Thursday, February 4th 2010

By Grace Evans

Someone put up their hand in my third-year English class the other day and asked, “Do we need a ‘works cited’ page for the essay?”

This was in a third year English class. Shouldn’t it be obvious that yes, you need a works cited? And yes, you should use punctuation. And put your name on it when you hand it in.

The faculty of Humanities’ programs have become so interdisciplinary that most of my classes are too general and generic.

There is a reason that Humanities is sorted into individual programs; English students and Philosophy students do not necessarily have the same training as each other, so it is easier to teach and to learn in an environment where the assumed previous knowledge is at a similar level. For example, an English student would not question including a works cited.

“The Fairy Tale” (ENGLISH/CSCT 3F03 and CL 3JJ3) used to be a Comparative Literature class, but since the Comp Lit program was collapsed into English and Cultural Studies, a lot of those courses were too.

What used to be a small class is now a two hundred-seat lecture in the Engineering building. While my perspective as an English major is limited, I suspect the case is similar elsewhere at Mac.

The professor, Dr. Iris Bruce, is phenomenal. She is subtly hilarious and obviously, incredibly smart. But with the immense number of students in the tightly packed room, the quality of education that students are receiving is less than great.

There are so many people in the room that I can’t hear what the prof is saying.

Now, I am not one of those keen students eager to listen attentively to every word the professor utters. But I actually cannot hear sitting in the fifth row on the side, because of the abundance of students talking or playing, I kid you not, Petz Catz 2 directly in front of me on their 17-inch laptop.

Surprise, surprise: McMaster wants to make money. Obviously hiring a couple of TAs to do the marking makes the expansion of 3F03 worth their while; they still only have to pay one prof. And making a third-year English class an open elective with no prerequisites, they’ve got an easy moneymaker.

It was the same story with the “Children’s Literature” class that was offered last year.

Classes like “Studies in Women Writers” (WOMEN ST/ENGLISH 2K06) are good. The prerequisites are WOMEN ST 1A03 and 1AA3, or registration in English or Women Studies. The same level of knowledge is assumed, and the cross-listing makes sense: the class looks at literature that is written by and for women, and deals with women’s perspectives and issues in the text.

This cross-listing makes sense, and is beneficial to students.

Another problem class for me this year was Critical Race Studies, with an immensity of cross-listings: ENGLISH 3A03, COMP LIT 3RR3, CSCT 3A03, PEACE ST 3A03 and WOMEN ST 3H03. While I think that Dr. Daniel Coleman is an intelligent and communicative professor, the course’s quality could be much improved with a narrower focus. The class was just so general and so populated that I did not leave the course feeling like I had learned very much. Another moneymaker that enables Mac to run one class that fulfills program requirements for multiple majors by filling 200 seats. One prof and one classroom satisfy what the university could fulfill with several much more focused classes and profs.

I don’t doubt that interdisciplinary education could be valuable in theory: students get to experience the different viewpoints of different majors, and learn something outside of their regular everyday curriculum. But this is not what is happening in many cross-listed courses at Mac.

With the collapse of Comparative Literature, the phasing out of Mac’s Women’s Studies program, and the impending removal of the Art History program, I would not enter into a Humanities program at Mac under the current climate. Becoming increasingly and increasingly homogenous, I can only guess that pretty soon there will just be one generic Humanities degree at McMaster.