A Farewell to Atkinson College

A great experiment in part-time, adult education is coming to an end tomorrow. Atkinson College at York University, now called the Atkinson Faculty of Liberal and Professional Studies, opened its doors in 1962. While the name Atkinson---after Joseph E. Atkinson, the founder of the Toronto Star---will survive in the form of the Atkinson Centre for Mature and Part-time students (an advocacy body on behalf of mature students), the College that was dedicated to the education of those who work during the day and go to school at night will be no more. Tomorrow the new Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies will come into existence. It will include both the former Atkinson and the former Faculty of Arts.

Tens of thousands of men and women, whose families come from all parts of the world, have graduated from Atkinson. Atkinson College was founded on a clear premise. Part-time students, typically working people who had to attend classes in the evening and young students who could not afford to go to school full-time, should have a college and a faculty devoted to their needs.

At Atkinson, students were taught by professors who devoted their careers to part-timers. The faculty learned, through experience, that there was no level playing field for their students, who ranged in age from those in their late teens to septuagenarians who were taking a degree during their retirement years. Over the decades, Atkinson became Canada’s greatest repository of know-how in the teaching of part-time university students.

Atkinson was established at a time when university education was becoming accessible to a much wider range of people in Canada. Up until the end of the 1950s, universities were primarily available to members of a narrow social elite. The idea that working people could and should have access to a university education was novel, even revolutionary. That changed dramatically in the 1960s, when new universities and colleges were established and the doors were thrown open to enormous numbers of students who never would have contemplated a university education previously. That change forever transformed the culture of universities.

Atkinson was on the cutting edge of the drive to democratize what had been a rather hide bound system in the past. Greater accessibility was the watchword of the time. Atkinson took that concept even further when it set up a faculty whose goal was to educate students who worked during the day and needed to attend classes in the evenings and in the summer. These students would earn degrees over many years and would thereby upgrade their professional standing. In the early years, primary school teachers who had not yet obtained university degrees were one of the largest of Atkinson’s constituencies.

From the very start Atkinson was about much more than upgrading professionals who needed a university degree. Without being fully conscious of what this implied at the outset, Atkinson was learning through experience how to educate people who combined work and study in their lives. Included in this wide cohort could be twenty year olds who had to earn an income while attending university. Included as well were older people who needed, or simply wanted, a university degree.

As it reached out to these new constituencies, Atkinson classes became unique settings from the first days. Course directors, who were used to teaching the traditional cohort of full-time students, discovered that they were operating in a new and unfamiliar environment. Classes in the arts and social sciences became more than academic exercises. They became passionate discussions about the relevance of the subjects under scrutiny. How the economy was performing was more than a matter for essays or exam questions, it was about what would happen to the people sitting in the classroom. Students raised questions about whether it mattered to learn about the past. As the composition of the classes changed over the years to include much larger numbers of immigrants and people of colour, students questioned whether subjects were being taught through a lens that was culturally much too narrow. One of the remarkable effects of Atkinson classes has been the way they transformed learning, not only for students who worked during the day and went to school in the evening, but for traditional day students as well. Younger students found the interaction with their older and culturally more diverse classmates highly stimulating. Long before it became the policy of Atkinson to coordinate its course offerings with those of the Faculty of Arts, Atkinson classes were sought out by Arts students who often found them more satisfying than the courses in their own Faculty.

It has been said that one of the differences between Atkinson classes and those in the Faculty of Arts was the sound of voices. Even at the first class, before class, Atkinson students talked to each other. They had something to say and were excited about saying it. This excitement, if nurtured, continued throughout the course. Atkinson students brough their life experiences to the class. Their experiences could, and have often became, the basis for the scholarly ventures of faculty members. Students who brought the “real” world into the classroom changed academia. They could even change the world.

The Atkinson faculty was recruited to teach in a novel environment, but faculty members received no special training to prepare them for this. They learned on the job. What they were discovering, in practice if not in theory, was a new pedagogy. They were learning about a diverse student population, made up of people from widely different backgrounds, socio-economic circumstances and different generations. They were adapting to a setting in which the notion of a “level playing field” simply didn’t work. Some students had access to libraries only at rare times, others were raising small children, still others had serious health problems and many had obligations to families located on the other side of the world. Decades later, faculty would have to adapt to the problems that arose when they taught Internet courses to students who sometimes were literally on the other side of the world.

However little formal preparation they may have had to face these challenges, faculty found Atkinson an exhilarating place to work. For most faculty members the adjustment to teaching in the evenings and in the summer was far from insurmountable. While other faculty in the university shuddered at the thought of such a schedule, the advantages that went with teaching such interesting and lively people more than made up for the inconvenience. Atkinson faculty made their mark as scholars and it has been a considerable one. For the most part, it was of little concern to them that members of other faculties sometimes dismissed Atkinson as a “lunch bucket” institution. That went with the territory for a college geared to educating working people.

Collegiality, a word often lightly used in descriptions of academe, has been a genuine characteristic of Atkinson’s faculty. While not free from disputes, Atkinson’s broad purpose has reinforced a cooperative spirit among faculty members. When faculty were asked to comment on what made the institution distinctive, they regularly noted that egalitarian values and a commitment to social justice made Atkinson a collegial place to work, one in which faculty members demonstrate respect and care for one another. This attitude, many believe, has been a welcome antidote to some of the more negative aspects of academic careerism.

Over the years, Atkinson has nurtured an administrative staff that is remarkably well adapted to addressing the special needs of the college’s student body. Because classes met in the evenings---on the main campus from 7.00 p.m. to 10.00 p.m.---it was crucial for Atkinson offices to remain open after the usual closing time for university offices. Many Atkinson students were not able to visit offices or their course directors before 5.30 or 6.00.

