Tough solutions are the easy way out

(March 24) - University curriculum is not a popularity contest.

When Nicolaus Copernicus enrolled at Krakow Academy 500 years ago, astronomy wasn’t a big deal. Most people who thought about it knew the sun revolved around the Earth. It was obvious. All you had to do was stand in the back yard and look up. The sun came into view in the east and disappeared in the west. There was no need to take out a student loan to figure that out.

There weren’t an awful lot of people studying astronomy in 1491. Copernicus signed up for mathematics and went on to study law and medicine. Along the way he met a professor who lit him up. Young Nicolaus was infected with astronomy fever and never recovered. Fifty-two years later he published a book that changed the world. Maybe it didn’t change it so much as stop it from standing still. That was when people started to realize the Earth moves around the sun.

If Krakow Academy rooted out programs with low enrollment, astronomy would have been done like dinner. The professor who put the stars in young Copernicus’s eyes would have been shuffled off to teach something else. Fortunately for them, capitalism wasn’t invented yet. The world wasn’t in the opening months of a recession. Krakow Academy wasn’t being administered by people who believed that tough times demand tough solutions. They didn’t think they should keep only the popular programs and ditch the ones with low enrollment.

Now here we are, 518 years later and what has changed? The university curriculum is turning into a popularity contest. In a message on the University of Guelph web-site, president Alastair Summerlee says they will be “eliminating courses, majors and programs with lower enrolments.” At the same time, they have “the overarching goal of preserving quality and programs that are strengths of the institution and differentiate Guelph from other universities.”

All of a sudden the women’s studies program isn’t popular enough for the University of Guelph. It is about to fall on the sword of the recession. So far it is the only one mentioned as a candidate for the chopping block. It’s hard to see how this is going to save enough money to let them beef up the agricultural college.

The courses offered in the program are from the history, sociology, philosophy, English literature and other departments. Students will still register for Dr. McKenzie’s political science course on Women, Justice and Public Policy. It’s just that a few of them won’t be able to say they majored in Women’s Studies. They’ll take the same courses, from the same professors, and pay the banks the same exorbitant interest on their loans. They’ll just have to tell people they took a History BA with a lot of this, that and the other thing about women.

It is not good enough for the university to adopt the language of the private financial sector. Looking for tough solutions for tough times is the easy way out. There are a lot of bright minds down on that stretch of Gordon Street. They ought to be looking for creative solutions. A recession is the wrong time to cut back on programs. Funding should be provided for the university to bring in its fair share of the newly unemployed and start training them for new opportunities.

There is one thing they should not do. They shouldn’t single out women’s studies as the only endangered species on campus. They shouldn’t poke a stick in the ghost of Simone De Beauvoir’s eye.

Who knows? One day a young Nikki Copernicus might make the radical discovery that the Earth does not revolve around the son.