January 2013 address to FASS
January 2013 address to FASS
In place of a blog post this week, I am pleased to publish my speaking notes for the annual decanal address to faculty and staff in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, delivered on Friday 18 January, 2013.
Good afternoon! It is hard to believe that this is the eighth January day on which it has been my privilege to address you, and I hope that there will be two more to follow! .
By tradition I have used these occasions to survey both the year past and the year ahead, an appropriate activity in the month named after Janus, the Roman god with two heads, one looking in each direction. And this year it is particularly useful to look back, as we enter the final months of the Faculty’s five-year plan, adopted in April 2008.
Five years ago, this Faculty set out a series of ambitious goals. These ranged from the expansion of graduate programs, so that, ideally, all faculty members could have the opportunity to work with graduate students, to the “Signature B.A.” in which all undergraduate students would have opportunities for a research experience, an international experience, and a coop or practicum/internship experience. And while there are a few steps yet to take, I am pleased to say that we have made enormous progress in realizing these goals. New Masters programs have been added in programs as varied as Religion, Music, Women’s and Gender Studies, Human-Computer Interaction (jointly with the Faculties of Science, and Engineering & Design), and most recently in African Studies; and at the doctoral level in Anthropology, and Applied Language and Discourse Studies. A number of others are well advanced in the pipeline, including Digital Humanities, for which the core course is being offered for the first time this term.
And in terms of the elements proposed for the “Signature B.A.”, we have seen a plethora of research opportunities for our undergraduate students, including new undergraduate student research journals in Canadian Studies and Greek & Roman Studies; we have seen the expansion of co-op to include the departments of English, French, and History; and we have seen the growth of international opportunities, including courses taught outside the Ottawa area in locations such as Quebec City, Greece, South Africa, and Burkina Faso, in addition to a strong FASS presence in the Alternative Spring Break program and the expansion of international exchange possibilities. In the next weeks and months the FASS Strategic Planning Committee will be developing the Faculty’s next five-year plan, but I think we can look back on what has been accomplished with enormous pride. We set out, ambitiously, to offer the best possible undergraduate educational experience to our students, and we have made huge progress towards that goal. Not that we should be complacent! We have not reached our goal, and indeed never will. Like the “untraveled world” of Tennyson’s Ulysses, its margin fades forever and forever as we move. But it is the journey that counts, and it may indeed be more important than the destination.
And all of this has happened at a time of enormous faculty renewal. At a time when the pages of job ads in University Affairs and the CAUT Bulletin have almost disappeared, we have continued to hire new colleagues, and to expand into new areas such as Child Studies, to take one current example. I have lost track of the number of new colleagues who have joined us, but there was another significant group last July, and there will be even more on July 1st of 2013, as there are some 12 faculty searches currently in place. And we have also gained two Canada Research Chairs. In terms of support staff, there has also been considerable renewal. At our annual December lunch this year there were a great many who were attending for the first time. And of course all of this is a sign of the good health of the Faculty.
2012 was a particularly significant year in terms of the physical space that we occupy. While not all units were affected, some were affected significantly. Psychology gained some space for graduate students in Loeb, and there was a significant expansion of our excellent Music program, which moved its faculty offices down to the 8th floor of Loeb so that the 9th floor could be devoted completely to performance space. Women’s Studies moved to new quarters in the Dunton Tower, and Child Studies and CIE gained additional space to meet their growing needs. In Paterson, African Studies has moved up to the 4th floor, shared with History which has also expanded slightly. And there have been significant changes to the space occupied by Philosophy. But the biggest move was the creation of a new Language Centre in St Pat’s, occupying much of the space formerly assigned to Journalism and Communications. And SSAC also grew, acquiring new offices on the 4th floor of that building, and I should also mention the long-desired theatre for showing films, now up and running in the River Building. These moves have not been easy: the disruption has been considerable and there is still quite a bit to be done. But the Faculty’s campus footprint is now larger than at any previous moment in its history.
Lest we begin to feel smug, I shall now turn to the new year, 2013, and the challenges which lie ahead … and I don’t think there are any surprises here. One only needs to pick up a newspaper to discover very quickly that the world of post-secondary education is in a fragile if not perilous state. Governments around the globe, having so gladly taken on the mantle of university funding in the 20th century, are finding it harder and harder to deliver in the 21st. Different governments have taken different approaches: in Britain, the government has withdrawn entirely from funding teaching in the humanities and social sciences, requiring students to pay the full costs, although providing loans for that purpose. South of the border, programs are being slashed, especially at state-funded institutions; and even private universities have experienced difficult times because their income is dependent on endowments, and interest rates have remained stubbornly fixed at historic lows – which is good news if you are paying a mortgage, but a calamity if you are depending on earned interest to fund your operations, or your retirement. Across our own nation many institutions are in financial difficulty. Some – for example Guelph and Wilfrid Laurier – are undertaking exercises to determine what can most easily be cut without hurting their revenue. Others have adopted the short-term solution of borrowing money to manage their operating costs – although this is hardly a recipe for success in the longer term, as Greece has become so painfully aware in recent years. Sooner or later, those debts have to be repaid. In Quebec, as we have seen, the government has held the line on tuition fees, but has actually cut the direct grants, leaving the universities in that province teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. We can count ourselves fortunate not to be in so dire a position; but we should not be complacent. There are two very large clouds on our horizon.
