Last Friday morning (Good Friday), CBC Edmonton published a story confirming that the University of Alberta “is looking” to lease out the Humanities Centre or possibly demolish it. The schedule for this decision is uncertain. But the University claims that it is likely to choose one or the other of these courses of action, which will “remove” the building from the University’s “inventory,” as part of an “asset management strategy” that “aligns with” the “evolving research, teaching and learning needs of our community.”
That is quite a statement. The implication is that the University is “evolving” away from its commitment to research, teaching, and learning in the Humanities.
The Humanities Centre, built between 1971 and 1973, houses 31 classrooms (including seminar rooms), along with the Arts Undergraduate Student Services office, the Parkland Institute, and the Department of English and Film Studies.
For English and Film Studies, the University’s intention to “evolve” away from its commitment to the Humanities has been clear for almost a decade. After Alison Redford’s Progressive Conservative government cut Alberta postsecondary education by $147M in its spring 2013 budget, eight faculty members in EFS chose to take the voluntary severance buy-out offered by Indira Samarasekera’s administration. With these departures, the department lost what are known as “lines” — budgetary commitments to a professorial salary for a faculty member’s career. These “lines” have never been recovered, and each year since the department has lost at least one more faculty member. The department is now a shadow of its former self. This last year, the senior administration refused to permit the department to hire a medievalist. This means we have no one who does research and teaches in a period that crosses several centuries of English literature and world culture.
Every department in Arts can tell a similar story. EFS’s story is, however, distinctive, for in 2014, with the effects of the Redford cuts still waiting to be felt, the department ranked #22 in the world in the QS rankings. With the senior administration’s refusal to reinvest in the department, the department is now lumped in the 100–150 range in the latest QS rankings. The University as a whole has now slipped out of the top 100 worldwide, and is no longer ranked in the top 5 universities in Canada.*
Our “evolution” away from being a top 100 institution worldwide has been greatly accelerated by the program of vicious cuts to which the Kenney government has been subjecting the University. Totaling hundreds of millions of dollars across multiple years, these cuts have not only put the Redford government’s cuts in the shade, they have precipitated an existential crisis for the university. The Flanagan administration denies this. In Orwellian language President Flanagan has persistently characterized the cuts as an “opportunity.” The only people who believe this (or pretend to) are the members of the senior administration and the board of governors.
The Flanagan cuts-as-opportunity “vision” involves imposing exceptional tuition increases on students. It also depends on the idea that the University will generate increased revenues by admitting 10,000 students more a year by 2025.
The question everyone should be asking, is, how, exactly, does the scheme of “removing” the Humanities Centre from the University’s “inventory” fit into this “vision”?
How can it possibly make sense to dump overboard the very kind of infrastructure that the University needs to offer instruction to its current student body of over 30,000 undergraduates plus an additional 10,000 students a year by 2025?
The willingness to treat as disposable the distinctive classrooms in the Humanities Centre — exactly the kind of classroom required for instruction in the Humanities — is, I suggest, its own answer. 
The senior administration is treating a certain kind of instruction as disposable, and possibly certain disciplines and/or departments, as the Facebook post to the right (by a colleague elsewhere in Arts) suggests.
If the University is really going to lease out or demolish the Humanities Centre sometime in the near future, does the board intend to construct a new building for the teaching of humanities courses by 2025?
Does the board intend to hire faculty members to correct for the faculty attrition that is devastating not just English and Film Studies but other departments?
Does the board understand the importance of the humanities to a world-class research university?
The University is “evolving” to what, exactly, in terms of its curriculum and its learning environment?
The humanities are not a luxury. They are an essential driver of any research university’s achievement of the academic mission. A world-class research university is not simply a cluster of professional schools, and the University of Alberta must not simply be a place for the development of “tech talent.” This generation of Albertans deserves much, much better than the current government and board of governors are doling out.
* Times Higher Education rankings, 2022:
Arts Squared 
Inhabitants of Tory (the social sciences) might be wise to consider the fate of the Humanities Centre as foretelling their own. Apparently the serious plan, going forward, is to have ONE floor of our 15 floor building staffed on a full-time basis. We used to have staffed department offices on approximately every other floor: places where students could ask questions, drop off papers, pick up papers, where the hubs and the hearts of departments for faculty and students alike were located. It’s already been a nightmare doing the most ordinary things (returning student work, for example) without these offices up and running but we all sort of lumped along on the premise that it was a covid-associated state of affairs. Nope! This is now to be the New Normal. It’s so obviously unworkable that it feels like it can’t be a simple mix up (“why didn’t you tell us that university students turn in work and also get feedback on it? whoopsie!”). It feels like it is intended to create conditions for the shuttering of the social sciences (along with the humanities) at the University.