Why were Atkinson faculty members prepared to put up with a schedule that other faculty often regarded as onerous? The answer is that they were teaching in the evening or summer as part of a collective project dedicated to providing access to students with a wide range of needs. In such a setting, senior as well as junior faculty members, regarded this as normal, and not as something to be endured only in the early phase of their careers.

As the years passed, the Atkinson student constituency changed dramatically and in response to the changes, the Atkinson culture continued to evolve. By the mid 1970s, the primary school teachers who needed degrees, had come and gone. Later, nurses provided a large cohort. They came and went. The changes reflected the demographic transformation of the Greater Toronto Area. Not only did Atkinson attempt to reach out to the ethnically and racially diverse population that was the hallmark of the GTA, it sought to contribute to the intellectual needs of a society whose diversity was unique in the world. Atkinson faculty had always emphasized the study of the society around it, specializing in the analysis of Canada and of Canadian political economy. Responding to the dramatic evolution of the metropolis of which it was a part, Atkinson made a commitment to social justice an integral aspect of the work of the faculty. Innovative and critical studies in gender, race, ethnicity and indigeneity were developed.

Not only was social justice to be an essential emphasis of Atkinson courses and of the scholarly projects of faculty members, it was to be built into the process of renewing the faculty. For the first several decades of its existence, Atkinson’s faculty was largely male and white. In the forefront of York University’s drive to hire a faculty that reflected the character of the GTA, Atkinson established an affirmative action programme whose goal was to bring women, people of colour, aboriginals and persons with physical disabilities into the faculty. As a consequence of this commitment, today’s Atkinson faculty much more genuinely reflects the gender, ethnic and racial composition of the GTA than was the case in the past.

The evolution of a culture within a faculty is an exceptionally important phenomenon. It takes place over years, even decades. Dynamic faculties are not able to rest on their laurels, but are required to adapt to changing circumstances and needs. The culture of a faculty is passed down from those who came before to those who take up the challenge. Values, priorities and ways of doing things are essential features of a faculty culture. In universities around the world, the importance of the traditions and cultures of particular colleges and faculties have long been recognized. It is not the external formalities of a culture that ought to be cherished, but rather the vital stream within, the spirit of scholarship, teaching and innovation that is the true life of a faculty. When formalities get in the way, adaptation and originality are placed at risk. Atkinson can claim to have evolved a living tradition that has not been too much burdened by formalities. A set of core values and a record of experience have been handed down from the past to the present.

The administrators at York, who have pushed through the changes that will eliminate Atkinson, are well-motivated and sincere. Those who advocated the demise of Atkinson argued that much more of the entire student population at York was now made up of part-timers, and that therefore, the needs of such students should be met in a huge new faculty that will include those in the present Faculty of Arts and Atkinson. The merger will retain the best of Atkinson, they say.

It was an odd argument. To meet the needs of part-time students, the university should disband the faculty that was best at teaching them.

In practice, what is happening at York is less a merger and more a takeover, of Atkinson by the much larger Faculty of Arts. Professors in the Faculty of Arts have tended to look askance at Atkinson as an institution that does not quite come up to their scholarly standards. It is no secret today that professors in the Faculty of Arts are anxious to avoid having to teach students in the evenings and summers. Although the planners of the merger will rush to tell the public that nothing could be further from the truth, it is virtually certain that in the future part-time students will be taught by those with the least clout in their faculties. It will be a teaching assignment for one’s early years, before tenure has been attained. Gone will be the esprit de corps of a college that was devoted to working people and part-timers.

The merger-takeover is a product of our times. The assumption is that bigger is better and more efficient. If anyone believes that such mergers save money, they almost never do, and are not likely to in this case. In fact, the efficiencies to be achieved have mostly been realized over the past decade or two by opening Atkinson and Faculty of Arts courses to the students of both bodies. Atkinson, it needs to be noted, has never been a financial drag on the rest of the university.

My fear is that in the new faculty, many of the kinds of students I have taught will fall through the cracks, and will not receive the support, encouragement, and expertise they could expect at Atkinson.

A couple of decades ago, a managerial culture grew up in the corporate world, the health care system, government, in academia as well as in other institutions which placed a great deal of emphasis on streamlining, mergers and reorganization to achieve stronger performance and enhanced productivity. Especially in its early days, one of the key ideas of this approach was that great gains could be realized through harmonization and standardization. The history of many large institutions was littered with mergers and reorganizations that not only failed to increase overall productivity but that had the negative effect of choking off valuable experience and ways of doing things in existing institutions and units. In many cases---notoriously, municipal governments---mergers added to overall costs and reduced productivity. Hard and bitter experiences have led to a rethinking of the merger approach. Standardization and harmonization have been rejected in many institutions in favour of mutual recognition, an approach that allows units within an institution to work closely together, while the strengths of existing units are retained. Mutual recognition---it is now widely recognized---allows units to exist side by side, each bringing its strengths to bear on the overall institutional goal. Mutual recognition treats institutions as organic entities with lives of their own.

The foregoing aside, I hope the administrators are right that what is coming will be progress and that the future will be better than the past. The new Department of Equity Studies, which comes into being tomorrow, for instance, holds enormous promise, as do other initiatives.

Having taught at Atkinson for the past thirty-eight years, however, I must be allowed my lament. If it is too late to save what has been, those of us who have spent our working lives in a very special institution cannot be expected to let it pass away as in a dream. We must be permitted to bid farewell to Atkinson.