I was not surprised, exactly, when a communique from the University of Windsor’s PR department arrived in my inbox informing the ‘community” that the administration had decided– without prior, public discussion or deliberation– that University Players (the student theatre group associated with the School of Dramatic Art) was closing and the EPICentre (a small business incubator) will “be reimagined to integrate and enhance our innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem.” The Dean of my faculty telegraphed that cuts were coming, but she phrased it somewhat more eloquently than the biz-speak spoken by the Office of Public Affairs and Communication [emphasis added]. Communication involves a back and forth, an exchange of ideas and arguments that moves dialogue partners towards mutual understanding and agreement. There was no communication, no debate, no opportunity for the units and the staff affected by the decision (10 staff positions will be lost), to make their case and propose alternatives. Instead, a communique was issued, informing everyone of this latest fait accompli.

The more that faculty unions and their provincial and national organizations insist on collegial self-governance, the more university administrations become autocratic. At Windsor, the Bookstore has been privatised, unionised housekeeping and food services staff gradually being phased out in favour of private sector contractors, and our off-campus access to some campus computing services made contingent upon allowing the university to install corporate spyware on our home computers, all without even the pretext of democratic debate.

The tactic of making decisions behind closed doors has a certain tactical brilliance. Reversing decisions is much more difficult than pro-active organization to prevent a bad decision from being taken. One cannot oppose that which one does not know is coming. Once the decision has been made, reactive opposition is difficult to build. A certain number of people who could potentially be enlisted in a constructive project centred around finding creative alternatives to cuts will conclude that the die has been cast and nothing can be done to change the new reality. That already limits the pool from which an opposition could be recruited. A certain number of others will support the changes, and another subset– always the largest– will not care. Only a minority of a minority will publicly oppose the moves but– being on the back foot right from the beginning– anything that they might organize will be small and ineffective.

This weakness is a function of the very low level of political engagement on Canadian campuses. I read colleagues for whom I have immense respect (having worked with them more closely in an earlier era where I was more actively involved in political struggle) and cannot understand why they think that the student encampments against the Gaza War portend the re-birth of a vital student movement to rival the 1960’s youth rebellion. While the students are right to mobilise and the encampments should be defended on grounds of academic freedom, the actual numbers of students involved are vanishingly small. In Windsor, the numbers actively camped out in the quad number in the dozens, out of a student population of about 16 000. Even the biggest encampments have attracted no more than a couple of hundred protestors. The only resemblance to the 1960’s is a revolutionary rhetoric vastly at odds with the students’ power to effectively counter the political economic structures of contemporary capitalism.

Calls to divest from arms industries are all well and good, but the university has been integrated with the capitalist economy since the birth of its modern form in mid-nineteenth century Germany. Demands for more Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion that are banal components of every campus movement just echo the lingua franca of corporate leadership. The bosses are as committed to “diversity” as they are to the doublespeak that portrays cuts that weakening of the academic mission of the university as “ensuring continuity and innovating new approaches to enrich the student experience and strengthen community partnerships.” If Laurentian University could be gutted by a bankruptcy court with virtually no provincial mobilisation in support of our Sudbury colleagues, one can be certain that this round of cuts– and they will not be the last– will be implemented with no more resistance than tree leaves pose to a howling thunderstorm wind. That is not the fault of individuals grown indifferent and inured to cuts; individual indifference is a function of the low level of political mobilisation on campuses and in the wider society, which is in turn a function of decades of mostly defeat for the labour movement and other progressive forces. Corrosive and backward identity politics dominates the left, making the construction of the solidarity that would be required to rebuild effective political movements more difficult.

