A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a finance and governance experiment at Concordia. Today I want to talk about one that caught some headlines over the summer; namely, the re-organization of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Waterloo.
The full details of the re-organization can be found here, but the basics of it are that where the Faculty used to have fifteen departments and two “schools”, it will now just have six schools. That sounds like a lot of change, but it both is and isn’t. The two existing schools – Finance/Accounting and the School of Interaction Design in Business located in Stratford, 45kms away from the main campus – aren’t changing at all (arguably neither of these two are really “Arts” and their attachment to the Faculty is just a by-product of Waterloo never having bothered to open a Business school). Two more of the new schools – Economics and Psychology, the faculty’s two largest departments – are simply being re-named. The big action is happening in the other two new schools, where many former departments are being mushed together: a “School of Critical and Creative Humanities” (Communications, English, French, German & Slavic Students, Spanish & Latin American studies, Theatre, and Fine Arts) and a “School of Social, Political and Historical Research” (Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science, Philosophy, History & Classics).
Whew.
There are broadly two sets of outcomes that one might normally expect from a re-organization of this nature, one academic and one administrative. On the academic side, universities often like to justify academic merger and re-orgs as an example of “breaking down disciplinary silos”, and, in theory, opening the door to all sorts of creative new inter-disciplinary programmatic endeavors. And, on the administrative side, universities tend to wink at the idea that fewer units = greater efficiency = fewer non-academic staff.
I am fairly sure that neither of these outcomes is likely to be the case here. For one thing, the university has been fairly clear in stating there will be no job losses associated with the changeover, so that’s not an issue. For another these groupings…well, they don’t really put the disciplines together in any kind of creative way that might foster real interdisciplinarity. In fact, quite the opposite. They mostly tend to bunch together disciplines which are already pretty close together (well, maybe not PoliSci and Classics, but Classics had to go somewhere, so…).
So, if the merger isn’t going to do the things people think it will do, does that make it a failure? No, not at all. Because it has a bunch of other, smaller benefits that make it worthwhile.
Let’s start with the non-academic side. I would argue that one of the biggest impediments to administrative efficiency in universities is the fact that, in practice, it runs as several dozen tiny little independent units called “departments”. The downside of this is not so much that it creates a larger-than-necessary staff requirement and wage bill, it’s that it creates a larger-than-necessary staff requirement and wage bill which is both seriously inflexibleand under-skilled. Someone’s out sick? Work doesn’t get done. On parental leave? Need to get a temp (which can take ages). Oh, and also – in tiny groups, a small number of people (sometimes a lone individual) are responsible for such a large number of very diverse tasks that they cannot possibly have expertise in all of them. The result: a lot of things which require expertise get done by part-timers.
But, if you push a whole bunch of departments together into a unit or school, instead of one person being responsible for all of finances, scheduling, services to students (including advising logistics), human resources and payroll, facilities liaison, etc. etc., you could have one person responsible for each of these things for a bigger unit. What a merger thus allows is greater efficiency and better service through specialization. Being a bigger unit also allows employees the option of shifting jobs without shifting units (and thus draining the unit of that person’s knowledge and expertise), not to mention allowing a pool of people to cover for someone in the event of short-term illness. Bigger units, in a word, result in both efficiency and resiliency. If it reduced payroll a bit, maybe that’s a plus, but the real gains are elsewhere.
On the academic side, the gains are more minimal but not zero – and I don’t mean just in this case but in pretty much every case that we see this. There are not going to be any groundbreaking new interdisciplinary programs as a result of this kind of merger. All the cool interdisciplinary stuff is happening between disciplines which are much further apart than the areas which have been merged together: medicine and engineering, say, or, in the age of AI, philosophy and computer science. The best you’re going to get out of these groupings, academically speaking, is probably a little bit more collaboration at the course level (classics and history profs guest teaching in poli sci classes on history of political thought, for instance). Not to say that those more innovative collaborations are made impossible by this kind of grouping – they aren’t. But this type of merger is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition to make them happen. They need additional and alternative encouragement.
Instead, the short-term benefits are probably with respect to things like space sharing and timetabling. The longer-term benefit – and I mean quite long term here – is that heads of schools can nudge disciplines to work more closely together through the power of hiring by selecting scholars who work at the intersections between fields. Not nothing, but not earthshaking either.
(There is another potential benefit which I think matters in particular for humanities, but which is not contemplated under these arrangements, and that is merging not just departments but actual degree programs. The reason humanities degrees are always being cut is because humanities is split into so many micro-disciplines that each individual program has trouble keeping enrolment at levels which make economic sense. Why not stop giving out dozens of different such degrees and instead just give out a BA in Humanities? That’s always going to meet minimum enrolment rules at a program level, though meeting minimum class size requirements might still be a problem. I know that won’t happen, because everyone’s disciplinary amour propre gets in the way. But it’s an option, should anyone wish to use it.)
Now you might think, after reading all that: why bother? Why go through all of this if so little changes? Well, to quote the Italian author Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, sometimes “se vogliamo che tutto rimanga com’è, bisogna che tutto cambi.” (If we want things to stay as they are, everything must change”). Higher education is in a tough place right now. We do need to reimagine the way things get done, while at the same time doing our best to stay true to what’s best about universities. Is this attempt by Waterloo the best way to do it? Maybe, maybe not. Time will tell. But at least it’s an ambitious attempt to reimagine the way educational programs are organized. We need many more experiments like this to help the sector as a whole to understand the possibilities and limitations of these kinds of approaches. That’s not easy to do in a sector as attitudinally conservative as higher education (and specifically, the humanities), and so however this turns out, I think Waterloo Arts deserves a tip of the cap.
