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 To: Trent University Community Re: Colleges and Communities Date: January 30, 2006 You are invited to participate in a series of discussions on the colleges and their contribution to building smaller communities of students, faculty and staff within the overall Trent community. It is this idea of creating a place where you are known and where you belong that underlies the college system at Trent. There is, however, considerable concern among some sectors of the student body, and among some faculty, that Trent has lost this defining characteristic because of a diminution in the role of colleges at Trent. It is time, I believe, for us to give serious thought to just what the college system does now mean at Trent and how it can meet the interests of the current Trent community. I would like our discussions and ideas to be forward-looking. At times the discussions revolve around the early years of Trent when the colleges were much more central to the lives of students and faculty and those discussions do not reflect the university at the beginning of the 21st century. Colleges are, however, a defining organizational principle for Trent and the challenge is to see how they might continue to evolve to meet the changing needs and circumstances of the Trent community. While the wish is to focus on future ideas and plans, I think it would be helpful to provide some background on the colleges and how we have arrived at our present situation. We currently have five residential colleges and a non-residential college for part-time students. The colleges have the following numbers of students:
As can be seen from the table, it took close to ten years from the founding of Trent to establish the college system. The biggest change since 1973 occurred with the closing of Peter Robinson College and the opening of Peter Gzowski College in 2004. The new college added 250 residence spaces to Trent’s inventory, 100 more than in Peter Robinson, along with 77 faculty and administrative offices and teaching spaces. There is a discussion underway of repositioning Traill as a college for graduate students. The details of such a change are still being debated with the idea being to expand college options through the provision of study space for graduate students along with graduate student apartments and associated teaching space. This would be accomplished by converting most of Wallis Hall and Scott House into offices and seminar rooms and selling Bradburn and Langton House. A graduate student college responds to the needs of our current students and the increased number of such students following the implementation of new graduate programs. Whether this plan moves ahead or whether Traill is closed as approved by the Board of Governors in November, 2001, depends on the costs associated with the project. A very significant change in Trent has been the growth in students, faculty and staff numbers.
From a staff and faculty of approximately 420 in the late 1960’s, Trent now employs 344 full time faculty and nearly 1400 full and part-time staff, stipendiary lecturers and students (Oct. 2006). As is to be expected, the colleges have adapted to their changing circumstances while attempting to preserve the underlying principle of creating smaller academic and social communities within the larger university community. The pressures colleges experience with respect to providing programs and developing community for students, staff and faculty are certainly not new, although the magnitude of the issue has increased along with our growing university community. Alf Cole in his history of Trent, reports that “Trent was planned on the twin foundations of small group teaching and the college system.” (Cole p.34). It was the view of the Campus Planning Committee that “students should live together in the company of their academic seniors,” (Cole p.36) and that teaching should occur in small groups. These two factors could be brought together within the college system. The Committee on Colleges (1964) suggested very strongly that colleges needed a high level of independence over such issues as allocating their budgets and that they needed to be represented on the university’s governing bodies. These ideas clearly informed the early days of Catharine Parr Traill College and Peter Robinson College and the new Champlain and Lady Eaton colleges. Some of our current faculty can recall the time they lived in a college as a senior tutor, or a don, the very lively senior common room and the high level of interaction between college faculty and staff and the students through visiting speaker programs, dinners and off campus outings. These experiences have to be balanced against the views of others who found the college system very confining and insular and a means of allocating resources that was, at times, quite inefficient. Further, a major consequence of establishing Trent in Peterborough has been the change in the in the city. Students, faculty and staff have helped create an arts community and social and recreational opportunities which now provide the Trent and the wider community with a much broader and more diverse range of activities than existed in Trent’s early years. These opportunities also compete with the colleges for people’s time and attention and commitment. Much of the discussion about colleges focuses on the residential colleges. JBC is, however, an important support for part-time students in Peterborough and for full and part-time students in Oshawa. The college provides academic advice, ensures the interests of part-time and Oshawa students are taken into account in academic planning, and assists JBCSA with social events. The early plans for Trent suggested there would be twelve colleges by the time Trent enrolled 3,000 students. As in subsequent decades, the plans had to be revised to meet the current realities. Then, as now, two of the most important realities were (and are) the changing nature of the student body and fiscal constraints. To quote Alf Cole again “As early as 1970, two college heads – Denis Smith of Champlain and Ian Chapman of Peter Robinson – produced a report for the Committee on Colleges in which they noted that resident students accounted for as little as thirty per cent of college enrolments. They concluded that “… increasingly for many faculty and perhaps the majority of students, the colleges are irrelevant to their life at the university.” They