Heading to the Fair

There are various challenges facing the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences in the months ahead, and the one which comes first to mind this week – the week of the Ontario Universities Fair in Toronto – is recruitment.  Put simply, in a financial model driven entirely by student numbers, maintaining, and indeed increasing, our enrolment is vital for our continued good health, indeed in the long term for our very survival. 

Although the “official” count for 2012-13 takes place only on November 1^st, the preliminary figures for the year are now in, and there is no reason for satisfaction or complacency.  The number of students enrolling in FASS programs is down for the second consecutive year, following a decade of steady growth.  There may be many reasons for this, including the current state of the economy coupled with articles in the press which have questioned the value of a Bachelor of Arts degree, but in the end the cause of this trend doesn’t much matter.  Lower numbers hurt us financially, and I fear entering a downward spiral in which budget reductions lead to fewer programs and courses, which lead in turn to even fewer students … and so on.  Fortunately we also do a lot of service teaching for Faculties whose enrolments are growing, and this will help us a bit in the short term.  But we don’t want to become a Faculty that simply provides electives to students in other programs!

So, what do we do?  I believe there are a number of possible strategies, and all of these need to be pursued simultaneously.  First and foremost, we need to recruit aggressively – and with that goal in mind we shall be sending the largest-ever FASS team to the OUF next weekend.  But the OUF is just one of many recruitment events, and we have to make greater efforts at each and every one of these.  We need to engage with as many potential future students as possible, and encourage them to think of Carleton as a possible option. Some of this is the responsibility of our excellent Recruitment Office, but not all.  Each and every faculty member in FASS also needs to be involved in this effort … somehow, somewhere.

Simultaneously, we need to explore options which will attract students who otherwise may never have considered Carleton, and vice versa.  Here I am thinking both about students in the college system, and especially those taking certificate programs designed for “university transfer”, and also international students.  While Carleton already does very well in terms of international students, in Ontario ranking second only to the University of Toronto as a percentage of the overall student body, these are not evenly dispersed across our Faculties, and the number in FASS is not particularly high.  We can and must try to do better.  And this is why I have no problem with the agreement that the university has entered into with Culture Works.  If it brings students to Carleton who would otherwise have gone somewhere else for their studies, then we shall most certainly benefit.

Thirdly, we need to reassess both our programs and their modes of delivery, to ensure that these are relevant to students in the 21^st century.  Don’t get me wrong – I am not suggesting that we discard disciplines and approaches that have stood the test of time for many centuries.  I am, after all, a medievalist, and the past is very important to me!  But those subjects, and how we approach them, have in some instances changed dramatically even since I was a student here in the early 1970s.  In those days there were no undergraduate programs in subjects as varied as African Studies, Environmental Studies, Interdisciplinary Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Sexuality Studies, Indigenous Studies, Child Studies, Cognitive Science, Humanities, or Human Rights.  And many of the subjects that are still being taught are now done so much differently, including my own core discipline of art history.  History tells us that nothing ever remains the same, and we would be foolish to presume that the approaches that seemed so relevant to us in graduate school, as we honed our academic skills, will still be relevant to today’s generation of students, let alone the next one.  The only constant is in fact change.  Carleton has been a trail-blazer on the path of greater interdisciplinarity, but there is much more that can still be done.  Similarly, advances in technology make things possible that were never previously imagined.  Forty years ago who would have thought that we could teach archaeology through simulated excavations undertaken by avatars in a “virtual” world, or that classrooms could include students situated physically in multiple locations around the planet?   And who knows what may be possible five years from now in 2017?  I choose that date simply because one of the tasks on our collective agenda in the coming months is to update our FASS academic plan, outlining our priorities for the next quinquennium.

In my view, our greatest enemy is complacency, the sense that the survival of the university, the Faculty, or our particular unit is somehow someone else’s problem.  It is easy to be complacent.  A few weeks ago I turned 61; and I fully expect that by the time September 2017 rolls around I shall probably have “retired”.  Why should I care?  Well, perhaps I shouldn’t … but I do.  And I hope that all readers of these weekly musings will do so also.  The future of our Faculty is very much what we choose to make it.