The Bubble

Here's an interesting problem coming down the pike for academics in the arts. Students in Quebec protested a hike in fees, and the Parti Quebecois got elected on a platform that included cancelling the hike, which they did. However, in a summit on education, the PQ immediately announced that they were going to cut higher education budgets (retroactively, no less), which led to massive public outcry. In any case, the cuts got handed down, and so now the universities are left trying to bridge the gap. McGill University decided to bridge the gap by cancelling 100 classes in their Faculty of Arts. (The article unfortunately doesn't mention what, if anything, has been slashed on the science side of the world. I would be shocked if there weren't even minor cutbacks made to at least appear to be distributing the burden evenly.)

How are these 100 arts classes going to be cut? The proposed solution is to move to larger class sizes by cutting the smaller classes (which also typically tend to be higher-level). So these high-level, small-enrolment classes, taught by tenured faculty, will be offered either less frequently, or no longer offered at all. Those faculty members will instead be asked to teach more of the higher-enrolment, lower-level classes, which are currently taught mostly by sessional instructors. And because tenured faculty are so expensive, the university will ease the burden on their time by increasing the number of teaching assistants, with the added benefit that these teaching assistantships are probably the single most important source of funding for the university's graduate students. End of the day: bigger classes, taught by tenured faculty (who presumably are better teachers, but that's far from a given); but with more mediation between professor and student, with that mediation taking place via greater TA support; fewer high-level courses for majors; fewer sessional positions; and the capacity to fund more graduate students.

Here's The Bubble. With more funding available through TAships, the university will be able to take on more graduate students. However, the growth in holding capacity for graduate students is not an indication of a stronger and healthier market for the arts; rather, it's a particular manifestation of humanity's latest sickness. In fact, the number of viable teaching positions is decreasing, and a greater proportion of the work is being shifted onto TA's (knowing that essentially the majority of that money comes right back in tuition anyway) so that the same number of students can be accommodated with using fewer expensive faculty. Here's the rub: we'll be training more doctoral and master's students, but cutting away the academic job market into which they hope to move.

The value of an undergrad degree, especially in the arts, has been the victim of rampant inflation in the last few decades, as more and more people get them. Unfortunately, the increase in quantity has also been accompanied by a decrease in quality. So the B.A. is currently worth, at least in economic terms, a shade less than the paper on which it's printed. A B.A. gets you a job in nothing, despite the immense importance to citizenship that critical reflection and cultural exposure bring. It seems that the MA and the PhD are heading in the same direction, a fact that greatly saddens me and makes me wary of the direction in which our society is headed.

Where do we go from here? It seems to me that we need to rethink the interface between humanistic studies (at all levels), and the economic world into which graduates will mostly emerge, with fewer and fewer of us able to hide behind the shield of academic employment. And that requires looking more closely at the humanities: what exactly are the skills that we learn; how can we shed some light on their importance to the market? And how can we make it clear that the value of being a critical and reflective citizen can't be treated as an economic sector heading toward market failure?