The first is the pension liability. As mentioned previously, interest rates remain at all-time lows, with no sign of any movement, and the stock market still has not recovered from the 2008 collapse. This means that most defined-benefit (as opposed to defined-contribution) pension plans are in trouble, as they don’t generate enough income to meet their obligations. All Canadian provinces have regulations to ensure that pension plans don’t go belly up, with memories of Nortel and others still painfully fresh, and while some have exempted universities from meeting various solvency tests, Ontario has not. This has meant that Carleton has been having to find an additional $20M a year to put into the pension plan, and at the next three-year evaluation, due July 1st this year, our accountants estimate that this figure will rise to approximately $37M. Now that’s a lot of change on a total operating budget of under $440M, even with the best efforts of our VP Finance to set aside funds to make those extraordinary payments. And thus we have received across-the-board cuts in each of the past three years, albeit very small ones: roughly 2.5%, 1%, and 1%. Next month I am required to submit a plan for cutting 3% from the FASS budget on May 1st, and while we hope the final number will be smaller, there is no end to these reductions anywhere in sight. Thus far we have met the challenge in two ways: through the elimination of some faculty positions which became vacant through retirement, and through growth of our undergraduate student numbers, which has generated ELBA funds, a portion of which have been converted to “base” funding, and thus are available to use for budget reductions.
And that brings me to the second dark cloud: our student numbers, particularly at the undergraduate level. After a solid decade of growth from 2001 to 2010, the last few years have seen not only a leveling off, but in fact a decline in the number of undergraduate students who choose to do a B.A. degree with a major in one of the FASS units. Unlike other jurisdictions around the planet, in Ontario the government contribution to university operating budgets is almost entirely a simple mathematical calculation of a certain number of dollars per student – with variation for the student’s program. Engineering students, for example, bring in more dollars than B.A. students. But what is important to know here is that this dollar figure has not changed in over a decade. At the same time, our costs have increased. The VP Finance tells me that Carleton’s salary bill alone grows by $6-7M each year. How do we manage those increases? Through the growth of student numbers … i.e. more students, generating more tuition fee revenue and more grant payments. If we don’t grow by a few percentage points every year, then there will be a budget shortfall. Engineering and Science are continuing to grow, and FPA is holding its own. But FASS isn’t … and in a nutshell therein lies our primary issue. If we can continue to grow – either through increasing the first-year intake or by improving our retention rate (lowest among all the Carlton Faculties) – then we can easily survive this period of turbulence. But if we don’t then we will suffer financial losses … and it is worth bearing in mind that more than 97% of the FASS budget goes to salaries. Thus I urge everyone – and I do mean EVERYONE – to take this as a personal responsibility. Our goal must be to make this the most desirable place for students to come to receive a high quality education in the humanities and social sciences. We need to promote the value of the “liberal arts” with every waking breath, in every discussion with friends, neighbours, and casual acquaintances … because, frankly, what we do is under attack from many directions. And not to succeed is to accept that we shall enter into a downward spiral of budget and program cuts, which is already beginning to happen elsewhere. I am often told, “This is the government’s responsibility.”, or, “This is for the Board of Governors, and the senior administration.” And while I won’t argue with that, I also don’t believe that our future should rest entirely in the hands of others, and particularly others for whom the liberal arts may not be the highest priority. Ultimately the responsibility rests with us, and that is how it should be. If we can maintain the numbers, and hence our source of income, then we are relatively untouchable. But if we falter, we are exceptionally vulnerable.
Carleton generally, and FASS specifically, is an excellent place to work. I believe that truly myself, and if I didn’t then I wouldn’t be here. It is indeed rare that you see anyone leave to go to somewhere else … particularly faculty members. And I don’t have people queuing outside my office to complain to me about the horrors of their working conditions. But please don’t assume it will always be that way, at least not without our sustained collective effort.
Five years ago the Faculty crafted a vision: our dream for the future. We have accomplished much to realize that vision, but the road still stretches out ahead. I look forward to travelling that road, both in the remaining years of my appointment as dean, and then afterwards as a professor cross-appointed between SSAC and the College of the Humanities. And I can think of no better companions on that journey than the wonderful staff and faculty colleagues in FASS with whom it is a great pleasure to share my waking hours.