In keeping with past practice, the blog this week presents the speaking notes from my annual address to FASS faculty and staff, delivered on the afternoon of Friday January 17th:<\/p>\n
Annually at this time of year I attempt to polish my crystal ball and look at what lies in store for the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences in the year ahead.<\/p>\n
It is always easier to begin with the known, as opposed to contemplating the unknown, so I shall start by mentioning that in the last few months we have welcomed an impressive number of new faculty members, including four who began in the last month; and we already have some five appointed to begin next July 1st<\/sup>, with another half dozen searches currently still in progress.\u00a0 And if you think that this represents some sort of \u201cbusiness as usual\u201d for universities in the second decade of the 21st<\/sup> century, please think again.\u00a0 Or better still, just take a look at the size of the job listings section in University Affairs <\/i>or the CAUT Bulletin<\/i>. We are continuing to hire when others are not, and for that reason alone we are the envy of our colleagues elsewhere.<\/p>\n We also continue to enjoy an exceptionally rich intellectual life on our campus, witness the extraordinary number of visiting speakers, conferences, and various other events to which I seem to receive multiple invitations every day during the academic term. \u00a0And many of these involve some sort of community engagement beyond the walls of the university.\u00a0\u00a0 If we are looking for things which make Carleton distinctive, perhaps we need look no further than that.\u00a0 Of course the event with which I have been most closely engaged in recent months was the Power of the Arts National Forum, which we co-sponsored with the Micha\u00eblle Jean Foundation at the end of September.\u00a0 This certainly exceeded all expectation in terms of its size and quality, and I am pleased to announce that we shall be co-organizing and co-hosting the second Forum in early November 2014.\u00a0 This is one of many events and initiatives in the Faculty which have helped elevate our reputation on the national stage.\u00a0 Indeed, I hope you will agree with me that we can look back on 2013 with considerable pride.\u00a0<\/p>\n At the same time FASS has been working to increase its footprint in the greater Toronto area, which has provided most of our recent growth in student numbers.\u00a0 We sponsored a number of events in Toronto last year, aimed primarily but not exclusively at developing more of a community among our graduates , including some memorable evenings in partnership with the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Toronto International Film Festival, both of which happen to be managed by FASS alumni.\u00a0 And in May 2014 we shall be extending our CU in the City series of public lectures from Ottawa to Toronto, something that I hope will become a regular occurrence. I am very grateful to Tim Pychyl for agreeing to speak, and if you are in the Toronto area on Wednesday May 7th<\/sup> you are very warmly invited to attend. \u00a0<\/p>\n Nor are our current students being forgotten, and the range of opportunities available to them is also being expanded.\u00a0 I am particularly pleased with a number of initiatives, including the Virtual Carleton environment which has been developed for language courses, and also the growing program of courses taught off campus each year in the month of May.\u00a0 Last year we added courses in Ghana and Italy, and I had the most delightful personal experience of joining 22 Carleton students for a long day of site visits in Rome.\u00a0 In May 2014 we shall make our first forays into Mexico, Israel, and Rwanda.\u00a0 Another initiative this year has been the appointment of an artist-in-residence in the Music program, the wonderfully talented pianist Mauro Bertoli.\u00a0 And this has already borne fruit in a way that was completely unexpected.\u00a0 Just before Christmas one of our Advancement officers was contacted by someone who was so impressed by Mauro that they had decided to endow a scholarship in his name for a Carleton piano student.\u00a0 And if you happened to read my first blog of the New Year, you will also know of the $100,000 cheque which arrived from the Crabtree Foundation, to be used for \u201cvalue-added\u2019 initiatives at the dean\u2019s discretion.\u00a0 One of those will be the continuation of this musician-in-residence scheme for a second year, albeit with a different musician, and an announcement is forthcoming.<\/p>\n 2014 will to some extent be a year of substantial transition and uncertainty.\u00a0 There will be changes in the Dean\u2019s Office, with Richard Nimijean leaving on June 30th<\/sup> and Catherine Khordoc arriving on July 1st<\/sup>, and new chairs and directors have also been appointed, or are in the process of being appointed, for a number of the FASS units.\u00a0 And in terms of professional staff, we have already just witnessed the retirement of one of our most senior and experienced departmental administrators, Elsie Clement, and it seems that at least four more may follow in the current calendar year.