In the face of looming deficits, McGill recently announced that they would be initiating drastic budget cuts over the next three years. During a town hall held on February 7, Chancellor Deep Saini, Provost Christopher Manfredi, and Vice-President Fabrice Labeau proposed slashing up to $45 million from the university’s 2025-26 budget. According to Manfredi, most of these cuts would come in the form of hundreds of layoffs and abolished positions. He also announced a new initiative called Horizon McGill, which would supposedly conduct “a re-examination of the university’s budget model” in the name of improving efficiency.
For McGill students and faculty in the Arts, these cuts will have disastrous consequences. McGill’s announcement is the latest blow in years of major rollbacks to the Arts department. In 2013, the university scrapped 100 Arts classes for the 2013-14 academic year, in what our Editorial Board then described as “a deprioritization of the Arts program at McGill and a disregard for student feedback.” A 2016 article by the Bull & Bear examined the trickle-down impact of provincial and university funding cuts on the Arts department. These cuts hindered the department’s ability to hire new faculty and teaching assistants (TAs), grant McGill undergraduates access to proper advising resources, and provide the necessary courses for students’ programs of study.
The 2024-25 academic year has been no exception to this alarming trend. In the wake of the Legault government’s tuition hikes targeting anglophone universities like McGill, as well as the federal government’s restrictions on study permits for international students, the ensuing slew of cuts was all but guaranteed. At the beginning of the Fall term, rumours circulated of more Arts classes possibly being dropped. This term has seen the university push for a 15 per cent reduction in Arts TA hours, which the Association of Graduate Students Employed at McGill (AGSEM) — the union representing TAs at McGill — is urgently organizing against. The TA dearth in the Arts is especially dire following years of austerity measures, with reports of some 100-student classes being assigned a singular TA.
This disheartening mentality — that somehow the humanities are expendable, that they must always be the first on the chopping block when it comes to tightening the fiscal belt — is a notion that is neither new nor unique to our university. Over the last decade, the humanities have been in decline across North America. According to Statistics Canada, post-secondary enrollment in the humanities has dropped by 18.5 per cent between the 2002-03 and 2022-23 academic years. A 2018 article in The Atlantic discussed a similar decline in the United States, with the percentage of humanities majors with respect to degrees in the US dropping from approximately seven to four percent between 2010 and 2017.
Drew Faust, former President of Harvard University, attributed this decline to “the pressure that students are feeling and being subject to about finding jobs and making sure their financial investment in education is going to pay off.” Her assessment is evidently reflected in enrollment trends for other, more financially lucrative subjects. Concurrently to the humanities’ crisis, the number of post-secondary students in science, engineering, and business has seen unprecedented growth. In Canada, the annual number of mathematics and computer science majors nearly doubled from 78,000 in 2002-03 to 142,000 in 2022-23. In the same timeframe, the number of business and management majors increased by 60 per cent, and the number of health-related majors by nearly 50 per cent.
This combination of financial stresses and peer pressure has fuelled a vicious cycle against the humanities: the lack of students leads to further cuts in the Arts by government and university administrations, thus driving the next berth of aspiring humanities majors away from gutted programs. “Students and their parents have increasingly come to see a college or university education as vocational training,” observed Paul L. Jay, Professor of English at Loyola University Chicago, in his 2014 book The Humanities “Crisis” and the Future of Literary Studies. “[People] want maximum value for the high cost of higher education, and that value is increasingly measured in utilitarian terms.”
To challenge this decline, some North American universities have taken to mandating a basic Arts curriculum for all undergraduate students, regardless of major. The Core Curriculum at Columbia University, in place since 1919, consists of a shared five-course syllabus in the humanities for all undergraduates. The Curriculum aims to “introduce cornerstone ideas and theories from across literature, philosophy, history, science, and the arts,” setting up a baseline in the Arts that is absent for non-Arts majors at many other institutions. Similarly, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology upholds the humanities, arts, and social sciences (HASS) requirement, especially important considering its critical role and reputation as a STEM-focused university.
Unfortunately, McGill — and Canadian institutions as a whole — are falling behind. Just last year, Queen’s University implemented catastrophic cuts to their Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). A January 2024 report by Queen’s Journal detailed how, supposedly in response to Ontario’s Premier Doug Ford’s tuition freeze, the university cut “undergraduate classes with less than 10 students and graduate classes with less than five students” in the FAS, while further shuttering “admissions to Arts and Science Online degree and certificate programs.” These cuts were implemented despite months of student campaigning, and following a $100 million donation by alumnus Stephen Smith to the very engineering department named after him.
The fate of Queen’s University’s FAS could be a harbinger of what awaits McGill’s Arts faculty and students. Provincial funding cuts? Check. An administration that seems hellbent on kicking the “less profitable” departments to the curb when it comes to distributing those cuts? Check. Such a mindset — that in order for a department to be successful, they must bring monetary benefit to the university — is abhorrent and in direct opposition to McGill’s very mission statement preaching “the advancement of learning and the creation and dissemination of knowledge.” The very purpose of universities is to enable intellectual pursuits that would not be possible elsewhere. We are not Wall Street venture funds: we are places where passionate people gather and teach and learn.
Universities and governments should be doing everything possible to make the humanities more accessible. Nonetheless, when faced with the prospect of austerity cuts, the McGill administration is once again throwing the Arts under the bus. Once more, the Arts are on the chopping block — and it is up to us, the students of McGill, to defend it.