Letter on Behalf of the Chairs of the Faculty of Arts

March 26, 2012

Dear President Axworthy,

I write on behalf of all Arts Faculty Chairs to express our concern about the current financial plan which cuts the Arts Faculty budget so as place in jeopardy several tenure-track hires underway, some conversions from limited-term to tenure-track positions, and stipends. At Wednesday’s Senate you indicated that the current budget was not final, so we offer the following suggestion.

We unanimously urge you to immediately add sufficient funds to the Arts Faculty budget for 2012-2013 to cover all hitherto in-process tenure track searches/appointments, all limited-term conversions, and the full requested stipendiary budget.

We write out of concern for the entire University community and the Winnipeg and Manitoba communities at large. The intellectually impoverishing effects of the current plan will be felt beyond our Faculty. The proposed cuts risk the University’s ability to deliver an excellent, broadly based curriculum, to continue to foster superb research, to serve our communities, and to work to transform the University in keeping with our reputation as progressive innovators. Further, we foresee long-term damage to the quality of faculty we attract when we continue a pattern of stipendiary or term replacements for tenured faculty, late hiring competitions, and rescinding hires at the last minute.

As the largest faculty, Arts is the backbone of the University of Winnipeg. Our excellence is locally, nationally, and internationally recognised. That reputation is neither directly nor solely based on how many students individual departments and units attract. For example, our justifiably famous Department of Theatre and Film is by no means the largest in numbers of faculty or students. Indeed, at the last Senate we approved the BFA in Theatre, which will serve only a small group of students. The decision to proceed with that program was clearly based upon its excellence, rather than on student numbers and direct revenue.

We know that counting numbers of students or majors in any department is at best the bluntest of instruments by which to gauge impact and value. To give one example, the department of Women’s and Gender Studies offers numerous courses that are cross listed with other departments and with the Graduate program in Cultural Studies. Though there is a formula for calculating who is credited with those student numbers, there is no way to quantify the value of having folks from a number of different backgrounds working together in the same classroom, or the challenges and rewards of teaching interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary courses. It is our responsibility to offer our students a diversity of approaches, methods, languages, and other skills, as they study the arts and prepare to participate fully in society.

Should you ask where the funds might be found to cover the expenses we request, we answer that at Senate on Wednesday a number of excellent suggestions were proffered and Chairs offered to participate in further consultations on this question.  There and in various other statements, you asserted your vision of the source of the University’s financial concerns. You must understand that substantial numbers of students, staff, and faculty see the growth of Administration as an additional problem; several years ago I noted an increase of over 50% in the actual number of administrators. We now have more Vice-Presidents, Associate Vice-Presidents, Deans, Associate Deans, and Executive Directors than at any time in the institution’s history. We suggest that you look within your own Administration and set a goal to immediately halt and ultimately scale back this growth.

We would like to point out that transparency in budgeting on the Administrative side of the University might go a long way toward improving the relationship between the University and its students, staff, and faculty. We urge you to open the books on the specifics of Administrative hiring and spending over the past several years.  Without any wish to second-guess previous decision-making, we believe such openness would help students, staff, and faculty to understand the situation. Some are willing to assist in suggesting where more appropriate budgeting decisions might be made.

Finally, we also offer our sincere support in your continued efforts to address problems with the provincial funding formula and welcome your suggestions for our participation in this initiative.

Yours truly,

Pauline Greenhill, on behalf of Faculty of Arts Chairs

cc.:  John Corlett, Vice-President Academic; Glenn Moulaison, Acting Dean of Arts; Pauline Pearson, UWFA President; Arts Chairs

Letter from Sociology Chair Kirsten Kramar

Letter from Women's and Gender Studies Chair Pauline Greenhill

March 19, 2012

Dear President Axworthy,

I am writing on behalf of all the tenured faculty in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies to express my concern at the University’s plan not to convert the limited term appointment in German Studies to a tenure-stream position. 

Women’s and Gender Studies has no direct stake in this appointment.  We write to you out of concern for the entire University.  The effects will be felt not only in the Faculty of Arts.  This move places German Studies in severe jeopardy.  It also halts its current plan to transform their curriculum to best serve the needs of all of the University of Winnipeg community and the Winnipeg and Manitoba community at large. 

Over the last few years, we understand that German Studies has moved into developing curriculum that supports our interdisciplinary Linguistics programme, which, I would point out, directly assists student who wish to enter the fields of speech therapy and practical speech communication.  German Studies faculty, including Dr. Kristin Lovrien-Meuwese, whose appointment we urge you to convert, are also working towards developing course work that will support a teachable area in Education.

We also understand that Dr. Linda Dietrick, currently the only tenure stream faculty member in German, plans to retire in the next few years.  Dr. Lovrien-Meuwese’s position will ensure a smooth transition to the continuation of German Studies at the University of Winnipeg.

We know we need not point out to you the significance of German as a significant heritage language of culturally diverse groups of settler populations in Manitoba.  Speaking personally, as someone who has recently conducted research on a traditional practice of Mennonite Manitobans, the New Year’s mumming brommtopp, I am perhaps more aware than many of the significance of German and Low German language and culture, which I understand is also a research area for Dr. Lovrien-Meuwese.  I should also add that my most recent SSHRC-funded research grant, the largest Standard Research Grant ever received by a faculty member at our University, involves significant work with fairy tales, which are perhaps best known in the Germanic tradition in the work of the Grimms.  One of my colleagues on that research program, Jack Zipes, Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota, an internationally renowned expert on fairy tales, is a former Germanic languages department chair, and I have copied him on this correspondence.

