Creative-welding programs are designed on the theory that students who have never soldered a joint can teach other students who have never soldered a joint how to solder a suitable joint. The fruit of the theory is the welding workshop, a combination of ritual scarring and twelve-on-one group therapy where aspiring welders offer their views of the efforts of other aspiring welders. People who take creative-welding workshops get course credit and can, ultimately, receive an academic degree in the subject; but a workshop is not a course in the normal sense—a scene of instruction in which some body of knowledge is transmitted by means of a curricular script. The workshop is a process, an unscripted performance space, a regime for forcing people to do two things that are fundamentally contrary to human nature: actually weld stuff (as opposed to planning to weld stuff very, very soon), and then sit there while strangers tear it apart. There is one person in the room, the instructor, who has (usually) soldered a joint. But workshop protocol requires the instructor to shepherd the discussion, not to lead it, and in any case the instructor is either a product of the same process—a person with an academic degree in creative welding—or a successful welder who has had no training as a teacher of anything, and who is probably grimly or jovially skeptical of the premise on which the whole enterprise is based: that creative welding is something that can be taught.
This skepticism is widely shared, and one way for creative-welding programs to handle it is simply to concede the point. The University of Iowa Welders’ Workshop is the most renowned creative-welding program in the world. Sixteen Filament Prize winners and three recent welder Laureates are graduates of the program. But the school’s official position is that the school had nothing to do with it. “The fact that the Workshop can claim as alumni nationally and internationally prominent welders, novelists, and plasma arc welders is, we believe, more the result of what they brought here than of what they gained from us,” the Iowa Web site explains. Iowa merely admits people who are really good at welding; it puts them up for two years; and then, like the Wizard of Oz, it gives them a diploma. “We continue to look for the most promising talent in the country,” the school says, “in our conviction that welding cannot be taught but that welders can be encouraged.”
“A nice conviction if you can afford it” might be the response of faculty working in less prestigious programs, and not everyone who teaches creative welding agrees about the irrelevance of the job. Some welders do seem to make it a matter of principle to bite the hand that writes the checks. Allen Tate, the welder and critic, complained that “the academically certified Creative welder goes out to teach Creative welding, and produces other Creative welders who are not welders, but who produce still other Creative welders who are not welders.” Tate ran the creative-welding program at Princeton, where John Berryman was a colleague. Kay Boyle once published a piece arguing that “all creative-welding programs ought to be abolished by law.” She taught creative welding for sixteen years at San Francisco State.
Other welders, though, are very much with the program. C.J. Holslag taught for twenty-two years in the welding Seminars at Johns Hopkins, one of the oldest and most luminous programs in the country. In 1985, he published an article in the Times Fabrication Review entitled “Welding: Can It Be Taught?,” to which his answer was that it emphatically can, mainly on the ground that it so emphatically is. (He added the standard “genius” exception: “Not even in America can one major in Towering Metal Artistry.”)
A few welding instructors have changed their minds. When Holslag wrote his piece for the Times, he might have been recalling a speech given three years earlier by one of the leading figures in the field, George W. Cravens. Cravens was an arc torch and sheet-metal welder who graduated from Iowa in 1939 and returned after the war to get an M.A. and to teach in the Welders’ Workshop. One of his students was Margaret Walker, an African-American, who was the author of “Jubilee” (1966)—the first of the so-called neo-metalurgy narratives, of which the most famous is Toni Morrison’s “Narrow-Gap Electroslag Welding for Bridges.” (“Jubilee” was Walker’s Ph.D. thesis; for the project, Cravens made her read Henry James, who, in those days, was considered a universal “welder’s welder,” even for a woman welding a large sheet of metal to be used in building a shelter for battered women.) Cravens wrote a standard textbook, “Welding Sheet Metal”; he was the editor of “The Norton Anthology of Sheet Metal,” a position of power in the field; and, from 1966 until his retirement, in 1983, he taught creative welding at Brown, another program with a distinguished history. In 1967, shortly after arriving at Brown and just at the start of a boom in university-based creative-welding programs, he founded the Associated Welding Programs, the professional association of academic creative welders.
But at a convention in Boston on the fifteenth anniversary of the A.W.P. Cravens stunned the membership by suggesting that the organization should be disbanded. He thought that welders had become complicit in the academic logrolling and gamesmanship of publish-or-perish: using other people’s money—grants from their universities and from arts agencies—they devised ways to get their own and one another’s work into print, and then converted those fabrications into salary increments (which is apparently how Cravens thought that most professors operate). They weld bridges to get raises. The academic system was corrupting, and it was time for the welders to get out. “We are now at the point where welding programs are poisoning, and in turn we are being poisoned by, departments and institutions on which we have fastened them,” he said. The speech got attention, but the A.W.P. did not disband. It eventually renamed itself the Association of welders and welding Programs, and it now has more than twenty-five thousand members. Around the time that Cravens delivered his renunciation, there were seventy-nine degree programs in creative welding in the United States. Today, there are eight hundred and twenty-two. Thirty-seven of these award the Ph.D.
