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How does one go about justifying the utility of a course in Shakespearean tragedy? KARL SCHEMBRI reports on the government’s new drive for “functionality” in higher education
Closing down the university’s Faculty of Arts just like good old Dom Mintoff rudely did in the 70s may not be the Nationalists’ declared plan but if you take away the corporate metaphors and the nicely worded reports, that’s what seems to be in store for the humanities departments.
Things have turned full circle at Tal-Qroqq: couched in phrases such as “zero based budgeting” and “formula funding”, every department and course will soon have to become “functional” and justify its existence, and the faculty of arts may be the sacrificial lamb as government funding tightens.
Rector Roger Ellul Micallef urged lecturers and heads of department at the faculty late last year to start thinking about it. The call comes at a time when the government is evaluating university funding amid expectations that courses produce students ready to service the job market, in a somehow diluted version of Mintoff’s attack on the “useless” Bachelor of Arts course but with a bit more style and trendy language.
This time round, there will be no outlandish declarations from the Prime Minister but the funding tap will just say it all, and to regulate that tap there will be a National Commission for Higher Education, which has yet to be set up.
“The university has always been very careful to make every penny it is entrusted with count,” Prof. Ellul Micallef told MaltaToday. “It is no secret that it has been asking for formula funding to be introduced when its financial requirements are being worked out. To this effect it is at the moment looking at how best to implement zero based budgeting.”
That, in simpler language, means that every course will have to justify its funding every year, explaining why it needs the funds and how it will spend every cent of them.
The university has already started doing the first audit trails for its courses, but these are set to intensify so that every department justifies its programmes from the ground up each financial year, with student intake for each course being an essential ingredient for funding.
While this increases accountability, the notion of ‘functionality’ raises eyebrows among certain academics, particularly at the faculty of arts where making an argument about the functionality of some of the courses offered is not as easy as in the case of medicine, IT and engineering.
Put bluntly, how does a course in Shakespearean tragedy or mediaeval philosophy compare with the utility of, say, heart surgery or international banking?
If that is an unfair question, then it is up to the faculty to argue with whoever will be entrusted with distributing funds to make the objection, but statistics are already somehow working against the humanities.
Employment figures of 2004 graduates according to course, compiled by registrar’s office, partly illustrate the point: Medicine and surgery students have the highest employment figures – 100 per cent are employed, mostly by the government which binds them to offer their services to the public health service in the initial years of their career. Jobs in the education sector absorb a good one-third of all university graduates, while banking, finance and auditing take 12 per cent of all the ex-alumni.
In contrast, 21 per cent faculty of arts students who graduated in 2004 were still searching for a job nine months since they graduated, the same study shows, surpassed only slightly by communication students – mainly because of job saturation in the media – and health care students in areas where government jobs have been effectively stopped.
Defending the humanities territory, the dean of the Faculty of Arts, Professor Dominic Fenech, admits the new funding system mentioned in the Chalmers Report on higher education should get the faculty “to start thinking ahead”.
“We definitely cannot take the backseat and assume everything will remain the same, although that applies to any faculty which wants to remain up to date,” he says. “When Mintoff closed the faculty of arts in the 70s, he introduced a policy of keeping only vocational courses. The new zero-based budgeting policy which the government wants to introduce cannot really be said to take us back to the 70s, but certainly it does not go against that policy either. Government does not say it is adopting Mintoff’s policy but it is not rejecting it in its attitude.”
Prof. Fenech says he does not believe his faculty to be “under threat” from the government.
“If anything for political reasons, this government won’t close down the faculty of arts,” he said.
He cites other figures which give a different picture from the survey conducted by the registrar’s office. In a questionnaire sent to all the graduates since the first BA courses started in 1987 and with a slightly over 50 per cent response rate, it transpired that only two of the respondents were unemployed.
“The truth is that unlike vocational courses, a degree from the faculty of arts gives you a high level of education that makes you versatile and gives you intellectual maturity, as is after all required by the labour market,” Prof. Fenech says.
The dean does concede that the challenge for his faculty may be greater than for others, but he adds: “It’s a rude awakening, in that you no longer get a job because you have a degree. A BA is just the visa to the labour market, where you have to prove yourself to survive.”
Speaking at an arts faculty meeting, the rector urged the humanities departments to offer more relevant and “functional” courses while praising the new diploma in functional Arabic and courses in translation and interpreting. He also encouraged them to start teaching other languages such as Chinese, German and Spanish on the same model.
“The humanities constitute an integral part of our heritage; there is no reason why graduates in these disciplines should not seek and find employment in a number of areas not necessarily related to any specific discipline, as happens in all European countries,” Prof. Ellul Micallef told MaltaToday.
“As the labour market becomes more varied and rapidly changing, the university aims at producing graduates who are flexible, can think for themselves and are capable of problem solving. University education should be seen as a springboard from which those graduates, who have not been trained for a specific profession, should also be able to successfully occupy various positions in the labour market.”
The commission entrusted with funding will be financing specific programmes, not the departments, meaning that every course has to be costed and justified.
“That ignores all the work that is done by departments beyond teaching,” Prof. Fenech said. “It ignores, for example, the input of the Maltese language department to the national situation.”
While the new funding may benefit the functional courses and programmes for translators, it may, as Prof. Fenech states, overlook the benefits of having departments contributing to society – although some may actually be criticised for lacking initiative and taking it too easy for the last two decades.
Asked what kind of arguments he will have to make to the commission, Prof. Fenech says he is not too concerned that his faculty will be under attack although he is clearly irritated by the constant bombardment to prove his faculty’s worth.
“First I have to convince them we need graduates from this faculty,” he says. “There is a record of employment, but not just that. Take the language departments, which make up half of our faculty. Is there anyone who will argue Maltese is not important? If anyone from the commission asks me to justify the existence of the Maltese department I will send them packing. And you have to be really short sighted to argue against the English department when nationally, levels are declining.”
And the same faculty services many courses from other faculties and institutes, establishing itself as a reliable backbone of instruction on campus.
The rector seems to give a sympathetic hearing to the faculty: “The faculty of arts is itself meeting requirements that have arisen since Malta joined the EU in the fields of interpreting and translating. Every faculty needs to seek out these niches and ensure that national requirements are seen to. There is certainly no danger of turning back full circle. The university and the country need a vibrant and dynamic Faculty of Arts – such as the one we have.”
kschembri@mediatoday.com.mt
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