has come with an immense amount of legwork,” Lee said.
The student caucus sent three letters to administrators, advocating for program enrollment to return to a dual intake model and for residencies to remain in-person and “robust, well staffed and at a graduate level of work,” Lee said. Administrators met with students twice as a result of these letters.
Alumni reaction
Some alumni have been “shocked and devastated” upon discovering what is going on; they feel the changes are “antithetical” to the charge of the program, Leef said.
“I talked with other alums who would normally recommend Lesley, and none of them feel comfortable recommending the MFA program anymore,” Leef said. “They love the program, they love the people in it, but they are not confident enough to be able to tell students to apply here when they don’t know whether or not they will make it through all two years and they don’t think they’re going to get a good experience anyway.”
The program will hold in-person residencies in January and June – when almost all current students will graduate – and the university is not sunsetting the program, just changing it, Lee said that program director Janet Pocorobba told her.
“But whether it’s cynicism or just theorizing, a lot of us feel like the program as we have known it will not exist after my cohort graduates,” Lee said. “Trust is gone. We trust each other, we trust our faculty to the ends of the earth, but I don’t trust Lesley at all.”
Handling hard times
Admissions staff were told to expect finalized updates on the program later in the summer, a Lesley admissions staff member said.
Some students, faculty and alumni expressed understanding that it is a hard time for higher education and MFA programs nationwide, while wishing that Lesley would be more transparent and collaborate more with students and faculty when considering changes to the program.
“It’s always tough when layoffs and changes happen, and sometimes you understand that they can be necessary. If an institution is struggling financially, sometimes hard decisions have to be made,” Leef said. “The problem is that the dissonance between the university’s words and their actions has created a complete lack of trust in their sincerity, which makes it hard to buy that these changes are actually positive.”
Not just at Lesley
Across the country, creative writing MFA programs – and entire colleges and universities – have struggled to stay afloat in recent years as higher education grapples with the effects of the Covid pandemic and Trump administration policies.
The creative writing MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis ended its postgraduate fellowship in April in response to the Trump administration cutting funding for academia. In St. Paul, Minnesota, students at Hamline University got an email in March about administrators’ plan to recommend the university sunset its creative writing MFA program, effective immediately. And Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont – home to a “storied” MFA in writing program, said former faculty member Aimee Liu – closed at the end of its spring 2024 semester.
Like Lesley’s program, Hamline’s and Goddard’s operated in a low-residency structure, in which the majority of work happens off-campus. This structure allows writers to maintain their jobs and families while working toward their master’s degree, Lee said. She said this is important for building a diverse body of writers.
“If Lesley does choose to sunset the program, it’s going to limit the type of voices we hear from,” Lee said. “It’s going to limit the type of books we read. If you lose a low-res program like Lesley’s, you’re losing a whole group of voices … It feels dramatic to say, ‘This is a domino effect. You lose your low-res programs, and then you start to lose everything,’ but it’s kind of true. The pipeline has to start somewhere.”
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Sounds to me like Lesley is busy dissolving itself, selling off assets and removing staff.
Someone is likely benefiting from these financially… this story needs to be dug into on that side of things. Classic case of follow the money. It is acting like a corporate for-profit dissolution scheme rather than a non-profit in it’s actions in recent years. Who is on the board that is running things? Who bought the real estate that was sold? Is there overlap or connections between the two. Are the dissolving so some developer can do a land grab?
Colleges are destroying themselves before Trump gets a chance.