Dear Uniter

Dear Uniter,

There has been talk about a merging of the Philosophy, Classics and Religious Studies departments at the University of Winnipeg, though what is actually happening is little understood. Such amalgamation has been implemented in the past without compromising the curricular integrity or the autonomy of the composite departments.

For the philosophy department, this is not the problem. The university administration has decided not to renew the contracts of the only two sessional professors, hired just last year. As a consequence, there may not be enough courses offered next year for philosophy students to graduate, nor may the inter-disciplinary ethics courses be offered.

Though the philosophy department has recently suffered internal problems, the only hope of making the department a good one is to hire new staff, not fire those who have just been brought in. The administration is essentially destroying the department. Philosophy is an internationally studied discipline and the oldest. The U of W seems to want to be the only major university in North America without a philosophy department.

But this does not only concern philosophy. The administration is side-stepping any decision-making processes with the department by cutting its funding. Administrators are not necessarily trained in the arts and sciences and should not be deciding how a department should be run. If we allow this to happen, all university departments are on the road to losing their autonomy. At the end of this road, people who are trained at nothing but handling money will be selecting our textbooks and making literary criticism. 

Sincerely,

Fred Acton

Editor’s Note: Read more about what’s going on with the U of W’s philosophy department in our campus news briefs, as well as in next week’s issue of The Uniter.

– Fred Acton

Published in Volume 64, Number 13 of The Uniter (November 26, 2009)