Time to part ways for the College of Arts and Science

CHELSEA POWRIE

The University of Saskatchewan’s College of Arts and Science should break up in favour of creating two separate colleges. The division would help with building community and student identity while also increasing the attention given to each department.

Not only does its existing four-stream structure make for a college with inherently conflicting overall goals, but the student experience suffers from a lack of community feeling. Breaking up the college into two smaller faculties comprised of disciplines with more in common would help focus the vision of the administration for each, while letting students feel they share an identity with their peers.

As it exists now, the College of Arts and Science subdivides itself by program type into the categories of science, humanities, social sciences and fine arts. Dean Peter Stoicheff and three vice-deans are responsible for the previously outlined subdivisions. Humanities and fine arts are grouped together at this level of administration. According to past college annual reports, the role of the dean is to focus on the “strategic vision” and “external relations,” while leaving “divisional decision-making” to the vice-deans.

Already, this seems complicated. First off, how is a dean with control over disciplines varying from molecular biochemistry to medieval poetry supposed to hone a specific “strategic vision,” let alone cultivate “external relations” which benefit everyone?

Stoicheff holds undergraduate and post-graduate degrees in English. His background is impressive and certainly makes him an ideal candidate for heading a college of arts. But whether he is also the best man to plan for the growth and nurturing of a collection of top-notch bachelor of science programs is another matter entirely.

A natural division would be to separate the programs which offer bachelors of arts and bachelors of science. Arts and sciences is the only college at the U of S currently awarding more than one type of degree and they are programs with high enrollment.

Of the 20,289 students reported as enrolled at the U of S in the February 2015 “enrolment snapshot,” 8,670 of them are in the College of Arts and Sciences — a staggering 42 per cent. Other examples of the larger colleges, such as the College of Agriculture and Bioresources with roughly 1,000 students, don’t even come close to comparing.

These numbers quantify the near impossibility of creating a unique campus experience across the whole college. That is without taking into account the breadth of subject matter under the umbrella of arts and sciences. According to the college’s website, it provides “approximately half” of U of S undergraduate classes, in a total of 60 subject areas. Hoping that such a large student population with this amount of variation in topics of study will cultivate a community identity is a waste of time.

Splitting the college would mean these students could experience similar levels of community feeling as those in other disciplines. While the colleges would still be large, it would feel a lot more feasible to have a college identity than it currently does. As it stands within the College of Arts and Science, small disciplines are the most common source of community for students, such as geology or history students. If arts and sciences were their own colleges with their own undergraduate student societies, students could more easily interact outside of their major, promoting interdisciplinary growth and innovation.

The university would need to put in a little work to reach the goal of creating separate college communities — it wouldn’t be as easy as slicing down the middle and slapping on new labels. Events like a “College of Arts Week,” with displays on different programs in Place Riel and mixer events, as well as a slew of them for the sciences, would go a long way in creating a student identity within the new divisions.

At its inception, the College of Arts and Sciences served only 70 students. Steady growth throughout the U of S’ 108-year history has left this number in the dust. The combined college is now an obsolete model, and dividing it into more manageable chunks with common goals would improve both administration and the student experience.

The College of Arts and Science is better together

TAB RAHMAN

Copy Editor 

The College of Arts and Science should remain one college. Splitting into two separate colleges would create structural problems, ineffectiveness and take away from the diversity of student options.

If the College of Arts and Science was to separate into two colleges, where exactly would the lines be drawn? Obviously, programs like fine arts would go under the college of arts and hard sciences like biology and chemistry would be in the college of science, but what about areas like interactive system design, which is a bachelor of arts and science program? This program combines psychology, computer science and art and art history courses. There is no clear way to split a program like that in half.

Secondly, students can get a unique combination of interdisciplinary degrees only possible with arts and science functioning as one college.

I am a biochemistry major with a minor in political studies. At any other university this would have been a bureaucratic nightmare but at the University of Saskatchewan, it is as simple as picking my classes. The variety within the College of Arts and Science allows students to have this flexibility when choosing their majors and minors. Other universities, like McGill University, offer some special programs for students to do this; however, at the U of S there is no worry of finding loopholes to work your way around.

Having the College of Arts and Science combined also allows students of all different educational backgrounds to work together and learn from each other. A broader range of subjects helps students become more well rounded in their post-secondary education.

The College of Arts and Science provides a degree of openness that fosters a whole new branch of learning that cannot be seen as detrimental in any way. The more dimensions that a student can learn from, the more diverse their education will be and the more prepared they’ll be for anything else that comes their way after university.

The Arts and Science Student Union is also a way that students from different backgrounds can come together for a united goal. Differing specialties enables the ASSU to excel at doing a multitude of things for a student union, where most others would feel out of their element in some way.

This applies to other student groups as well; with the huge range of people that come through the College of Arts and Science, other clubs or groups get to have members with related interests from all kinds of different backgrounds. The variety of people that can now be associated within these groups is a layer of complexity that can offer so many different and exciting dynamics that are exclusive to the College of Arts and Science.

Together, students get a totally unique experience filled with varieties of people to make connections with and learn in totally new ways. If separated, the college becomes like any other college — the chances of isolation with hardly any overlap would increase. Students wouldn’t be able to get those same privileges of taking vastly different majors or minors, and programs like interactive system design likely wouldn’t even exist.

A separated college would offer a hugely stunted program when compared to what is currently offered. When it comes down to it, you can make the experience of being an arts and science student anything you want. The college is ultimately customizable and can cater to a huge range of interests like no other. That fact alone shows that it would be a mistake to cause such an unnecessary separation.

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Image: Stephanie Mah/Graphics Editor