Dear local school experiencing labour unrest,
As a card-carrying member of Halifax’s Joe Q. Public, I absolutely love that you exist in our city. But for fuck’s sake, make up your mind already. Do you want to be a fine arts and critical studies research university, or an art college? Pick one and do it. If the former, support your faculty appropriately and commensurately with other research institutions in the province. If the latter, create teaching-intensive faculty streams and remove the professional practice, research generation and service requirements the job otherwise entails. You can’t have it both ways.
It seems to me that if you spent as much time fundraising as you did making Venn diagrams describing “Community Pillars” and other such horseshit, your identity crisis wouldn’t be one, and you wouldn’t have a bunch of placard-waving, justifiably pissed-off protestors in colorful scarves and designer eyewear marching outside your front door right now.
—You know my name
This article appears in Feb 28 – Mar 6, 2019.
NSCAD has always wanted it both ways. They don’t care about their students just getting more money each year. It’s been this way since I went there almost a decade ago and it won’t change until the day they close their doors.