Reader Responses to the Principal’s Bicentennial Vision, Issue #1

This is the first in our series of posts featuring your responses to the Principal’s Bicentennial Vision. 

A big thanks to all those who have copied us on their correspondence and a reminder to keep sharing your answers by cutting and pasting them into this anonymous form.

Responding to the Principal’s preset questions, the colleague who wrote the answers below calls the Bicentennial Vision “a desperate, last-ditch strategy,” and suggests that Queen’s could ensure its reputation for high-quality education by capitalizing on the “massive capacity for growth” in its humanities and social sciences programs. 

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How can Queen’s ensure its Bicentennial Vision advances its Mission, Vision, and Values while adapting to the challenges and opportunities of its third century?

1. Commit to the autonomous aims and values of the Arts, Humanities, and Social Science (AHSS) disciplines, to cultivate and support for their own sake in terms of enrolment, teaching capacity, and research expectations. This Vision paper makes no concrete commitment of that kind, focussed as it is on STEM uniquely to improve the University’s financial security and at-risk reputation (which apparently, AHSS is not expected to do). Everything the paper says about STEM is persuasive, however, including the value of AHSS contributing pedagogy to it. The neglect of an imperative in the reverse direction is symptomatic.

2. Distinguish between the University’s responsibility to cultivate practical knowledge in response to present and future conditions, and its responsibility to preserve knowledge and increase understanding of the vast, unrolling landscapes of past and other lives, of the struggles and achievements of heart, soul, imagination and intellect over centuries and millenia of human life on this Earth. It is sad to read this “vision” of a University that has nothing to say about the latter for its own sake, focussed as it is on the importance of knowledge as timely engagement and customer demand. Certainly, the University must be willing to respect and adapt to, indeed humanistically to enrich, the increasingly profound relevance of STEM in our world. But that is not only, in the words of the paper, what a university is “for.”

What measures should Queen’s take to remove barriers to education, enhance diversity and inclusion, and address the increasing non-academic needs of students, such as mental health support?

1. The Ontario universities might try to negotiate funding to implement dedicated student health programs that would allow funding for mental health consultation and accommodation to flow more from the provincial government. Perhaps such an implementation could be rationalized so as to take pressure off of higher-cost health professionals under OHIP. (But I don’t know, maybe this is already what’s going on.)

What should be the optimal size of Queen’s student body by 2041, and how should enrolments be distributed across STEM and non-STEM fields to balance workforce demands, financial sustainability, and the university’s core values?

1. Smaller is better, especially for the Queen’s brand in Canada—as the only elite institution of that kind. But limiting size is less important than sustaining the balance of STEM and non-STEM academic values and pursuits.

2. The Vision paper implies that the balance of students—hence resources and research, and hence the University’s mission, as noted above—should shift substantially toward STEM. I do not think this is a bad thing, if the University would otherwise close its doors; it’s a desperate, last-ditch strategy. Such a shift would signal that Queen’s is no longer what Queen’s was, and no longer a university like most others in Canada. Its brand would change, and likely not for the better. Queen’s would be aspiring to be the MIT of the north, which I doubt it truly has the money and size to pull off.

How can Queen’s strengthen its global connections and focus on mission-driven research to address real-world challenges and improve its position in rankings?

1. Obviously the answers vary by discipline. The Vision paper notes that an objective is for every Queen’s researcher to have external funding, which would improve one measure of rankings. But this objective is out of touch with funding needs and opportunities in the humanities, so is not a reasonable or equitable practical aim for the stated ends.

What innovative strategies or alternative funding models can Queen’s adopt to address decreasing government funding, frozen tuition fees, and limits on international student enrolment?

1. For the same reason that STEM is the leading mindset today, the days of hinterland universities are on the wane. Nobody now wants to be out of reach from a city, because cities are associated with opportunity and the future. Unlike Queen’s, nearly all Ontario universities are within cities or an easy commute to them. Queen’s should be creating brick-and-mortar footholds in metropolitan areas, both in Canada and internationally. For example, Queen’s should be partnering with TMU—a growing, successful institution that could benefit from association with the elite Queen’s brand and not in program competition with it. Or it should be renting its own space for a dedicated centre of some kind in Toronto with full-service teaching and research, no matter how modest in size, as a brand sign and gateway to main campus. Internationally, we should be opening up the kind of outpost institutions that escape tuition regulation and offer our programs to students eager for our brand (like the Castle, but in China, the US, etc.).

I am deeply concerned by the Principal’s Bicentennial Vision for Queen’s which will see the university defund thriving and central aspects of its mission, its humanities and social sciences departments.

The principal claims that “STEM is not a contemporary aberration but a longstanding fact of higher education in this country, the time is surely right for the arts, social sciences, and humanities, in particular, to ponder the lineaments of a possible future defined not by alienation from and reaction against that drift, but by a recognition of their continuity with it. As part of the present visioning process, therefore, we should convene colleagues from the arts, social sciences, and humanities, to consider positive options.”

The principal’s argument for forcing the “lineaments” between these departments is vacuous and shames the Queen’s community. The principal assumes that the humanities and social sciences fields are themselves not a “longstanding fact of higher education in this country.” Has the principal decided that we should all now take his assumption that these departments somehow “are not” part of that fact on faith? Will he be defending this false framing? Has he deluded himself?

As someone who teaches and does research with undergraduates in these fields, I can promise everyone that my courses are full, completely maxed out, and have been for years now. These departments have no challenge attracting student interest, other than a shortage of instructors and new tenure lines to teach our courses. It is not the lack of alignment with STEM or business that hinders this university’s growth but rather a generation of overpaid and useless administrators. These pointless offices include the Principal himself, who fails to understand what leadership even is in the first place.

These departments have massive capacity for growth and could attract large contingents of undergraduates to our university who are eager to receive a social sciences and humanities education at the university level. Does the Principal want to reduce undergraduate enrolment? Does the Principal wish to take the university off course, away from its core mission and values? I wonder what the university stakeholders would think of that?

Perhaps the Principal should “convene colleagues from the arts, social sciences, and humanities, to consider positive options” but purely for the purpose of developing a real strategic plan that follows democratic principles and centres these departments to make Queen’s a place where students can trust that they will receive the high-quality humanities and social sciences education for which they are willing to pay good money and spend four years of their lives. Perhaps the principal should learn how to actually be a leader of a university before pretending to be one. Queen’s does not need any more pretenders. It needs real leaders.