saw that the intangible but important role that the colleges were supposed to play in academic life had already become a myth to most non-resident students.” (Cole p.48). With many more student members than in the 1970’s, it is not surprising that the issue of integrating non-residential students into college activities is a matter with which College Heads and college cabinets wrestle every year. The sheer increase in student numbers has been accompanied by an increasing diversity of students. Students and students’ lives are more complex now than in previous decades. Many students must balance their university studies with family and work and have limited time for involvement in extracurricular activities. Other students are very active in the life of the university and are the core participants for activities ranging from student governments to athletics to a very wide range of clubs and organizations. Some of these activities are based in colleges while others are attached to academic and service departments or are much more free floating. TUFA members usually join the college in which they have their offices if they are in the humanities or social sciences. Science faculty are distributed among the colleges with a view to maintaining the requisite number of faculty to act as academic advisors for the first year students. The wish to have faculty from a very diverse range of disciplines in each college has given way, in many instances, to the wish to have colleagues from the same discipline in contiguous offices. This trend may well reflect the increased emphasis placed on research and scholarly activity and the advantages to faculty in having colleagues in the same discipline close by with whom to talk and collaborate. Chairs of departments have reported that it is easier to run a department when departmental members are in the same building. These professional requirements result in many faculty having a closer identification with their discipline, its teaching and research, than with a college. Full-time faculty have withdrawn from being senior tutor in favour of other forms of service and found the requirements to be a live-in college head in conflict with their family and professional responsibilities. In the 1980’s faculty decided that College Heads would no longer be involved in the hiring of faculty and voted to be represented on Senate through disciplinary groups rather than by college. Taken together, these changes have lessened the academic role of colleges in the lives of many faculty members. Where student and faculty interests do intersect is in the advising of students. First year advising continues to be based on the college affiliation of students and faculty. Changes have been made recently to ISW that assist both faculty and first year students to connect within the college advisory system. In some programs, however, the college-based advising is supplemented by program-based advising, e.g. nursing, business. Senior Tutors are also college-based and play a lead role in the first year advising system as well as the identification of students at risk. Most upper year students now receive academic advice through the departments of their major subject. The fact that Trent has approximately 8,000 students and that we do not have twelve colleges (25+ if we were to keep a similar student to college ratio as proposed in 1964) speaks to the university’s financial realities. For most of its existence, Trent has operated in a provincial funding environment which has constrained its development and at times has required significant reductions in its operations. This situation was at times exacerbated by Trent’s enrolment history. Enrolments grew much more slowly than predicted and when government grants were tied to student numbers uncertainty about a given year’s budget was the result. Enrolments continue to drive the provincial funds allocated to each university. From the late 1990’s onwards, Trent has addressed the problems caused by small and fluctuating enrolments by adding new programs, both undergraduate and graduate, and by actively seeking to increase its enrolment. New programs attract a different range of students, and a larger enrolment provides more of a financial cushion when numbers do fluctuate. The growth in student numbers has been accommodated through the expansion of teaching facilities on the east bank and the addition of Peter Gzowski College in 2004. Peter Gzowski College was built as part of the province’s Superbuild program associated with the double cohort and following the controversial decision by the Board of Governors to close Peter Robinson College, one of the two remaining downtown facilities. (See attachment for full listing of Trent’s buildings). The decentralization of some administrative and student services, which characterized the colleges in Trent’s early years, has been replaced by a more centralized model. The residential colleges retain their dining halls but responsibility for food service contracts, residences, and residence life programs are now under Housing Services in the Office of Student Affairs. Similarly, the Physical Resources Department has responsibility for all the facilities and their upkeep and the Office of the Registrar timetables all teaching spaces. These changes occurred throughout the 1990’s and were implemented in order to control costs, provide a more equitable and professional standard of service to students and to better utilize all available space. As a consequence of these changes, the role of College Head in residential colleges has also altered. The revised Role and Responsibilities of the College Head (Oct. 2002) states: The College Head provides leadership in the intellectual and cultural life of the College, and in that capacity fosters and facilitates activities that highlight the academic interests and achievements of members of the College community and Trent University, both within the university and to the wider external community. To accomplish these ends, the College Head will both initiate and/or support measures including:
Many changes have occurred within the college system since 1964 – some small and some very significant. Our discussions must be about defining the essence and the spirit of the colleges for the future, through accommodating the changing needs and interests of the students, faculty and staff of Trent University. REFERENCE APPENDIX
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