The future of colleges at Trent is closely tied to the fate of the Office of Student Affairs

This week Arthur covered the first of the Ashley Fellow lectures given by Don Markwell that celebrated colleges as a way to bring faculty and student together. While the Trent community discusses the possibilities and promises of college life at Trent, it is important to remember how the Trent college system has become what it is today and how faculty and staff were driven apart in the first place.

To begin it must be noted that the college system at Trent is, well, dead. College cabinets do exist, but only as remnants of what they once were.  The college cabinets once managed their various colleges in conjunction with the decentralized system of fellows, college heads, faculty and staff.  Today the only input cabinets have in Trent’s governance is as advisors to the Office of Student Affairs (OSA) through the College and Student Services Committee (CaSSC). Today, the powers and responsibilities the cabinets once enjoyed are in the hands of the OSA and its director, Meri-Kim Oliver.  

About ten years ago the administration created the Office of Student Affairs.  This unfortunate creation was designed to take over the college system.  Its only reason for existing is to limit and control the power and influence students (and faculty) have in deciding the course of their own living and working spaces.  Ten years ago every college had a faculty member as a college principal. Today, nearly everything is run out of the OSA. This has a serious effect on how we see our university and ourselves.  The administration set out to dismantle the colleges; it has succeeded.

The Patterson administration restructured Trent, both through  how we interact with the physical buildings and  through how we perceive and imagine college life. When I lived in residence at Langton House at Traill, the door was locked, but only with a key.  There was no warning on the door, there were no security cameras, and the common rooms in Scott House were open to students to meet and discuss issues and plan protests.

When I arrived at Trent, the dining hall at Gzowski College, which forbids outside food, was routinely invaded by student potlucks in protest. Gzowski College was originally designed without student common space or faculty lounges and included a private dining hall. The building is structured to limit dissent and debate and discourages faculty/student interaction, while faculty are encouraged to go home as soon as work is done.

How we perceive colleges as living spaces has been changed as well. The university claims that colleges are not dead. And by getting involved in Living Learning Communities (LLC), students can learn more about themselves. But these LLCs are not run and self-managed by faculty and students, as colleges of the past were, which brought together an interdisciplinary learning environment involving faculty and students. They are an attempt by the OSA to create surface understandings of community. Students, for example, “who aspire to balance a sound mind in a sound body” can join the Active Living LLC. Rather than learn from fellow students and faculty on various issues through academic debate, a student can now live in a second LLC run out of Champlain College, but only if I have a “keen interest in global citizenship and learning through cultural diversity.”

But this is not a residence. This is an attempt to guide student debate away from critical thinking.  

At a liberal arts university we should be interrogating what the terms ‘global citizen’ and ‘cultural diversity’ mean. We should discuss how they are employed to create and maintain power in our community and the world.  We should not just utilize these terms without thinking.  

That is why colleges existed in the first place: to discuss and debate who has power and how to challenge that power.  Students at Trent today are taught to be afraid of those with power and to listen to them.  But universities exist to challenge the status quo and question the role administrations and governments play in our lives. If we are only here to get a job, then universities are no longer doing their job.  

So, who has power now? Meri-Kim Oliver and the OSA. The centralizing force of her office needs to be challenged. If the college system is to be resurrected, as so many hope it will be, then her office needs to be tossed into the Otonabee. It cannot be saved. It must be removed.

Last Updated on Monday, 08 February 2010 18:55