Volume 28, No. 8             Editor: Mark Langer               November, 1997





INTELLECTUAL AND HUMAN LOSS UNDER

PROGRAM REDUNDANCY







In a meeting with the presidents of Ontario universities in Toronto last week, Premier Harris asked "who

in the university system will decide to reduce enrollments or close programs?".  Rather than making the

case for the universities, management at Carleton appears eager to do Premier Harris' bidding.  And, they

will do it behind closed doors in Senate on 28 November.



Management's rush to program redundancy means that faculty at Carleton have only until 27 November

to contact university senators to, at the very least, take sufficient time to study the issue and permit

consultation with all stakeholders before committing an act unprecedented in modern Canadian university

history.  Management wishes to force an action that more prudent administrations have been unwilling

to take.  At Carleton even the most minor academic changes are done after extensive consultation with

faculty boards.  Management thinks that the most drastic action taken by any Canadian university can be

achieved through a flaunting of due process.  Even minor course description changes are done with

greater consultation and debate.



Lest there be any among us who think that program closure at Carleton university is a simple matter of

tearing a few pages out of the Calendar, one must consider the intellectual and human costs of such a

move.  Tenured faculty constitute the only real capital that a university has.  The loss of such faculty,

tragic in terms of human cost, also constitutes a serious diminishment of the intellectual assets of

Carleton.







                                                          Continued overleafCUASA will profile some of the faculty who are threatened with job loss through program redundancy. 

Look at the faces of your colleagues and consider the injury to our community if these scholars are

terminated.  Then, contact Senate with your views.





                            FRANCISCO HERNANDEZ

             Full Professor, Spanish and Comparative Literature











































Academic Distinctions:

Corresponding member of the Spanish Royal Historical Academy

Marston LaFrance Fellowship, Carleton University

Raimundo Lida Lecturer, Harvard University

Visiting Scholar at St. John's College, Cambridge University



Publications and Grants:

3 books

3 chapters in books

21 refereed publications

20 papers presented at scholarly conferences

12 research grants



Special note: Professor Hernandez has received Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada

grants of 1/4 million dollars for a project to catalogue and edit the unpublished medieval documentation in the

Cathedral Archive of Toledo, for publication in the series Monvmenta Ecclesiae Toletanae Historica.