The University of Toronto’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences has decided to “close down”:http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=140864242594644&ref=ts its “Center for Ethics”:http://www.ethics.utoronto.ca/ for budgetary reasons. This is a _really_ terrible decision. I spent two very happy years at U of T. When I was there, the university had superb faculties in political theory, philosophy and legal theory, but had difficulty in building bridges between them (the university, for a variety of historical and organizational reasons, is quite decentralized). The Center for Ethics opened shortly after I left – I’ve been following its work ever since. It has brought these faculties together and built a genuinely world class institution. I know that other universities view University of Toronto’s Center for Ethics as a model to be emulated. Now, the U of T is proposing to junk it summarily, for entirely short sighted reasons.
If this goes ahead, I can’t help but think that it’s going to seriously hurt the University’s international reputation. When universities face tough budgetary times, they have to make hard decisions. But they should not gut their core strengths and competences. It is indisputable to anyone in the field (and to sympathetic outside observers to me), that the Center gives a body and an organized presence to one of the University’s most important areas of strength. Below the fold, I have a letter that I’m sending to the relevant university officials (President David Naylor [david.naylor@utoronto.ca], Provost Cheryl Misak [cheryl.misak@utoronto.ca], Dean Meric Gertler [meric.gertler@utoronto.ca]). I suggest that other people who are disturbed by this write letters to these officials too (be polite but clear). There’s also a Facebook protest group “here”:http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=140864242594644&ref=t, which has gathered nearly 450 members in less than 24 hours.
Dear President Naylor
I am writing to you (and ccing Provost Misak and Dean Gertler) to urge in the strongest possible terms that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences reverse its decision to close down the Center for Ethics. I have followed the development of the Center with enormous interest. When I taught at the University, it was clear to me that the university’s superb faculty in political theory, legal theory and philosophy did not receive the international recognition that they deserved, in large part because they had no common home for discussion and collaboration. When the Center was founded it became that home. This has not only greatly enhanced the university’s existing strengths, but has created new ones. It has forged unanticipated and highly productive relationships within the university (through, for example, its work on ethics and the arts) and outside it. When I hear colleagues at first tier US institutions and elsewhere discussing the Center, they speak of it as a model to be learned from, and emulated.
I understand that the University is facing difficult budgetary conditions. However, when an institution has hard choices to make, it needs to focus on retaining its core competences. The Center is manifestly at the heart of one of the University’s most important competences. The University of Toronto has genuinely world class faculty in political theory, philosophy and legal theory. Frankly, it needs not only to retain existing institutional resources that allow these faculty to cooperate, but to build upon them.
As an outside observer who still feels personally vested in the University’s success, I worry that the closure of the Center would gut one of the University’s greatest assets. I can testify that it would surely hurt the university’s reputation with outside academics. Such a decision would seem to signal an inexplicable lack of continuing commitment to one of the University’s greatest achievements. I cannot over-emphasize the unfortunate ways in which this move would be interpreted by academics in other institutions, which are also experiencing budgetary shortfalls, but which are concentrating on retaining their core strengths. When I was at University of Toronto, I was highly impressed by the determination and commitment of the administration and faculty members to build a world class university. I would hate to see the University settling instead for becoming a second rank institution.
Yours sincerely
Henry Farrell
Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs
The George Washington University.
{ 12 comments }
Alex Livingston 07.06.10 at 9:53 pm
Thank you for sharing your letter. Supporters of the Centre have put together a group on Facebook and are asking for friends and allies to write to President Naylor, Provost Mysak, and Dean Gertler to ask them to reconsider their short-sighted decision.
The Dean, Provost and President can be contacted at these addresses:
President David Naylor
Provost Cheryl Misak
Dean Meric Gertler
FB group: “http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=140864242594644&ref=mf”:http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=140864242594644&ref=mf
Renee 07.06.10 at 9:57 pm
Ah, if it wasn’t for the request to be polite, mine would read something like this:
“Dear President Naylor,
I see that the U of T is no exception: as usual, when budgets are tight, the first thing to go is ethics.
