The Metric That Matters Most: Faculty Complement and the University of Alberta’s Department of English & Film Studies

Albertans are watching a debacle play out in regard to the K-6 curriculum for Alberta education, with the latest event in this saga involving the Alberta Teachers Association passing, last Friday, a vote of non-confidence in the Minister of Education Adriana LaGrange. The Kenney government’s proposed curriculum changes for elementary education in Alberta would make world-renowned educational programming into a laughing-stock. With 95% of school divisions declaring that they refuse to pilot the new curriculum, Alberta’s teachers may be able to hold the line against this. But it’s not clear that anything can prevent the debacle that is unfolding for Alberta postsecondary education in the face of the Kenney government’s hubris.

In regard to postsecondary education, the Kenney government would have Albertans believe two untruths: that the sector was somehow broken, and that it knows how to fix it. Its “fixes” include taking a hacksaw to the University of Alberta’s budget under the excuse that the University currently spends a little more per student than comparator universities across Canada. This makes no sense whatsoever, given that no university in Canada currently spends enough on its students. The government’s argument makes sense only as a part of a let’s-cheap-out, race-to-the-bottom mentality. Given the amount of money that the University of Alberta pumps into the Alberta economy the Kenney government’s savage budgets cuts are also downright irrational. What’s needed right now, at a moment in Alberta’s history in which Alberta must diversify its economy and do everything it can to help decarbonize the planet, is radical investment in Alberta’s postsecondary sector, and the province’s flagship university in particular. Good futures for Albertans depend upon us.

So let’s talk about the metric that really matters—one you won’t hear the Kenney government or even the University administration so much as mention: faculty complement. (They also don’t want us talking about the faculty-student ratio but that’s a topic for another time.)

The Kenney government’s cuts, greater than any ever experienced by any major research university on the planet, have put the University into a tailspin—not that you’ll hear the senior administration admit it. The last president, David Turpin, decided simply to end his second term early; current president Bill Flanagan would have Albertans believe that the cuts are an “opportunity.” Flanagan’s fantasy, under his UofA for Tomorrow plan, is that if students can be made to pay significantly higher tuition and he can get 10,000 more students a year through the door, the University will be just fine. That is nothing short of a ruse, for the University is currently busy bleeding the very people that it needs to keep the University afloat: its faculty.

There has been some—not nearly enough—mainstream media coverage of the drastic job losses that are occurring to the support staff. In cutting over 1,000 non-academic jobs the Board of Governors and the senior administration are gutting the University’s infrastructure and hoping no one will notice. At the September meeting of the General Faculties Council Board chair Kate Chisholm informed faculty, students, and staff that they were to stop grieving and get on with the work of restructuring the University—work based on the recommendations of the Australian management consultancy the Nous Group, which has entered the Canadian academy like a predator hoping to make a fortune off universities’ misfortunes. The McKinsey Group has also made off with a handsome sum, paid directly by the government. But what is also happening, without a public spotlight being shone on it, is major attrition to the University’s faculty members or “complement.”

Let me illuminate this matter in relation to the numbers that I know best—those for my own department, English and Film Studies (EFS).

In 2014, the Department of English and Film Studies was ranked #22 in the world in the QS rankings for studies in English. This ranking placed us amongst the most prestigious English departments in the world. But just seven years later, in a terrible decline precipitated by the Progressive Conservatives’ budget cuts of 2013, the Department has careened downwards to the #94 spot. There is one simple reason for this: a drastic loss of faculty members—over twenty in a decade.

As it stands, ten Asian universities now rank ahead of Alberta’s for studies in English. That includes universities in China, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea, and Taiwan.

This coming year we will lose another four members of the Department to retirement.

Traditionally when a faculty member retires a university hires, as soon as possible, a replacement. This is essential as a part of reinvestment in a department’s academic programs. A department cannot possibly maintain the quality of its programs without the faculty to do the work of teaching and supervising undergraduate and graduate students.

Because EFS has lost so many faculty members, we cannot support the number of graduate students that we used to. At this point the loss of faculty members is creating a situation so perilous that, if it is not rectified, the department will continue to plummet in the international rankings, and now undergraduate students will also have to pay the price in the loss of the kind of course they could take if they chose another university. This matters not just to the Department, but the University as a whole, for the status of a university’s English department is commensurate with a university’s overall status. In many cases, a strong English department pulls up the overall status of the university. In the University of Alberta’s case, EFS is the canary in the coal mine.

Instead of reinvesting in faculty for what has historically been one of its most prestigious departments, the University has been clawing back the “lines” of funding from the ever-shrinking EFS. Having permitted EFS to plummet, the administration has made it possible for the current government to devalue the institution as a whole and subject it to cuts that are kicking the legs out from under it. The Board of Governors and the senior administration have forgotten the essential point—that faculty are the University’s most important asset.

The Provost has now asked the Dean of Arts to give him a list of priorities for hiring across departments in the Faculty. EFS has been told that it can put forward only one priority. This shows how little the senior administration understands of the devastation that has been done, and the extent of the price about to be paid by the University as a whole if it does not right the ship.

How in the face of such massive faculty attrition does EFS establish a single priority? Wonderfully for us, we have gained more than one Indigenous faculty member over the last few years. But the losses have been stacking up far faster, and we cannot possibly have only one priority for new hires.

In this case, however, EFS has one truly urgent need. As of this Fall, I will be the only member of the department whose specialization is in literature before 1600.

In other words, we no longer have someone whose research covers at least some part of the literature of England across a period that spans several centuries. No serious department of English lacks a medievalist. Strong English departments have more than one—you don’t leave a period of several centuries to one scholar! And most prestigious English departments have several people whose research specialization is in early modern literature—the period of English literature’s great blossoming during the reign of Elizabeth I.

Here’s a visual snapshot of the current predicament of the Department of English and Film Studies relative to the faculty complement at other top-ranking Canadian universities and a few of the ten Asian universities that now rank ahead of us. The tale from the top 3 English departments in Canada—which continue to reside in the terrain where we used to rank—tells a lot of the story. But the Asian universities that we used to greatly outrank tell us a lot, too. Imagine what the effects are going to be across the next several years, in the wake of the Kenney cuts. (As I’ve said before, no government of the day should be free to destroy an institution meant to serve generation after generation.)

Will the Department get the new faculty members it needs to maintain the quality of its academic programming and its reputation for teaching and research? Or is the senior administration going to continue to leave EFS to its immiseration?

Let’s remember, please, that literature is our principal means for imagining, in narrative fiction, poetry, and drama, what it is to be human. But for those for whom that is not enough by way of suasion, let me suggest that without a robustly sustained department of English the University of Alberta risks becoming a mere simulacrum of a university. As it stands, it appears that we need to be learning lessons from institutions such as the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore.