A New Image for Brock

On December 5^th, Brock University faculty may go on strike for a few reasons, but mainly to preserve academic integrity. The issue is one of funding; and as it stands right now, we have an average of 75% part-time status teachers working in the different areas of study. Right now, it is the various faculties that control how many people in a department have tenure positions but the school administration now wants to be able to decide on this. The problem is this: what is in the best interest to the school administration when there is a problem with school funding to accommodate the new influx of students? Wouldn’t the administration want more part-time teachers (that get paid by the course) to exploit and in the end, have to pay less to keep?

Professors and Associate Professors share the responsibility of the “schools image” with the students because it is them whom, in doing research and writing text, create the scholarly atmosphere and academic integrity. Take the full-timers away and they will be replaced by teachers who will come to school for a few hours (however many classes they teach) and then leave to their other jobs or real life back home.

In an interview of Alfred Holden by Conan Tobias* (both Toronto city enthusiasts), they were talking about the TTC in Toronto and how to get people to use it and love it. Holden says that it needs to create a better, friendlier image for itself and essentially, sell it like a commodity. He says that people should have a warm, fuzzy feeling when thinking about the TTC, a feeling that it is an essential part of their lives. Reading this, I thought: Why do I not feel this way about Brock?

The Brock Press, this week, featured a comic making fun of the whole, “If you can walk and talk, you can go to Brock”, which has become a very widely known expression spread by Brock’s own students. Back in first year, when I was on the school running team, I would chat with the runners at other universities and when they would ask me: “So how do you like Brock?” I would reply: “Well, if you can walk and talk…” but they would finish the phrase for me because the person would already know of it. If you ask me, this is not really good; not really good that I was spreading the expression myself (but, hey, I was just a young kid who didn’t care), but even worse that people in other institutions knew of it as well.

I am not trying to bash Brock here. But maybe if the school approached the students with a new image, in the same way that Holden suggests for the TTC in Toronto, students and alumni would have more of a warm and fuzzy feeling about the school. One thing that won’t help with this is if we have a bunch more part-time teachers that are never around the school because – why would they? – when they are underpaid for the time that they are there.

If we look at schools like UofT, we may find a solution… That is the fact that $34.9 million last year, a large dent in operating cost money, is from alumni endowments. Why would UofT alumni donate all this money to the University? Well, first of all, there are bound to be a few CEO graduates from there, but also because UofT invests in the way that their students feel about the school while they are studying and keeps in touch with them when they leave.

Perhaps the solution to the problem of Brock’s academic integrity lies in advertising the school better to the students and graduates like the TTC might do to Torontonians. This involves a financial investment, initially, but the benefits will come with time.

*McBride, Jason and Wilcox, Alana. Utopia: Towards a New Toronto. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2005. Pg. 176 – 185.