We, the members of the Purdue University Creative Writing Program, are asking for your help in preventing the inevitable destruction of the Creative Writing program, both graduate and undergraduate, and irreversible harm to the English Department as a whole, as a result of the administration’s defunding of graduate education within the English Department. 

The Dean of the College of Liberal Arts has withdrawn funding completely for all graduate student admissions to the Department of English for the academic year 2022-23. As for succeeding years, the planned number of admissions has been reduced to ten graduate student admissions for the department’s three programs. Destructive to graduate and undergraduate education in all English Department programs, this policy decision threatens the survival of Purdue’s Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing, one of the top fully-funded programs in the United States, as well as our internationally-recognized literary journal, Sycamore Review. It's not lost on us that as our program has grown more diverse, more queer, and more international, so has our funding decreased. We understand the administration’s proposed de facto abolition of the most diverse graduate program in the college only as a deliberate and fatal attack on that diversity.

By signing this petition, you are expressing a strenuous and justified objection to the College of Liberal Arts and the Dean's enforced moratorium on graduate admissions to the Creative Writing MFA program, which will lead to the shuttering of a program with a rich cultural and educational legacy.

You can find additional information, as reported by the Exponent, here and here.