Yours sincerely,
&etc.”
Alex Livingston 07.06.10 at 9:57 pm
Sorry. HTML error:
President David Naylor (david.naylor@utoronto.ca)
Provost Cheryl Misak (cheryl.misak@utoronto.ca)
Dean Meric Gertler (meric.gertler@utoronto.ca)
Michel-Antoine Xhignesse 07.06.10 at 11:17 pm
I got the following response to my own email earlier today:
—
“Dear Friend of the Centre for Ethics,
I am responding to you as the Provost of the University of Toronto, but also as an occasional participant in the Centre’s activities; as someone who works in the field of ethics; and, indeed, as the person who initially came up with the idea of a Centre for Ethics over a decade ago when I was Chair of the Department of Philosophy. At that point the proposal was set aside because we could not raise funds to endow the Centre, as we must if we are to offer visitorships in the economic climate in which publicly-funded universities find themselves. When the Centre was successfully launched through the exemplary initiative and commitment of its first director, that launch was made possible by seed funding provided by something called the Academic Initiatives Fund. There was a clear understanding that the University could not maintain this financial commitment in the long term, and thus that funds had to be raised from the private sector if it was going to be sustainable.
The Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science is working within a very difficult budget situation. He is on the way to pulling the Faculty out of it so as to preserve and enhance the excellent scholarship, research, and teaching that is at the heart of the University of Toronto. He and his Academic Planning Committee have come to the hard decision to close the Centre, while committing significant resources to support the research and teaching of ethics for a broader range of our community members, including our undergraduates. A committee to work out how to best use those resources is to be chaired by the Chair of the Department of Philosophy and will be entirely driven by faculty members working in ethics. While this decision is deeply disappointing for all those involved with the Centre for Ethics, I hope that you understand that very difficult decisions are constantly being made in a university under financial pressures. I assure you that the University of Toronto’s commitment to the finest research in and teaching of the subject of ethics is unwavering, despite this recent shift in how the Faculty of Arts and Sciences goes about it.”
Cheryl Misak
Vice-President and Provost
—
tomslee 07.07.10 at 2:04 am
“The Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science is working within a very difficult budget situation.”
I guess that would be because of the university’s recent $1.3 billion loss after U of T “brought U.S.-style investment management to Canadian campuses.”
Bill Gardner 07.07.10 at 10:15 am
That is terrible. I am part of a group that is trying to establish an interdisciplinary Center for Ethics and Human Values at Ohio State. Any thoughts about what to do, and what not to do, would be welcome.
NomadUK 07.07.10 at 12:15 pm
Well, it’s nice to know that it’s not just the UK that’s shutting down important parts of its universities in the relentless, competitive, free-market dive to the bottom. And Canadians are always such pleasant company.
Andrew W. 07.07.10 at 1:26 pm
Henry,
Thanks for raising this. I should also note that Arts and Sciences has decided to consolidate nearly all the Language and Literature Faculties at the University into a super department.
And maddeningly, they are disbanding the 42 year old Centre for Comparative Literature, which was founded by Northrop Frye, and turning it into a collaborative program under this new super department.
As a long-time student of the U of T, it seemed as though we were somewhat insulated from what was going on in the US and the UK. I was sadly mistaken.
Steven 07.07.10 at 9:11 pm
For the sake of argument:
One of the reasons I didn’t attend West Point was because all of its humanities departments were crammed into one building and there was no way to major in philosophy per se, only to earn a BS in Humanities or something like that. This worked well for West Point’s mission, but it didn’t work well for me, for obvious reasons.
So it is genuinely bad news that any university is consolidating its humanities subjects into one large one superdepartment. It shows a lack of respect for each of the academic traditions assimilated. Why not just merge Earth Science and Astronomy as well?
