Enough is enough

A major side effect of the emasculation of the post-secondary education system in this country is that the benevolence of the alumni is not simply sprucing up university campuses, it is shaping the very nature of academe.

I had the misfortune to attend York University a few years back and lived through the utter funding vacuum which is the faculties which one might describe as those providing a liberal education -- fine arts, social sciences, humanities... While I did not find a single (and I looked everywhere but the law school and the business school) comfortable chair or couch (and I simply mean one worth sitting in) to curl up in to read/study I did get to watch as several new buildings went up -- all but one for the business school (the other was for computer science -- a close cousin of business administrations in this discussion).

York is starving for cash. You see it in the huge classes for even senior courses (30 or 40 people in a senior level English class!! -- forget about the 500 in the junior level English classes) and you see it in professors now being called course leaders and teaching one hour a week of the course, while the other three hours a week are assigned to a grad student in a tutorial.

So it pained me, as it did when I was at Western and as it did when I was at U of Calgary (both at the time not suffering particular cash grabs by their provincial overseers yet, but still the philosophy was there and swinging against them) to see capital expenditure almost exclusively used to build towers and lecture theatres for the business schools. All named after the men who made the construction possible with their largesse, their wanting to give back to their schools.

BUT imagine, if you will, the improved state of post-secondary education in this country (and it is a mess, really, unless we're content with university degrees simply being the new requirement to go off and get a job; that is universities become solely trade schools -- where one goes to university to "become something" -- "what will you be when you graduate," my mother asks every time I attend a university. Better read, I like to say to piss off my brothers.

But I digress. Imagine, if you will if the names Haskayne, Schulich, Rotman, Ivey were placed not in front of "School of Business" but "Chair of Medieval Studies," or "Centre for Research into English Literature."

Yes, yes, I know those names fund more than business schools but not really on campuses in as significant way as they do building business schools.

I was set off on this rant by the fact that a very, very large development to the west of the Eaton Centre on Dundas Street (which I had the impression was to be a new condo and hotel development) turns out to be the new home of Ryerson's School of Business. Sigh.

Don't get me wrong. Nothing wrong with studying business in a university, but the curriculum in most business programs (as it is, say, with graduate schools of law -- no matter how much those schools scream otherwise) is about developing a trade. Learning how to be business practitioner rather than critically looking at the nature of the beast itself. Little is about studying business academically, viewing the discipline with a critical eye -- if you want proof of that check the last time you heard much fundamental or systematic criticism of Bay Street from a Rotman professor? The peer-reviewed business journals that come out of the major business schools are how-to manuals.

Ah, but I gotta give it up. My head hurts and the brick wall is getting bloodied. My last degree, the majority of my fellow students were there not to read a thing, or challenge or discover in what they read, but to finish so they could get a job. And to a number, every time a dispute arose in a class about teaching, curriculum or the like, the argument inevitably turned to "Hey, I'm paying for this, and I want good customer service and value for my dollar..." I, on more than one occasion, heard the following from student to professor: "I pay your salary so..."

I'm done now.