As many around me are doubtless aware, the accessibility of ideas (and particularly of philosophical ideas) is an important topic to me. This interest began when I first read Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, also published under the title Magister Ludi, which explores a fictional world in which the academy is entirely segregated from, but still supported by, the community at large. My fear is that this story is less and less fictional with every passing moment. In Canada, university researchers have a responsibility to the public, as it is they who fund the institutions that support our research. We academics are chosen as the researchers of the people, to represent them and their interests in our intellectual forays. Sadly, it feels like the people who support our research are being snubbed. We thumb our noses at the public when we neglect to publish our research in forms accessible to that very public.
In the spirit of opening up the academic world to the populace at large, I will now present a short report on the 2012 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. For those not in the know (and I myself was one of them up until I started my doctorate two years ago), Congress is an annual gathering at which all of the Canadian societies and associations of the humanities and social sciences hold their yearly meetings. All of these meetings take place over the course of about a week or ten days, and all at the same location. Last year, Congress took place in Fredericton, New Brunswick at UNB and St Thomas University. This year, it was at the University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier University, in the Kitchener–Waterloo region of Southern Ontario. Obviously, Congress is a pretty big affair, considering that in each of the last two years, it has taken two universities to host this intellectual love-in.
And a love-in it truly was, verging on self-congratulation. The first address that I went to see was one of the Think Big lectures, offered in this instance by the Governor General of Canada, David Johnston. I must admit that I don't know most of what the GG said: his first remark was so utterly flooring that I had trouble following him on any of his later points. I could barely believe that he opened his address by claiming that it is currently the best time in history to be a scholar in Canada. I spent most of the rest of the talk thinking about who exactly he was referring to when he used the word "scholar."
Perhaps he was referring to undergraduate students. Surely that couldn't be the case, thought I: the value of an undergraduate education in the job market these days, particularly of degrees in the arts, is laughable. Everyone's got one, so the value of it is severely decreased. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. Some, myself included, would say that the value of education far exceeds its economic importance, and that a good education is valuable even if significantly better job prospects don't come of it. However, that value relies on the education itself being of good quality, and that is far from the case these days. I have been a teaching assistant for the last two years, and have been nothing short of appalled by the inferior quality of work submitted to me. People are completing undergraduate degrees without the skills necessary for any measure of critical reflection. They don't know how to process what they read, they can't think through arguments, and have trouble expressing themselves coherently in written form. One student in my first semester was nearly illiterate. Orally, they actually fare alright, from the very little that I've seen of oral presentation.
Undergrads are not getting a significant benefit on the job market; they aren't getting a significant intellectual benefit; they don't seem to be getting much of anything. Except for debt, of course. Especially shocking was that the Gov. Gen. had the gall to make this remark while the streets of Montreal seethe in anger over a proposed tuition increase that prompted students to strike for three months (and counting). It is less and less feasible to finance one's own education, and those who do so mostly incur massive debts. And the government's response to a lack of funding in the education system is simply to inject more money by raising tuition rather than to even countenance the possibility that perhaps the money it currently spends might be mismanaged. Undergraduate education is becoming more and more difficult to justify as education quality plummets, expected debt loads for graduates become greater and greater, and the job opportunities necessary to repay such debts are conspicuously absent. Clearly Johnston couldn't have been referring to the undergrads when he spoke of the Prime Time to be a scholar in Canada.
Perhaps he was referring to graduate students. But there again I had trouble seeing how this could be true. Yes, many graduate students receive funding, but the majority of funding agreements are contingent upon working as a teaching assistant in one's department. And once tuition fees are deducted from one's salary, basically all but the smallest handful of graduate students live below the poverty line in Canada, while working for what amount at the end of the day to be negligible wages. (I must say at this juncture, that I consider myself to be extremely lucky to be in the department that I am. The working conditions for graduate students in my department are significantly better than others of which I hear through the grapevine.) Graduate students also, for the most part, feel the economic pinch. And the quality of their education is dropping as well: graduate students are "fast-tracked," hustled through their programs as quickly as possible in order to comply with ever more draconian standards imposed upon them from administrators who run universities like businesses rather than like educational institutions. This hustling through has the undesirable end result of putting a whole bunch of doctors and masters out there (there's something undeniably poetic about those titles) who lack the intellectual breadth to engage with scholars across disciplinary divides or (Heaven forbid) with ever-less-educated general public. This breadth was a hallmark of graduate study in the days when comprehensive exams were par for the course. Such exams have at many institutions been deemed to time consuming, and accordingly eliminated.
Perhaps the Governor General was referring to young academics having it better than ever. Once more, I have trouble understanding how this could be true. There was a time when graduate students would finish their degrees and would reasonably believe that they had a good chance to find a steady tenure-track job. No more. Young academics finish graduate school, along with hordes of others, only to find themselves in a flooded market. It is not uncommon that even a school in a backwater town in The Middle of Nowhere will get 300-400 applicants for a single entry-level, tenure-track position. There are few such positions, and far too many candidates. As in many other job sectors, the belief was that the Baby Boomers would retire, and that this great wave would open the floodgates for young workers, chomping at the bit, to get their foot in the door in an entry-level position. However, as in other sectors, the financial squeeze in the last few years has prompted those same Boomers to hang on to their positions just a little bit longer. Furthermore, when these senior intellectuals have retired, universities have been so financially squeezed that they actually close the position rather than hiring a young up-and-comer to fill the void. As the market is so competitive, young academics are expected to have ungodly credentials: lists of publication as long as your arm (or longer, should you have short arms), unfathomable depths of teaching experience documented with reviews so glowing that one dare not look at them but from an oblique angle, and so on. Clearly, the Gov. Gen was not talking about young academics then either, as they have a pretty tough lot and very long odds of even being able to continue their research (professionally) after graduate school.
I can only then conclude that the Governor General was referring to established, tenured academics. They live quite comfortably, the majority making salaries with six figures (eight, if you include decimal places; otherwise I'd be in that category, too!), and already enjoying the stability in their employment to carry out the scholarly research that which interests them. Yes, perhaps it's true that there has never been a time in Canadian history when it has been better to be a scholar of this ilk, being able to thumb one's nose liberally at all those on the lower rungs of the ladder, which my own Governor General did to me as I sat flabbergasted by the audacity he showed in publicly announcing the present Hey Day of Canadian Scholarship.
(Here endeth the first part of my informal report. I hadn't intended to break this into parts; but then again I also hadn't counted on having so much to say on this first topic. Stay tuned for more.)
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