But there is another side to the particular issue of budget cuts that needs to be addressed. The political economic dimension of the problem is well-understood. The administration pointed to the need to solve a 5.6 million dollar budget deficit as the cause of the elimination of University Players and the EPICentre. They argued, correctly, that provincial funding policies are the root cause of that deficit. However, that is also a feint to distract attention from matters that they do control: how they allocate revenues. Across the last two administrations those priorities have been new building construction, expanding the size of the administration and support bureaucracy, and paying outside service providers. My own Faculty, (Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences) has been under a virtual hiring freeze for years because the budget model that the university has adopted puts FAHSS in a structural deficit impossible to cut our way out from under. This model makes absurd assumptions (for example, it ‘charges’ the faculty 10 000 dollars per office, as if we were renting space from a commercial landlord) and forces faculties and departments to compete for resources. While FAHSS departments in particular have been constrained by lack of hiring, the administration has continued to hire more administrators and ship money out the door by contracting out campus services. Only a few weeks ago, I received another email informing me that the university was spending something like 9 million dollars on new photocopiers and their accompanying software suite.

Photocopiers! Nine million dollars! What happened to the paperless office?

I hope whomever occupies the Philosophy Department’s offices after we are amalgamated with another department (as I fear is almost inevitable in the near future) enjoys it. Having lost 5 colleagues to retirements, resignations, and death over the past few years my department seems destined, in a best case scenario, to be forced into some sort federal arrangement with a larger unit.

Is this now the purpose of the university in the twenty-first century, to provide a home for photocopiers but not philosophers? Perhaps. But if philosophers want to prevail, we must ask ourselves some hard questions which– despite our vocation as gadflies– we are often loath to ask.

That question, the other side of the problem of cuts that philosophers and humanists are less inclined to want to consider is: if we are so important, why do our numbers continue to decline relative to the sciences and professional schools? Philosophers (and other humanists) know, or think they know, why philosophy and the humanities are important. But do students know or care? The numbers suggest that more and more that they do not.

The typical explanation of the decline of humanities and arts enrollments focuses on parents’ and students’ perceptions about post-graduation job prospects and the typical solution involves pointing out that statistics do not support the prevailing pessimistic assumption. But that solution has not arrested the decline. Could there not be, in addition to these practical concerns, a deeper crisis affecting humanities education, one that forces us to re-think what the purpose of a university in 2024 ought to be?

Academic departments are organized by academics who have devoted their working life to their chosen field of inquiry. Humanists love texts, we love to read, we love to write, argue, and reflect; we have organized our departments to impart that love of texts to new generations of students, and we tend to focus our attention on those who remind us of younger versions of ourselves, whom we nurture by mentoring them through their undergraduate degree and then sending them off– like proud parents– to graduate study elsewhere, hopefully to see them once again on the conference circuit as a newly minted PhDs. The problem is obvious: the vast majority of students will not become PhDs, not because they lack the intellectual chops, but because they are not interested in the life of the mind.

As I noted above, today’s university took on its contemporary structure in the 19th century, but its division into faculties and departments is literally medieval. Why do academics– especially academics who fancy themselves radical social critics– rise in defence of a 1000 year-old institutional structure? Relative to what pressing social problem: war, environmental crisis, poverty, the re-birth of the far-right– is growing the faculty complement of an academic department important? If–as all of us are quick to maintain– we play some sort of vital role in helping people understand those problems- what is it about any particular discipline that cultivates that understanding? What if what helps people understand problems is not anything specific about the historical content of different disciplines, but practices of thinking that would be better cultivated outside of existing departmental structures?

When we look out at half empty classrooms four weeks into the year we tend to blame students. They are lazy, distracted, immature. But we rarely ask if there is a problem with the way in which our programs and classes are organized. Maybe sitting in a classroom listening to someone talk at them from the front of the room about an historical era or a set of disembodied theories no longer speaks to them in the world that they inhabit, relative to the problems that they face.

