Editor's note: The following letter was published in the Ottawa Citizen, on Monday, April 4, 2005.
George Lang, Dean, Faculty of Arts
My friends warned me last summer when I moved to Ottawa that I was entering the world of spin. You know the word: Spin is the particular impetus we impart to projected objects. In sports, the spinning objects we toss, chuck, kick or hurl can be made to curve or bend, Beckham-like, as they shoot through space. In politics, it's how we manage events swirling within the media world.
So here I am, Dean of Arts at the University of Ottawa, hoping to put my own spin on what everyone else keeps calling “massive cuts” in my faculty. I'm referring to the Citizen, as well as other mainstream and student media. Most recently in these pages, Pauline Tam referred to a “$1.3-million cost-cutting exercise” in my Faculty. Our “exercise” was contrasted with the $1 million “investment” Carleton University is making this year in its ArtsOne program.
For the record, ArtsOne sounds like a great idea. I don't buy into the notion that the kind of rivalry which builds team loyalty in sports has a place in the symbiotic and mutually sustaining relationships between neighbours like the University of Ottawa and Carleton University. We are both better and stronger institutions because the other is there. Besides, we are linked by a common ice-rink.
Our Faculties of Arts are also linked in another telling way - by the fact that we both have invested about $1 million in new positions in this year. Carleton created 12 new positions (at least that is what this paper said, so I will believe it); we got perhaps a few more, but let's not split hairs.
Before the spinning began, it seemed self-evident that students—and deans—prefer to have full-time professors, as opposed to term contract instructors (however excellent these latter may be). Career professors are bound and committed to discovery and invention. We encourage them to bring their research into the classroom, to let innovation and research drive learning. One of our strategic goals as a university is to increase our faculty complement. Rankings of universities almost universally reward schools with more courses taught by full-time professors.
Our Faculty of Arts is already second in Ontario and fifth nation-wide in terms of externally-funded research grants, and we have just added another group of 20 dynamic, internationally recognized professors to our roster. In this context, I have reduced our total course and class offerings by about 4 per cent for the next year (so you know: 66 out of 1635 sections). Basic housekeeping, with one outcome being some current contract instructors will not be teaching next year.
Budgets reflect priorities. Our priorities are to serve our students best by hiring dynamic, committed, full-time professors who will be accessible to them and full participants in academic life in the faculty.
Forget the apocalyptic headlines and the dire predictions - we know that investing more money in full-time faculty and providing students with the intellectually rich and stimulating environment that creates is a good thing. Students won't suffer because of our “cost-cutting exercise”; they'll benefit.
When the hysteria abates, and the new academic year begins, those who pay attention will see that. Unfortunately, spin cycles rarely last that long.
