The University as One Might Like It

By Peter Ives, UWFA Member-at-Large

In his recent book, Love the Questions: University Education and Enlightenment, Ian Angus defines the university as “an institution of thought” with its core resting in “the seminar room with its interchange between younger, beginning thinkers and one or more older, experienced ones.  This encounter is not an exchange of information (which produces nothing new) but precisely an encounter, an event” (pp.19-21). 

While Angus’ important analysis is very critical of recent trends towards the corporate university, he notes that the public university of the welfare state also failed to live up to this ideal.

Over the last few years, we at the University of Winnipeg have grown used to a very different notion of the core of the university being Arts and Science. We are repeatedly assured that this will not be threatened by newer programmes such as those of the Global College, the new Faculty of Business and Economics, and the new Graduate Programmes that we have developed.  Our Academic Plan represents this with a diagram of circles, where these newer programmes are placed on the edge of the core of Arts and Science and a caption that ensures us these new programmes have helped strengthen this core.  I think many of us have wondered about the veracity of this claim and it seems to me questionable how we would go about determining this.  But there is a growing sense that there is an imbalance in the allocation of resources and we experience our own sense of the core of this university being diminished as our classes grow larger, our classrooms deteriorate, and it becomes less clear the retiring faculty members will be replaced. 

Of course, none of us here sees our work as belonging to a static core that is to remain unchanged.  Instead, whether at the smaller level of developing new classroom techniques or material, or the larger level of new programmes, we are constantly adapting to our changing worlds and those of our students.  It seems to me that Ian Angus’ reflections on the core of the university as an institution of thought and relations among thinkers have something to add to our circumstances.

The University as One Might Like it is an ongoing column featuring short submissions from faculty members on the University as they would like to see it. If you’d like to submit your idea of what the University should be, contact Tracy Whalen at t.whalen@uwinnipeg.ca.