The problems that the world faces are practical, but they cannot be solved unless they are understood in their complete reality. The university has always been a contradictory institution, devoted, on the one hand, to the production of people who will occupy positions of authority, but, on the other hand, to educating those same people. Thus, the university is part of the process by which societies reproduce themselves but also, in so far as it must educate, also a space in which critical perspectives on social institutions and value systems necessarily emerge. Even the medieval university in which faculty members always ran the risk of being charged with heresy, allowed a wider latitude than is sometimes thought for debate. Education demands a turning of the mind against the givenness of reality; a questioning attitude vis-a-vis the world as it present itself. Education begins when one asks how the world came to be the way the world is.

No discipline can answer this question on its own and recognizing that fact is perhaps the starting point for much needed thinking about how the educational purpose of the university can guide what I think is an increasingly urgent need to reform its structure and pedagogy. Let us reflect on that most basic question for a moment: how did the world come to be the way it is? What discipline does not make a contribution to the answer to that question? Cosmologists, chemists, evolutionary biologists explain how the universe has developed from a superhot plasma after the Big Bang to human societies in which intelligent people continue to work on refining those explanations. But people do not only work out empirical explanations, they also wonder. And so philosophers, theologians, and artists, those who, in different ways focus on the meaning of life in properly human experience, have as central a role to play in answering the question of how the world became the world that it is, because it has not simply evolved according to natural laws, it has been shaped by human wonder and creative activity. But it has not simply been shaped by wonder and activity: the existence of human beings presupposes their ability to satisfy their life-needs. People satisfy those needs through different forms of social organization. Hence historians, sociologists, political scientists, and economists all have something essential to say about how societies have been organized to satisfy those needs, but so too health care professionals and psychologists about the scope and content of those needs. Moreover, since any historical inquiry into the institutions of any society will reveal inequalities in access to the resources, critical perspectives that look into the ways in which inequalities have been justified and how people have organized to overcome them are required.

The throughline connecting this way of seeing disciplinary diversity is the contribution each makes to understanding human society as it is at present. Each of those disciplines has its own history and everyone will situate themselves differently within that discipline, but that is of lesser importance when it comes to organizing the teaching mission of the university. What matters for the student– the person who is becoming educated (as opposed to becoming a philosopher, a psychologist, etc.,) — is what the way of thinking that distinguishes these different approaches contributes to the answer to the question as a whole. Instead of organizing education under the implicit assumption that its function is to produce philosophers, psychologists etc., the guiding principle might become the education of people capable of understanding, in a unified way, the different perspectives necessary to comprehend the full scope of pressing problems. Classes could then be organized around problems, not disciplinary histories, and taught by teams organizing students into active working groups, not individuals talking at them from the front of a classroom.

Let me take just one example: climate change. In order to understand climate change one must understand atmospheric chemistry, mathematical modelling, and probabilistic reasoning. But one must also understand the origins of the crisis, which means that one must understand economics. In order to understand economics, own must understand the forces that operate in a capitalist society, but also the value system that legitimates those forces. One must be able to trace the cumulative effects of those economic forces over time, and thus also the political institutions and events that have allowed those forces to grow (and get them under control). That is a very rough sketch, but one can see how it might inform course design. Students would work with atmospheric chemists, mathematicians, historians, economists, political scientists, and philosophers to grasp the different dimensions of the problem. The focus would be on developing the cognitive and practical skills. Students and professors alike would have to learn to work collaboratively in teams and master and apply forms of thinking, not assimilate abstract discipline-specific content, in order to succeed. Professors would continue to pursue their own interests as researchers, but as educators they would have to invent new ways of working together to teach what their discipline can contribute to the synthetic understanding of the complex problems that life in 2024 poses.

This sketch is far from a plan and any attempt to institutionalise this approach would face significant hurdles. Inertial forces are very powerful in institutions, and the daunting problems of how workload would be calculated, how many teams a professors would expect to be part of , etc., are probably sufficient to prevent concrete steps towards making these sorts of changes being taken– until there is a system-wide crisis. At least in the humanities, I fear that the system-wide crisis is at the door. Will we solve it by being bold and creative or continue to lament program closures after the fact?