The Women and Gender Studies (WGST) department at Mount Allison University in Sackville, N.B. may be scaled back as a result of significant funding cuts.
The program, which has been at the university for 17 years, is facing cuts due to a recent budget revision made by the university, according to an email sent to students from WGST acting director Lisa Dawn.
Dawn told CBC News on Feb. 8 that $12,000 has been committed to the program. Mount Allison vice-president Gloria Jollymore said the budget has not been finalized yet, and at least two of the four WGST core courses will be offered in the next academic year.
“We have no intention of cutting or eliminating the Women’s and Gender Studies program at Mount Allison University,” Gloria Jollymore said.
Currently, Mount Allison offers WGST as a minor. Jollymore said those already enrolled will still be able to add the minor to their degree.
Tasia Alexopoulos, a WGST instructor at Mount Allison, said faculty was not given a specific reason behind the budget cuts.
“In terms of the provincial budget [for the university] it was much better than what we expected our outcome to be,” Alexopoulos said. She added enrolment numbers for the program itself have gone up in recent years.
“This academic year, we went from 13 declared minors to 43,” Alexopoulos said. “We had a hundred students in the introduction class last term, many of them wanted to declare a minor . . . now those students are unable to do so.”
News of the potential cuts was met with petitions, silent protests, and protest on social media from members of the Mount Allison community.
A petition started by Mount Allison student Annica Collette on change.org received 6,989 supporters as of Feb. 10, a number almost three times the size of the university’s student population.
“[The number of signatures] was shocking to me, [but] very encouraging,” said Collette, who is enrolled in the WGST minor. “I’m really hoping publicity will put pressure on administration to smarten up and rethink their decision.”
Collette said the budget cuts speak to a larger problem of gender inequality on Mount Allison’s campus.
“There are a lot of issues at [Mount Allison] that need to be addressed as far as gender-based violence goes,” she said, adding that she once experienced her drink getting drugged at the campus bar.
“People seem to believe that there’s not a problem anymore with sexism, but it is so obvious that we need educational subjects like [WGST],” Collette said. “Learning these subjects is our best way of ending inequality.”
Alexopoulos said if the university continues to offer a minor in WGST to students, they must offer classes that are specific to the discipline.
“[WGST] is its own standalone academic rigorous discipline,” she said. “We are not sociology, we are not psychology, and we are not English literature.”
Alexopoulos added that faculty and students are pushing for a sustainable, long-term plan to keep the program at Mount Allison, and that she is grateful for the amount of support the program has been receiving.
Mount Allison was the first university to award a bachelor’s of science degree to a woman in the British Empire, a fact that Collette said once made the university a revolutionary place for women’s education.
“I’m very disappointed in Mount Allison,” Collette said. “We claim to be a liberal arts school and so forward-thinking, and then we turn around and do something like this. It’s a very blatant act of misogyny.”