\u00a0 So, there will be \u00a0lots of new faces.<\/p>\n Adding to the uncertainty is the fact that all our main employee groups are either currently in bargaining for new collective agreements or shortly about to be.\u00a0 It seems inevitable in such situations that tempers rise, and the rhetoric becomes more antagonistic.\u00a0 And of course who knows what the future holds for the provincial government, which controls something like 96% of our revenue, either directly through the grants per student, or indirectly through the regulation of tuition fees.\u00a0 But there is very little of that over which we have any direct ability to control, so the mission will be to minimize any potential damage to FASS, to the extent that this is possible.<\/p>\n Budget issues will continue to cause concern for universities across the country and around the globe, and I suspect that this will probably always be the case.\u00a0 There will never be enough money to offer the kind of educational experience that we see at Harvard or Cambridge, although even those universities have financial issues.\u00a0 In the end, we have little control on our revenues, except in terms of attempting to recruit more students \u2026 a two-edged sword!\u00a0 And thus what matters is how we manage the resources available to us.\u00a0 And we should remember that these are not inconsiderable.\u00a0 FASS operates with an annual base budget of roughly $42M, almost all of which is comprised of salaries.\u00a0 During the first term of my deanship, my goal was to get the faculty\u2019s finances under control, particularly with regard to tenured faculty positions that were not supported by a base budget.\u00a0 And in my second term, and particularly in the last few years, the focus has shifted to investment, both in terms of positions in areas of increased growth, but also in infrastructure \u2026 by which I mean the physical space which we occupy.\u00a0 The biggest project was of course the new Language Centre in St Pat\u2019s, but a number of units have received funding for alterations to their space, or for renovations, or for the acquisition of some new furniture.\u00a0 I was very pleased to attend the official launch of the new meeting\/lecture room in the Dept. of English last week, and a couple of other projects are currently in the works.\u00a0 These changes do make a difference, perhaps most significantly for our morale, and that of our students.<\/p>\n \u00a0For the coming budget cycle, which is to say the 2014-15 fiscal year, deans have been asked to plan for a base budget reduction of 2%, which for us is something north of $800,000 \u2026 roughly 10 faculty positions, assuming that there were 10 vacant and hence available to be eliminated, which of course there are not.\u00a0 At least Faculty deans have the possibility of receiving ELBA funds if enrollments rise, and if those increased student numbers are maintained, then a portion of those ELBA funds is converted to the base budget, and thus is available to be used for budget cuts.\u00a0 But the amount available to FASS this year has been set at $186,000, and thus won\u2019t go very far if the full 2% reduction is required. \u00a0\u00a0This does mean that any faculty or staff position which becomes vacant will not be returned automatically, and a number of faculty positions have already been lost in recent years as a result of cuts.\u00a0 I have attempted to spread the pain as evenly as possible, but to some extent it must necessarily also depend on trends in student numbers. Fortunately, we have made up for a number of these losses in other ways, including two \u201cstrategic\u201d appointments which have come to FASS in university-wide competitions (in heritage conservation, and in migration and diaspora studies), and a CRC in Physical Geography.\u00a0 So, while the budget cuts have been painful, the pain has been relatively manageable.\u00a0 And I believe that this will be the case again this year.\u00a0 Financially, we shall be OK \u2026 but only as long as we maintain our student numbers.\u00a0 And every member of faculty and staff must make that a priority, indeed their foremost priority. \u00a0<\/p>\n One way in which to increase student numbers is to develop new programs, or tweak existing ones.\u00a0 In the current year, declines in most FASS units were more than overcome by very large surges of interest in Child Studies and Cognitive Science \u2026 and both will be welcoming new faculty members in July this year.\u00a0 And there are also some new programs in the works.\u00a0 At the undergraduate level the biggest project is the proposed Bachelor of Global and International Studies degree, a joint project of FASS and FPA.\u00a0 This has received \u201capproval in principle\u201d from senior management, but the heavy lifting in terms of getting it all organized has yet to be worked out \u2026 and I am pleased to announce that Sukeshi Kamra will be making this a major focus for her time and energy in the coming months, along with Chris Brown from the Faculty of Public Affairs.