The challenges of the spring term

It is difficult to believe that we are already into the third week of the “spring” session, the equivalent of “November” during the regular year.  Spring/summer courses always seem a bit strange.  Some topics lend themselves well to something resembling an immersion format, and some don’t.  Unfortunately, many students take them for very much the wrong reason, believing that difficult courses will somehow be “easier” in the summer.

From the perspective of the Dean’s office, spring session courses are both necessary and problematic.  The first major problem is the funding formula.  FASS does not have a base budget allocation for the summer term, and thus must rely on the revenue-sharing that kicks in above a certain baseline in order to cover all the costs of hiring both instructors and teaching assistants.  But the baseline year – I think it is 1998 – was apparently a good one for summer courses in our Faculty, so we have to achieve a very high level of enrollment before we gain even a single penny towards our cost recovery.  This means we depend on having a large number of courses that will draw 100 students or more simply to get to zero.  If we fail to reach that baseline, we have to return money to the VP Finance.  Fortunately we normally reach it, and more – but it has been quite a few years since we succeeded in generating enough revenue to cover our actual costs.  Thus, from a purely “business” perspective, we lose something like $200,000 on the spring/summer term every year, a loss that has to be covered by the “profit” derived from the revenue sharing scheme for the fall/winter.  Not an ideal situation, but I suppose something to be regarded as a necessary evil, an inherent “cost of doing business”.

The bigger issue, from my perspective, is the timing of the spring/summer registration, especially for those courses that begin in the second week of May.  Unlike most other universities, which open their registration in February or March, and thus have plenty of time to adjust their schedules, hire TAs where needed, acquire the requisite number of textbooks, and so on, at Carleton we only open registration a few short days before classes actually begin, creating an unholy scramble that leaves much to be desired.  This isn’t fair: not to the students, who don’t know whether their classes will go ahead or not until the day they actually begin; not to the professors, who similarly don’t know until the first day of the spring term whether they will in fact be teaching; and not to the TAs, who don’t know until that same day whether they will have summer employment.  This is a very poor situation, completely exasperating for those involved, and one that cries out to be fixed.  Unfortunately, I am not holding my breath that action on this is forthcoming anytime soon.

I shall predict with some confidence that, sooner or later, Carleton and all other universities will move to a trimester model, following the lead of Simon Fraser, Waterloo, and some others.  But as yet there is no momentum for change on this campus.  And thus we are stuck with a system that most regard as flawed, but which no one has any compelling incentive to make an effort to improve.  And change does not come easy at a university, especially fundamental change.

This is not to say that the spring/summer term doesn’t offer exciting opportunities as it stands.  For one thing, it allows the possibility of intensive courses taught at locations other than Ottawa, and this month FASS is mounting credit courses in places as diverse as Quebec City, Greece, and Burkina Faso.  The students lucky enough to be taking advantage of these opportunities will have an experience that they are likely never to forget, and the same is also true for the faculty members who are teaching them.  So there is certainly merit in the concept.

My own experience as an undergraduate at Carleton began with a summer course in French, back in July 1968 in the months just prior to my 17^th birthday, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.  Languages are among the subjects that I think do benefit from being taught in a concentrated format with classes held every day over the period in question.  But we still have a long way to go to get this right.