Public Deterrence and Defunding/Deteriorating in the Humanities

     When I started work at Memorial University ten years ago, my wonderful colleague Rob (one of two wonderful Robs in my department at the time) was touring me around campus, but the campus was not as wonderful. We started with our building: the Arts and Administration Building. I think this structure dates to the 1940s (the university having been established officially in 1949), with our St. John's campus opening officially in 1961, but I might be off with these dates. Regardless, the passage of time has not treated it well. When I first walked through the it, there were patches and lines of tape on the walls everywhere on the third floor, which houses our department. "What's with that?" I asked Rob. In what I later learned is Rob's deadpan sense of ironic humour, he said something like "Oh, that's the recent renovation--and I'm sure they'll finish it any day now."
      That wasn't the extent of the damage to fix, either. There was a hole in the ceiling in the men's washroom above one of the stalls, which had a privacy barrier that was loose. (From a hushed voice, I heard once that it leaked onto one of my colleagues, and I heard that from the source—not of the leak but my colleague.) There was more tape on the walls. The tile around the urinals was cracked and missing pieces. One of the toilets was out of service. I am aware that the university is a space of privilege, including the spaces of the Arts building that are associated with a cultural elite, but what I’m describing also illustrates uneven development on a local level. The building was in rough shape, unlike the Engineering and Medicine buildings across the road.
       Ten years later, almost no visible repairs have been conducted on the third floor of Arts, except for a new grippy set of tiles was installed around the urinals a couple of weeks ago, inspiring this post, if inspiration can be said to come from below (rather than from a hole in the ceiling). Admittedly, we renovated our main classroom, A-3018, not long ago, with a new whiteboard, and other classrooms have had minor technological upgrades. I specified "visible" because the Arts building has also had frequent asbestos abatements, as a lot of places on campus have, which might have been the original cause of the holes in the walls. The holes, of course, are not “original” in the sense that this building was once new and then probably well-maintained while it seemed like an asset to keep.
     Irrespective of the history of this built environment, on top of the discomfort of working in these less than encouraging conditions, I have become increasingly concerned that they also deter students from enrolling in the humanities, and they are probably something of a shock to prospective job candidates and guest lecturers whom we have invited here to St. John's. I imagine that the lecturers and anyone coming to a public lecture or event might be dismayed by how quickly the nicely appointed foyer (however patriarchal and imperial its statuary may be) degrades, a hallway or a stairwell later, to the junky spaces that are common here. Prospective students moving through campus would naturally feel more attracted to Engineering, Medicine, and Core Sciences, which have better-maintained or newer facilities. The so-called decline of the humanities—like talking about the near-extinction of the American buffalo—implies a natural occurrence and disregards the agency at work: an administration and a government that invest in some parts of the institution far more than others, with the effect of deliberately shrinking other parts. Who can blame students for enrolling in STEM fields when they get the message, through the medium of the space (in Marshall McLuhan’s terms), that they’re not welcome in the humanities here? Who can blame candidates who turn down our jobs, or our professors (our colleagues and friends) who move, mid-career, to other universities?
    A public has to have a dimension of invitation. The American literary and cultural scholar Michael Warner’s view of publics is that they are created by an address: “Hey, you, this might interest you, so listen up!” (That is definitely not a quotation.) A public tends to be inviting--though there are some prominent exceptions in the tribalist publics of American society today, the eve of the American election. I don’t remember if Warner considers the issue of the site of the public in Publics and Counterpublics (2002), but it seems obvious that the space in which the public can gather, or can be constituted, would be instrumental to the character of that public. If the site is the medium, it is also the message. If the message is also a “hail” or an interpellation in the Althusserian sense, it provokes ideological responses. Arena politics is likely to be combative; the presidential hopeful (maybe not the best word) Donald Trump invited the wrestling icon Hulk Hogan to tear off his shirt at his Madison Square Garden rally.
​    In the usually more modest and usually more moderate environment of a Canadian university, the site of the public is often a convocation hall, where family and friends are warmly invited to celebrate the graduands and graduates of that year. To a lesser extent, it is also the lecture hall, where public talks occur for more informative and educational purposes. The classroom, too, is a site of the public, or at least a semi-public, because in theory everyone is “invited” (to pay tuition and) to join the class. If there is a prerequisite or enrolment cap for the course, then maybe it is semi-private not semi-public. In my seminar on public intellectuals in Canada, we recently decided that our Go Public assignment might involve a talk given when a guest learner has come, by invitation, to effectively publicize the semi-private/semi-public of the classroom. We have modest hopes for such an event: the guest, unaccustomed to the methods and materials of the course, might learn something, and so might we, through the process of translating knowledge and bringing our guest up to speed.
    The guest might teach us something too, but in the broader scope of declining enrolments and defunding/deteriorating in the humanities (and social sciences), I think we are turning away a lot of potential guests, whether they are students, their families, or our job candidates. I wonder too when was the last time a local or provincial or even federal politician walked through the halls of the Arts building. Has the government turned its back on us, or have we not been welcoming enough? I suspect a little, or more than a little, of both. Ten years later, and more for others, we are living and working with that problem. And not only “with” it. We’re in it, all the way.

Works Cited

• Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. Princeton University Press, 2002.