\u00a0 And I hope we can make another attempt to develop a major in Indigenous Studies, especially now that Paterson Hall houses the Douglas Cardinal-designed aboriginal student centre.\u00a0 The Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies is also bringing forward a proposal for a minor in critical disability studies, which seems a logical fit; and you will understand my personal pleasure at the initiative of a group of faculty members to introduce a minor in medieval and early modern studies, to be based in the College of the Humanities.\u00a0 At the postgraduate level, I hope we shall hear much more in the coming months about a Masters in Northern Studies (based in Geography & Environmental Studies), a diploma program in Curatorial Studies (based in the School for Studies in Art & Culture), and a Ph.D. in Ethics and Public Affairs (based in the Dept. of Philosophy).\u00a0 So there is some hard work ahead.\u00a0 Not only do the programs need to be developed, and seen through all the various hoops, but then we have to persuade the government to fund them, in the sense that they have to agree to approve them for \u2018per capita\u2019 funding (BIUs).\u00a0 And this cannot be taken for granted, in particular given the growing emphasis on \u201cdifferentiation\u201d.\u00a0 Indeed that is where the Strategic Mandate Agreement document will become important, and I am pleased to report that all the FASS initiatives were included in the submission which went to Queen\u2019s Park on December 20th<\/sup>.<\/p>\n The FASS research enterprise continues unabated, and we have had some considerable success in a number of external competitions.\u00a0 In addition, a number of our colleagues have received honours and awards, of which perhaps the most prestigious was the Carl Mannerfelt Gold Medal awarded to Fraser Taylor by the International Cartographic Association, the first time that it has been awarded to a Canadian academic.\u00a0 And perhaps this is an opportune moment to mention that the FASS awards for teaching and research, including our major annual award, the Marston LaFrance Research fellowship, all have application deadlines at the end of this month.\u00a0 And we shall once again be offering some internal research grants, with a competition open to faculty members at the rank of assistant professor or associate professors who have not held that rank longer than 5 years.\u00a0\u00a0 I know that there has been some debate in the Faculty about the necessity of applying for external research grants, something that is now included as a \u201cuniversity criterion\u2019 in the Collective Agreement; but I would argue that a culture of research, and of external funding, is required if we are to meet the goals set out in the latest Strategic Plan.\u00a0 Of course my deep fear is that universities which don\u2019t do well in the grant \u201cleague tables\u201d will sooner or later be required to wind down their graduate programs.\u00a0 And thus I would contend that embracing this concept is really nothing more than enlightened self-interest.\u00a0 Research lies at the core of what we do.\u00a0 Rightly or wrongly, we are in direct competition with other institutions for a financial pie that is not growing \u2026 nor is it likely to do so in the coming years.\u00a0 Thus we need to be competitive for whatever funding will be made available, and that means paying some attention to the metrics used to measure our achievements, flawed as those metrics may be.<\/p>\n On a personal level, 2014 will see me continue to divest myself of some of the many hats which I have been wearing in addition to that of Faculty dean.\u00a0 Last summer I completed my second three-year term as the so-called \u2018SSHRC Leader\u2019 for Carleton, and that particular portfolio is now the responsibility of Sandra Crocker in the office of the VP Research; and I also completed my presidency of the Canadian Council of Deans of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.\u00a0 Tomorrow and Sunday I shall be chairing the annual meeting of the Fulbright Fellowship selection committee, after which I shall be stepping down following a three-year term.\u00a0 And in late May, at Congress 2014 being held this year at Brock University, I shall finish my term as president of the Canadian Society of Medievalists.\u00a0 While all these have been labours of love, they have all required substantial amounts of time \u2026 and I am starting to look forward to a period of administrative leave in which I shall be able to focus exclusively on research and writing.\u00a0 \u00a0But there is much to accomplish before that happens.\u00a0 Let us hope that 2014 is a good year for FASS, and that in 12 months\u2019 time we can come together again to revisit the year that will have passed and contemplate the next year unfolding.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In keeping with past practice, the blog this week presents the speaking notes from my annual address to FASS faculty and staff, delivered on the afternoon of Friday January 17th: Annually at this time of year I attempt to polish my crystal ball and look at what lies in store for the Faculty of Arts<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n