Chair in Canadian Theatre Studies

[Alan Filewod]

I've been following the discussion initiated by Denis regarding the
idea of a Chair in Canadian Theatre Studies. Denis asks if ACTR should
lobby for such a chair.

I have a question and a reservation about this. The question is
simple:  who would we lobby? The research chairs will be allocated to
universities which will then distribute them across faculties as internal
considerations determine. At Guelph, for instance, we can reasonably hope
that our arts faculty will be in contention for two or three chairs. It is
quite clear that in our case, these chairs will have to meet
interdisciplinary program needs.

ACTR can indeed lobby for a research chair in Canadian theatre studies,
but we need to identify the university that is prepared to make that
appointment and argue it at the federal level.  On the federal level,
these chairs are clearly about attracting funding to graduate programs.
Given that there is only one university in English-speaking Canada with a
doctoral program in theatre studies, that doesn't leave much choice. It
would have to be UofT. And would UofT be prepared to dedicate one their
allocated chairs to this field? I don't know the answer to that, but I
haven't seen much evidence that UofT assigns much priority at all to
theatre studies in recent years.

Beyond that, my reservation is the same that I have voiced at Guelph in
our own school meetings. What exactly do we expect to get from these
chairs? Why do we assume that they are in fact something we want? The
federal guidelines propose that these be seven year appointments with
possibilities of renewal. The seven year term seems to suggest that the
appointments are gateways to tenurable positions, but the renewal is
problematic. Either the position becomes a revolving door to cycle new
scholars into tenured positions within the standard tenure-or-out window
of six or seven years, or they will -- contra most faculty association
agreements -- endeavour to keep scholars in non-tenured positions for up
to 14 years. I assume most universities will see these as bridging
positions that will enable programs to juggle new appointments ... but
whether they will actually create new positions remains to be seen. My
concern is that we are being sucked into a corporate shell game in which
the measure of academic success is the procurement of private industry
funding.

What do other folk think?

Alan Filewod
Professor
School of Literatures and Performance Studies in English
University of Guelph
Guelph, ON
Canada N1G 2W1

phone: 519 824-4120  x 2932
fax    519 824-0560