That having been said, I often wonder how much we need all of our ethics research centers. There is certainly a lot of work to be done in ethics (etc.), and this need renews itself as society evolves and new questions come about, or old questions become more pressing or sudddenly more difficult to answer. But it seems like the work could be done by a the same of fewer number of centers as we have now. On one level, I am all for an overabundance of centers, departments and positions. I enjoy scholarship and this would suit me personally. But Tolstoy might ask, “How much ethics center does a man need?” It’s more than six feet, but probably less than what we have now. And it goes without saying that if this is the case for ethics research, then it is doubly so for comparative literature and triply so for sociology.
If you think about it seriously, most of the best philosophizing that comes to mind was done in the prior decades when there were many fewer doctors of philosophy out there and almost none of the centers for advanced study, etc. that now seem to have sprung up everywhere. Even if we eliminated half of the ones we have these days, very good work would still get done.
What I fear losing the most, however, is the means to meaningfully present ethics to practitioners and those who are consumers, not producers, of scholarship: the bankers, lawyers, teachers, doctors, cops, soldiers, etc. When institutions tighten their belts, it seems like the need to discuss and take seriously theories of ethical conduct might be the first to go. Students need to learn how to bank; beyond that, who cares about how they should behave in doing so? It seems so prudish. Or so the argument goes, with miserable consequences. Do we need a center to do this, or just a series of well-stocked philosophy departments? Ones that, unlike centers, might require professors to teach undergraduates?
Joe Heath 07.09.10 at 2:02 am
For Bill Gardner at Ohio State,
As an insider in this whole UofT business, I would say that the following lessons are to be learned: People sometimes forget that money in a university comes from only three places: tuition, research grants, and donors. It doesn’t actually come from the dean’s office, an “academic initiative fund†or a promise made by the principal – these are just allocation mechanisms. During good years, all sorts of things get funded just on someone’s say-so. But in order to make your budget defensible in hard times you have to make sure that there is a direct line between your budget and one of the university’s three primary revenue sources.
So there are three (long-term) viable models for running a research-focused ethics centre:
1. Get a big endowment.
2. Get major (i.e. 6-plus figure) research grants, and fund operations with the skim-off. (This tends to be most feasible in centres that do some bioethics.)
3. Take on a significant role in teaching and tie this in to your research activities, so that they can’t cut one without losing the other. (E.g. take over responsibility for all the big applied ethics service courses, administer some undergraduate programs, etc., that way if they cut your budget, it throws their curriculum into chaos – and they have to hire replacement instructors, so they don’t gain that much.)
The UofT Ethics Centre did none of the above. So the lesson learned: If you think your research activities are going to be funded out of the university’s operations budget, you’re setting yourself up as the low-hanging fruit in the first budget-cutting exercise. And if you do that, not even having Cheryl Misak as the provost can save you. If you look at other interdisciplinary centres at UofT that were left untouched (e.g. Centre for the Environment, Joint Centre for Bioethics, Jackman Humanities Centre), you can see that each of them conforms to one of the three models listed above.
The decision to cut the Ethics Centre came as a big surprise to all of us, but mainly because we didn’t know that the Dean’s Office was planning such radical cuts.
Shelby 07.09.10 at 6:13 am
to anyone in the field (and to sympathetic outside observers to me)
s/b “outside observers like me”?
Lynda Lange 07.21.10 at 4:16 pm
Response to JOE HEATH: Joe is actually badly mistaken that money for universities comes only from tuition, research grants, and donors. The primary sources of funding for Canada’s major universities have traditionally come from the federal government and the provincial governments. During the surge of neo-liberalism in the 1990’s, money from the federal government that had been ear-marked for universities (our federal government used to have the “spending power” to designate this kind of thing), became available for the province to use as it chose. The Harris/Eves government chose not to spend it on universities, leaving Ontario the *least well funded* in terms of public funding for universities in the whole of North America! That’s when the emphasis on getting research grants and donors became really intense, with many adverse effects on the humanities. Joe seems to be one “insider” (as he terms himself) who has swallowed this idea completely. With friends of the humanities like this,…..?
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