By Katie Stobbart (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: February 4, 2015
Often it seems as if this university is a game of Operation, and administration is trying to remove vital organs instead of plastic toys.
Such is the case with the recent announcement that the Writing Centre, which has operated since about the time this institution transitioned from Fraser Valley College into a university college, will be closed.
If you’re not familiar with the game, the players in Operation must remove plastic pieces from cavities in a human body using tweezers without touching the edges. If the edge is touched, a buzzer will sound.
Likewise, the decision to remove the Writing Centre, which appears to have been made exclusively at the administrative level, seems to be striking a nerve in the UFV community. It’s not the only nerve that has twinged recently, but I have to hope it elicits a stronger counteractive response than previous decisions have.
The space the Writing Centre currently occupies will be converted into what is being called an Academic Success Centre. For further detail, I invite you to read the news article here.
UFV administration is trying to market this as a positive transformation, as a kind of vision for student support. However, the decision means lowering service quality as well as erasing a service that performs a specific, necessary function.
Furthermore, the Academic Success Centre will be redundant of existing services. There are two main categories of academic support: one helps students grasp material and place it within a context, while the other helps frame one’s understanding in written form.
For the first category, students go to professors. That is the best way to get clarity when it comes to assignments, surpassing hurdles that bar comprehension, and achieving more than just the prescribed learning outcomes. Professors, obviously, have a much better understanding of the material they are teaching than even an A+ upper-level student. It’s also their job to impart that understanding to you.
When students need help with the second category — expression of what they’ve learned —they go to the Writing Centre, where there are trained and skilled professionals at the same level of expertise as instructors.
Peer support is valuable, but it should not take the place of services offered by professionals. To suggest otherwise by imposing a decision like this on faculty and students is not only myopic and disrespectful; it’s insulting.
While some of the cuts to academic services over the past couple of years have been directly linked to budget cuts handed down from the BC government, the message from UFV administration this time is that this is not a cost-saving measure.
It begs the question: what could the reasoning possibly be for trying to fix a system that isn’t broken? I don’t have the answer. As far as I can surmise, it’s just another whim of the powers that be, like the UFV 40th anniversary debacle. Neither students nor faculty are properly consulted in such decisions; Umbridge-like decrees are nailed into place before anyone can say otherwise. It’s not up for debate. Administration is closing the Writing Centre, whether you like it or not.
Then they try to pass it off as the most fragrant shit any institution has had the misfortune to defecate.
I hope that makes you angry. This university cares more about profit and cosmetics than it does about your academic success or personal growth, no matter how they try to spin the story.
Is this the pattern at all universities? Here it seems it’s all about bang for buck — how can we offer an education to a financially strapped and most often disengaged student body and go home with our pockets overflowing?
I love UFV; the principles and values it purports to have are worth striving for, and, at what I feel must be the tail-end of an era in its existence, I have gotten a good education here. But I fear future students won’t get the same, and certain administrators should be given the pink slip before they decide to cripple another limb of the university — and the students — they’re supposed to serve.
Note: The Cascade received an op-ed this week from a UFV alumnus regarding the closure of the Writing Centre; said alumnus has started a petition and is in the process of organizing a protest to take place on February 25.
