The academic year 2009-10 marked the 100th
anniversary of a psychology department at the University of Alberta. Around this time, the chair of the department
asked a small number of people to gather some information and relics to commemorate
this event. My task became generating a
roster of the department’s full-time faculty members for each year of its
history. I began this task by examining rosters
published online in the University calendar, as well as a couple of published
department histories. This evolved into
spending many, many hours at the Law Library, and later at the Book Depository,
going through older (never digitized!) calendars. In the end, I produced an unwieldy
spreadsheet that documented this aspect of department history.
I had two problems.
The first was to manipulate the spreadsheet into a form, preferably
visual, for easy access and communication.
The second was to convert my long hours of research into something
useful (i.e. a publication). I solved
the first problem by using a particular representation, called a Gantt chart
that provided an engaging visualization of department history for public
display. I also leaned on my
computational vision background to perform some algorithmic processing of this
chart to pull additional information out of it.
This solved the second problem, for I wrote a paper about these visual
methods, a manuscript that recently
appeared in the journal History of
Psychology.
Below you will find one of the less challenging analyses
of the Gantt chart. It graphs the total
number of faculty members in the department for each year of its history.
This graph reveals four different phases of departmental
dynamics. The first is a long period of
slow growth in a small department, ranging from 1909 to 1945. The second is a long period of steady growth
between 1945 and 1988. The department
grew in size by about one faculty member per year over this period. The third is from 1988 to 2001, and marks a
dramatic reduction in the number of faculty members. The final phase is from 2001 to the present,
where there has been some recovery of department size, but not to historical levels.
The sudden downturn in department size, the third phase of
the graph, is of interest today. This
downturn reflects changes in provincial funding. This was a time in which per capita funding
for Alberta postsecondary institutions declined by between 36% and 46%. For instance, the Klein budget of 1993 cut
$140 million from postsecondary education.
Premier Klein said of that budget that “you
have to hunt where the ducks are”, a line recently echoed by the current
minister of Enterprise and Advanced Education.
The graph suggests that after the ducks were hunted, the
hunters left, along with a sizable number of faculty members who were not
replaced. This was a long lasting
effect: two decades after the Klein cuts, department size had not
recovered. Is a similar downward trend
on the horizon as a long-term effect of the recent Redford budget?
Links:
Dawson,
M. R. W. (2013). A case study in Gantt charts as historiophoty: A century of
psychology at the University of Alberta. History
of Psychology, 16, 145-157. pdf
version: 315 kb
If you then correlated this data with student numbers (undergraduate, graduate, U of A totals and Psych degree students) the results would be even more marked, I speculate. In 1988 there were 10,000 fewer undergrads at U of A than in 2013, and about half the number of graduate students: see
ReplyDeletehttp://www.strategic.ualberta.ca/en/ALongLookBackHistoricNumbersfo.aspx