East Asian Studies closure at the University of Toronto

[Mark Roberts]

On Jul 29, 2010, at 9:36 AM, Eija Niskanen wrote:

> I heard from my friend (whose son is about to enter UCSB, and wanted  
> to major in its Asian Studies program) that the UCSB ASian Studies  
> undergrad program will be split down and combined with other  
> programs, including Classics.

According to the UCSB EALCS site, the campus has just been awarded a  
three-year Japan Foundation Grant to support Japanese studies across  
the campus. The focus of the grant seems to be primarily graduate- 
level study and support for visiting scholars. The grant is intended  
to help make UCSB "one of the primary centers for Japanese studies in  
the US".

Questions: if the administration is downsizing and restructuring the  
undergraduate program in Asian Studies, how will that affect the  
Department of EALCS? How about their long-term prospects for support  
from institutions like the Japan Foundation?

Talking with friends, I have heard that there have been similar  
changes at other schools with less visibility than Toronto or Santa  
Barbara. Apparently, University of Redlands cut Japanese and Chinese  
completely. The professors were sacked. The program at U. of Iowa was  
already restructured, as Toronto is now proposing. There has been talk  
of reorganization at Stanford.

The larger picture involves broad, structural changes in higher  
education. It's not about East Asian Studies per se, but rather a  
restructuring in which the power of departments and faculty are  
declining as universities switch to corporate models of management.  
Under this model, the academy is seen less a self-governing profession  
than as an enterprise with profit- and loss-centers, in which the  
managers in the administration decide policy and the professors become  
the shop-floor workers taking orders.

I would be curious to read an article that explores this in more detail.

Digging a bit deeper, the media reports that the U. of Toronto  
decision to restructure the humanities and EAS was motivated in part  
by a USD 55M debt, and pressure on the university to reduce it. This  
is a lot of money, but of course it needs to be considered in the  
context of their total budget. A quick search of the published  
operating budget plan for U. of Toronto reveals that "Total revenue is  
projected to increase by 1.6%, from $1,416M in 2008-09 to $1,438M in  
2009-10." In other words, this 55M is a shortfall of less than 4% of  
the total budget. At the same time, their budget contains other, new  
expenditures. E.g., under capital funds: "The total approved project  
costs up to 2008-09 amounted to $1.28B. The University of Toronto will  
undertake approximately $56M in new capital projects, raising its  
total capital project costs to just over $1.34B."

So, there is a 55M debt that has made it "necessary" to restructure  
the humanities, but now 56M is being allocated to "new capital  
projects". What are those, exactly?

A few more clicks leads us to this site <http://www.greatspaces.utoronto.ca/ 
 >, whose front page announces:

"The signs are everywhere that the University of Toronto is in the  
midst of its greatest capital expansion program in 40 years."

So, they are in debt, the humanities must be downsized, but they are  
also expanding "new capital projects". What's this "greatest capital  
expansion program" about? How about this:

http://www.greatspaces.utoronto.ca/stgeorge.htm
http://www.greatspaces.utoronto.ca/utsc.htm
http://www.greatspaces.utoronto.ca/miss.htm

Looks like a lot of shiny new buildings for the hard sciences. Are  
these actually going to generate more revenue for the university? What  
is the new revenue model that's driving this expansion?

Here, it is worth mentioning a recent article in the Chronicle of  
Higher Education, which explores how the Humanities are in fact  
subsidizing the sciences:

The Humanities Really Do Produce a Profit
By Robert N. Watson
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Humanities-Really-Do/64740/

Unfortunately, it's from the paid section of the site, but if you  
google the title, you can find it elsewhere (on a FB page, it seems).

Above all, what are the consequences of these changes for the  
Humanities, for research on East Asia in general, and for academic  
work on Japanese film in particular? The only hypothesis that I can  
hazard at the moment is that the centers where work can be done are  
being consolidated. Smaller departments may disappear, with resources  
either disappearing as well, or being diverted to larger universities.  
The faculty at these universities may protest against the systemic  
changes, but perhaps they also stand to benefit from the new landscape  
in which there is less competition?

I'd be curious to hear other ideas about this.

Regards,


Mark Roberts
Research Fellow, UTCP
http://utcp.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/members/data/mark_roberts/index_en.php
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