Confronting Change

For many of us working in the colleges and universities of Canada, there is a profound sense of new political, economic, and professional conditions challenging core assumptions in post-secondary education—two current examples: the implications of radically increased participation rates for the university of both a real and imagined past, and a related debate on the roles played by differing types of colleges and universities. As noted in the December 2006 "Report of the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion," changing demands and expectations "have taken their toll on individual scholars—and on the academy's infrastructure as a whole—and strained the profession in ways that are intensely serious but not yet well understood or articulated" (26). In what follows, I want to argue that individual and departmental engagement in understanding the complexity of those broad institutional contexts is crucial to the development of effective responses to disciplinary questions as directly focused as "Why Do I Have to Write Like That?"

None of us will have any difficulty citing reasons for our inability or reluctance to engage more fully in understanding and addressing the relation of immediate departmental and disciplinary issues to the institutions that support our work: too many students, too much perceived pressure to publish, the triumph of administrative managerialism, and, for many of the most privileged and potentially powerful members of our community, tenured faculty, self-representations as more solitary than social, hedgehogs not foxes, thereby protecting the blind spots of self-interest that allow us not to connect the balance of teaching, research, and service in our own professional careers to the sometimes ethically challenged expansions of doctoral programs and the increased reliance of our departments on contractually limited instructors.

Given that many of the issues we are confronting have been around for almost forty years, why must we now reject Atwoodian victim roles rooted in denial, demonization, and abdication of responsibility? I suggest that one only has to look at government intervention in our discipline and departments in Australia to see the threat to our disciplinary and institutional survival—and if you don't know what I mean, my first point regarding the need for information and collective discussion as a spur to engagement is already made. From its inception, our discipline never had an easy-to-grasp unitary focus and hence justification. In its current hydra-headedness, it is, at best, not well understood, and, at worst, dismissed. If we don't assume a responsibility for explaining, justifying, and asserting the importance of what we do in relation to the institutional discourses surrounding us—in terms of engagement defined by us—our fate is perhaps deservedly sealed.

The 2006 experiences of both President Lawrence Summers at Harvard and of Vice-Chancellor John Hood at Oxford suggest that faculty can engage with potent impact on their institutional structures, but even the status of "Professional Concerns" at our own conference reflects a revealing imbalance between the sessions complementing our disciplinary identities (more than fifty) and the two focused on professional and institutional discourses and responsibilities. If I am right that our long-term goal has to be to acknowledge that we can re-think and re-balance not just the writing requirements in our courses but the triad of teaching, research, and service in terms appropriate to the stewardship of our discipline, then there are some obvious, even embarrassingly banal, first steps that we can take in fostering a stronger bridge between our disciplinary and institutional identities. Examples include taking departmental subscriptions to the Chronicle of Higher Education (that subscription then providing on-line access to the Chronicle's "Daily Report" for all faculty) and splitting the participation of distinguished scholars in our visiting speakers series equally with university press editors, SSHRC or CFHSS officers, faculty from the nearest School of Education, or the most recent Canadian ex-President of the MLA speaking not about adaptations but about the idea of "collegiality" that she made a focus of her presidency. My personal hobby horse in this category is to change department meetings with Deans, Provosts, or Presidents from either...