Having served on faculty for 37 years, I feel privileged in encountering so many fine students along the way. The relationships forged with these young people endure as the best part of being a professor. Beginning a career with (now Globe and Mail columnist) Jeffrey Simpson and ending it with his daughter Danielle sums up how good students can be.
Yet we are not perfect—not the Harvard of the North, not even the State University of Albany of the North. We (royal We) are Queen’s, a fine university as things stand.
But what to do to make a fine university better? Here are several modest proposals:
The University has become too specialized, increasingly focused on faculty grantsmanship, and more than ever in thrall to corporate sources of fiscal support. Accompanying this privatization, we behold the meta-static spread of administration, which tends not to facilitate community but to intensify feelings of isolation and alienation. We need to admit these things and address them.
A major concern in the arts and science curriculum is the number of courses students must take to graduate. Too often, their experience becomes, first, an invitation to specialization at an early stage, then existence on a treadmill writing paper after paper, running like a gerbil on a flywheel. Too often, TAs and the profs who do read the papers read them haphazardly.
We need fewer courses for the graduation requirement, to give students and professors more of a chance to reflect and actually think about what they are doing and why they are doing it. Sixteen courses would suffice for graduation.
Canada Research Chairs (CRC) at both tiers suck resources not just from government, but also from faculty sources. All CRCs should teach a course in their specialty every two years, to a group of 20 outstanding frosh who would sign up or be assigned to these high-powered seminars. Research, after all, should inform teaching. And we need help in the first year.
ALL frosh will have to pass an exam in written English before taking upper-year courses in arts and science, commerce, applied science—anything. The writing of sinewy prose remains the University’s prime goal.
One should also reinstitute breadth requirements for the first two years, with the humble goal, among others, of teaching engineering students to read and write, commerce students to think about something besides taking money out of other people’s pockets, and arts and science students to think across the “two cultures.”
To enhance the campus, why merely beautify University Avenue? Why not close both University and Union (from Barrie to Albert) and create a real campus? There’d be room to do some real beautification, as well as to get more cars off campus. More trees? A pond or two? The corner of University and Union imperils all pedestrians.
All first and second-year students should perform a chosen area of volunteering, if only to keep streets free of detritus. There are numerous programs possible to improve town- gown relations. Students and landlords should sign a social contract, with both groups being held to higher standards of behaviour than they are today.
Landlords should be hands on, and helpful. Students should show more respect for property. Courses in pharmacology might be introduced in responsible student drinking—duh. Perhaps jail terms for miscreants on both sides of the equation might help. Perhaps the worst landlords should have to eat their cockroaches, not just receive awards.
Queen’s should strengthen its athletic programs, transforming non-spectator sports to club sports, and with the admissions office finally realizing that each of the competitive big teams requires more support than it currently receives. Each coach should have, with the blessing of admissions, the ability to admit five student-athletes whose marks are insufficiently stratospheric, but promising. And there should be a modest scholarship program and academic support infrastructure to facilitate the new initiative.
Finally, I’d like to see staff and TAs unionized, to bring some balance to human resource relations here. These groups need protection from fiscal whim and uncertainty. And get rid of the annual Faculty Merit awards, which at present is a time-wasting, aggravating, and ultimately useless task. And let admin and professoriate alike check their attitudes toward academic politics, most of which are also needless. Indeed, vanity bonfires burn most heatedly when nothing but ego is at stake.
—Geoff Smith is a retired professor who taught history, sport sociology and health studies at Queen’s for 37 years.
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