Stuck in the status quo
by Christine Overall
Over and over we’ve been reading and hearing laments about the sad state of university funding in Canada.
The litany is familiar. Courses will have to be cut; sessional instructors will be dropped. There will be fewer teaching assistants; graduate students’ funding will decline. No additional programs can be introduced; departments may be consolidated or made to disappear.
It’s an unwelcome prospect. What is to be done? The challenge is to find ways to preserve what is most valuable in our teaching while at the same time enduring a significant drop in our resources. Taking this challenge seriously will require radical reconsideration of what we do, not a mere continuation of the status quo.
Maybe we should rethink how many hours a week, and weeks per term, are needed for each course, and how many courses are needed for a degree. These things are not, after all, set in stone; they’re the result of historical precedent. Suppose, for example, we were to require fewer courses, while each course would require more in-depth investigation from the students. Students would have a chance to explore particular themes or topics without being rushed from one subject to another. They would engage in in-depth research, rather than writing multiple-choice tests and churning out superficial papers.
Such an approach would require more independent learning on the part of students, but surely that’s part of what we want to encourage. Each field and subfield of knowledge grows so quickly that scholars can scarcely keep up. Traditional “coverage” of our disciplines is becoming less and less possible. The alternative is an emphasis on in-depth exploration. Such an approach would also enable us to cultivate in our students the skills of analysis, evaluation and imagination that will serve them well, not only in university but beyond it.
A common response to the challenge of radical change in our modus operandi is to say that it cannot be done. I recently heard the following joke: “How many faculty members does it take to change a lightbulb?” Answer: “Change?”
The problem is that top-down transformation will not happen. No self-respecting academic wants to be told by administrators what their discipline is about or how to do their teaching. But bottom-up change also doesn’t work. At the departmental level, academic units have neither the means nor the motivation to make fundamental change. They lack the means because they have to avoid curricular alterations that might impinge negatively upon other programs. They lack the motivation because there’s little reason for them to take risks that might disadvantage them vis-à-vis other units. Moreover, most people want to continue teaching the way they themselves were taught.
The same problems plague any attempt at a fundamental rethinking of what the university is.
Many academics have asked whether the university is now primarily a credentialing mechanism. It merely attests that its graduates have sufficient staying power to pass a collection of courses, even though they can’t do serious work in the disciplines they studied.
Some say the university is a great equalizer, providing the opportunity for immigrants, aboriginals, people of colour, and persons with disabilities to compensate for the disadvantages dealt to them by birth, geography, or social class.
Is the university perhaps primarily for specialized training – engineering, business, law, pharmacy medicine, nursing, urban planning – with the humanities and creative arts serving as options to give our future professionals a veneer of culture?
Or is the university only for the serious, dedicated student, the one who is passionate about scientific research, spends hours discussing history with her roommate and wants to do graduate work in her subject? Perhaps the university is just a kind of warehouse, complete with pubs, health care services and gymnasiums, to keep young people out of the job market a little longer and hence prevent the unemployment statistics from being even worse.
In an age of declining funding, we have to rethink both what the university is and what it is for. We need to reevaluate the kinds of students we attract, the types and modes of education we offer, and the resources we devote money to.
Unfortunately, as at the departmental level, it doesn’t seem possible to transform the university. A top-down approach, with politicians or consumer polls telling us what to do, is out of the question; it’s inconsistent with peer governance and scholarly independence. Yet, bottom-up change by individual institutions seems too risky. It could threaten our competitiveness or our funding from governments, donors and tuition fees.
Thus, ironically, the institutions where creativity and innovation should be hallmarks are places where transformation is particularly difficult. I don’t know what the answer is. But I strongly suspect that academic “business as usual” will not be sustainable.
Christine Overall teaches in the department of philosophy at Queen’s University and is our regular columnist on philosophical issues in the academy.