We strongly urge you to reconsider your decision not to convert the limited term appointment in German Studies to tenure track.  Indeed, the Women’s and Gender Studies tenured faculty members unanimously recommend that the position be converted.  Please do not hesitate to contact me should you have any questions or wish to discuss this further.

Yours truly,

Pauline Greenhill,

on behalf of Women’s and Gender Studies Department

cc.:  John Corlett, Vice-President Academic; Linda Dietrick, German Studies; Glenn Moulaison, Dean; WGS Faculty; Jack Zipes, Emeritus, University of Minnesota

Letter from Modern Languages & Literatures Chair Linda Dietrick

Dear friends and colleagues,

The German program at the University of Winnipeg is in danger.

On Friday, March 9, 2012, I was informed by Acting Dean Glenn Moulaison that the limited-term appointment of my only full-time colleague in German, Dr. Kristin Lovrien-Meuwese, will not be converted to a tenure-stream position, as we had recommended.

This is a very unexpected setback, because I agreed last year to serve as chair of Modern Languages & Literatures on the assumption that she would be there to compensate for my reduced teaching load and, eventually, to carry on the program. Dr. Moulaison said that the decision was based not on performance but on financial considerations. I was told that the recom­mendations of our personnel committee and the Acting Dean were overruled by senior administration because, in the language of the Collective Agreement, they did not agree that there was a need for this hire.

On behalf of the department, I’ve just written to the President, Dr. Lloyd Axworthy, to express our dismay over this decision, to point to the implications, and to propose a plan to preserve the German Studies program.

As I indicated to Dr. Axworthy, we are shocked at the way our colleage has been treated by the University. She has spent the last three years teaching up to four full courses a year for us and serving as the mainstay of our German language program, introducing exciting new methodologies in our courses and organizing extra-curricular activities. Her students love her and make remarkable progress with their German skills. As an applied linguist, Dr. Lovrien-Meuwese was a perfect fit with our revamped German curriculum, which emphasizes language, linguistics and culture. Plans were underway for her to offer a course for the Education Faculty on the teaching of German, and to develop a course in Applied Linguistics for the Interdisciplinary Linguistics program. She was moving forward with a fascinating research project on the German language in Manitoba, notably Mennonite Low German, which is spoken by a growing population of newcomers in our province. She was helping Mennonite Studies design a course in Low German. All of this dedication and momentum is now cut short and dismissed. As a department, we have greatly valued Dr. Lovrien’s collegial contributions, and we are appalled that the University values them so little.

Of course, there are wider implications. The German program is now endangered. In the past, after the departure of a previous colleague, André Oberlé, I was able to offer our basic German program (3-year BA and combined major) as the sole tenured professor with the help of contract academic staff, by teaching advanced students on overload or in courses cross-listed with History and English. I could do this again if I stepped down as chair or, with a little more help, while continuing to serve. With the reduction in the number of faculty in the department, my teaching load as chair increases anyway.

The more troubling problem is that I am planning to retire in the next two to four years, and Dr. Lovrien-Meuwese was supposed to continue the German program. Although no one has either confirmed or denied that the program is slated for closure when I retire, it is very difficult not to draw that conclusion. I have asked both the Acting Dean and Vice President Academic John Corlett if there will be resources available to hire someone to replace me. They have said that they do not know at this point.

I take that as reason for some hope. I am now writing to everyone who may be concerned - students, colleagues at the Univ. of Winnipeg and at other universities, German teachers, donors, the German-Canadian community, and the scholarly and professional organizations. As I told Dr. Axworthy, I see it as my responsibility to let everyone concerned know that the University of Winnipeg German program is in danger of being closed, perhaps as early as two years from now, and to ask them to write to him if they don’t want that to happen.

German has been offered continuously at the University of Winnipeg and its predecessor colleges for 130 years. Closing down a venerable but small Arts program like ours may seem like an easy source of money, but I think it would truly diminish the University. That is very worrisome to all of us in the Arts.

I have not asked Dr. Axworthy and senior administration to increase our complement of German Studies faculty, but simply to hold the line: one. If there is a certain student-to-faculty ratio that would make an appointment viable, we would be glad to hear what it is, so that we can strive to meet it by, for example, re-designing courses or offering more cross-listed ones. I pointed out that when I retire, my salary will become available to use for a hire, and of course there are always savings when you replace a retiree with a junior faculty member.

I urged him not to close the German Studies program, but to plan for a replacement appointment when I retire, and to give Dr. Lovrien-Meuwese, a highly qualified candidate for such an appointment, the opportunity to apply.

If you are willing to write in support of this, I would be very grateful. I would suggest that you do the following:

1) Please send a courteous letter to Dr. Axworthy. I think a printed letter may receive more attention. You may wish to keep in mind that he is a former Minister of External Affairs who is familiar with the role Germany plays in world affairs:

Dr. Lloyd Axworthy, President and Vice-Chancellor

University of Winnipeg

515 Portage Avenue

Winnipeg  MB  R3B 2E9

2) Please send an electronic copy of your letter to Dr. Glenn Moulaison (Acting Dean of Arts), to Dr. John Corlett (Vice President Acad.), and to me, at the following e-mail addresses. I suggest you use the following subject line: Please keep German.

g.moulaison@uwinnipeg.ca

j.corlett@uwinnipeg.ca

l.dietrick@uwinnipeg.ca

With many thanks in advance for your support,

Dr. Linda Dietrick Dept. Chair and Assoc. Prof. of German Studies Modern Languages & Literatures University of Winnipeg