And Another Thing... A Rant

By Andy Park, Biology

There’s an old saying about changing what you can, but having the grace to accept the things that you cannot.  Fair enough. But that’s no reason not to have a good old therapeutic rant about some of those (apparently) unchangeable but annoying aspects of university life.

In the wake of our recent near-strike experience, however, a bit of blue sky thinking may also be in order. Of course, our administration is not immune to blue sky thinking.  Consider the recent Academic Renewal Exercise (remember that?), which established strategic goals across the University of Winnipeg.  There was tons of stuff in there about increasing diversity, maintaining our (presumptively) high teaching standards, encouraging non-traditional students, and community learning (whatever that is). 

What was absent was any indication about how these objectives would be realized. Blue sky thinking has to be followed up with concrete, realizable actions. Contrast my home department, Biology, for example.  Here, our concerns tend to revolve around maintaining program commitments in the face of retirements, coping with non-traditional students (many of whom may be woefully unprepared for university), and dealing with pressure to increase course caps.  Not a lot of blue sky there. In fact, there seems to be a clear disconnect between our ambitions (many of which are not “ours” as such, but have come from elsewhere) and the means to achieve them.

So what should we do to match ambitions and resources more closely?  Here are a few of my thoughts, which have nothing to do with any policy, real or implied, that may emanate from the Biology Department:

1. We have “broadened our standards” of admission, but what about attracting the very best students?  The super-bright also add to our diversity and enhance the university’s reputation, as well as raising the bar for other students.

2. Professors and instructors need pedagogical support to deal with underprepared and educationally challenged students. These students are admitted under permissive standards, and once admitted some struggle.  (See CBC’s Sunday Edition for Sunday April 9, 2011 (http://www.cbc.ca/thesundayedition/), in which award-winning University of Toronto English Professor Nick Mount addresses exactly this issue of the explosion in the student population.)

3. To assure academic excellence, we need to shake up our teaching.  It isn’t enough to just tell ourselves that we are good at teaching (which we did quite a lot of in the Academic Renewal meetings), when we may really only be leveraging the advantages of small classes.  All over Canada, universities are taking advantage of educational research to reform teaching practices – we should learn from these examples.

4. Of course, to reform teaching we need help and time.  I have missed numerous teaching workshops because I was either double-booked with committee work, catching up on lecture prep, or other such activities.  Maybe we need more free slots to pursue professional development.

5. Institute a university-wide written English test after the pattern of the University of Waterloo. When Waterloo started their standard test they were shocked at the results – and not in a nice way.  About 30 percent failed, and those included Canadian-born students.  Let’s institute the test – if we dare!

6. If “you” really matter most at “You of W”, then why does it take our students so long to graduate?  A lot of students may never finish. I know that there are quite a few part-time students, but that does not explain the poor return rates of first-year students.  Shouldn’t we be concerned and try to do something about these problems?

7. And while we are at it, why have we so little idea of what the fate of our graduates is after they leave?  At the very least, you would think that we would dedicate a qualified university employee to tracking the fate of a selection of graduates. Otherwise the often-repeated axioms about the value of university education (versus the alternatives) hold little water.

I’ve realized that I could go on and on all day, but I think you get the point.  There are many things that we could do better (that’s the blue sky for you), but for the most part we seem not to be dedicating the time or personnel to making sure that we do so.  To sum up my blue sky thinking: universities excel at generating knowledge and ideas, so shouldn’t we use those capacities to improve the way we do things?