By Amanda Charbon
For future university students with aspirations towards studying in humanities, what types of questions do they ask when deciding among universities? Does the university have extracurriculars and a variety of clubs? What is their party-scene? What is their reputation? For some future students however, there aren’t questions about which professors are going to be teaching their first to fourth year classes, nor do they ask how much funding is given to the faculty they are applying to. University, for some humanities students, is just a means to an end and a degree-waving, parent-supported past time that includes research areas such as flip cup, beer pong, and ‘picking up’ at bars. Infamous quotes such as “Queen’s University students have long been the blondes of Canada’s university community: They seem to have more fun than everyone else,” made by the Globe and Mail, makes it difficult to pull away from the idealization of university as a party scene rather than an academic one.
Queen’s University religious studies professor Herb W. Basser wrote an article on the preservation and exclusivity of university for those who strive to be academics (in contrast to professionals). Basser asks, “Why should [students] waste their time in humanities courses that in the end give them no skills whatsoever except perhaps the skill of coasting through life thinking anything they do deserves a good grade and the skill of haggling for an extra mark or two”. Lack of skill is attributed to the manifestation of the social and economic value of a Bachelor’s Degree, which has produced a student body that strives for the mark and not the interaction of academic learning.
This mark-mongering attitude has been socially constructed as an acceptable form of learning. With our generation’s exceedingly short attention span, and the constant dependence on technology, interaction with professors is becoming limited. Walking into a first year classroom as a professor, you won’t see the faces of engaged and eager students – you’ll see the backs of laptop computers. Interaction is unrealistic in class sizes of 300 or more students, when universities pack students into tiny lecture halls, and spend the extra tuition building recreational facilities instead of giving the surplus to professors or faculties. If professors feel devalued or underpaid, and if students do not have the drive to make an effort to communicate from behind the security and anonymity of their laptops, engagement is lost. Instead of having an engaging discussion with their students, professors read off of PowerPoints and post the lectures on the internet, negating the purpose of a lecture. Take McGill for example with their taped lectures – what is the purpose of attending class when, at your own leisure, you can watch the taped version? With large numbers of students being accepted into Canadian universities, the quality of education is lacking and dynamic student-professor relationships are difficult. In an essay by professor Nicole M. Fortin from the University of British Columbia, she articulates this viewpoint by stating that “…limiting the expansion of college seats preserves institutional quality”. Keeping the university population small will produce edifying results not only with the students’ willingness to learn, but also the quality of teaching.
It is not surprising that, being a humanities student, I have witnessed a materialization of non-engagement. My class and I were assigned a book review to hand in to the professor. A student walked in, handed the professor his paper, and walked out of the classroom. The professor was, understandably, furious! He proceeded to say he felt “used” like a “quickie in the back of a car”. This comment resonated in the class: we realized we were here to actually learn and digest this information, not just get a mark in some class that we will never remember five years from now.
This begs the question, are universities commodified into pieces of paper that we can acquire after four years? Fortin believes so, as she argues that “In economics, the post-secondary enrollment decisions of high school graduates are seen as solutions to a simplified version of the human capital investment model,” meaning that attendance at a university is thought of by students in a rational-choice methodology: investment needs to guarantee an adequate return. What is problematic is that investment standards are declining, but the tangible return stays stagnant.
Our social environment has created a market for the demand and supply of degrees, designations, and letters after your name. Our society has made these designations mandatory for many jobs that previously did not require these levels of schooling. What is the point of attending university when the only return is stress, debt, and a piece of paper showing you handed assignments in on time, but yet no knowledge to show for it?
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