SHELLEY SCOTT
I was a student at the Graduate Centre for Study of Drama at the University of Toronto from 1989 to 1997; I did a two-year MA, then entered the PhD programme in 1991 and completed it in the spring of 1997. The Drama Centre is by far the largest graduate drama programme in Canada; although primarily focused on the study of dramatic literature, theatre history, and theory, it also includes a practical requirement which most students fulfill by participating in a number of productions, staged at one of the Centre's two theatre spaces on campus. I thought I would use my own experience as a student at the Drama Centre to explore how the Centre has changed over the past eight years, and how these changes affect the quality of preparation and experience one receives as a student. As I see it, the two most important -- and interrelated -- areas of concern are: 1) financial hardship, and 2) lack of specific training.
Some of the information I have gathered here comes from a session organized by Danielle Couture at the Festival of Original Theatre (FOOT) in March 1997. The session brought together the current and past directors of the Drama Centre and was moderated by Richard Plant. Panelists were: Brian Parker, designer Martha Mann (who participated in place of Ann Saddlemyer), Michael Sidnell, Ronald Bryden and Domenico Pietropaolo (also missing was Colin Visser, Domenico's immediate predecessor). The purpose of the session was to reflect on the origins of the Centre and how it has changed over the years.
Brian Parker began by recounting the founding of the Drama Centre in 1966 with seven students. For me as a current student, the most remarkable thing about his account was the amount of contact with the professional theatre community those students enjoyed, and the large production budgets at their disposal: there were four shows done annually at the Hart House theatre by a professional company with student involvement; there were also connections with the St. Lawrence Centre, the undergraduate programme, and the Poculi Ludique Societas (a company that stages medieval plays). Parker told us that in one season there were 40 productions with Drama Centre involvement; they had to publish their own "What's On" campus newsletter, and the Hart House budget was up to $50,000.
Of course the subsequent speakers at the FOOT session recounted the changes that have occurred over the years -- the implementation of a two-year MA programme, the removal of Hart House from Drama Centre control, the sponsorship of Theatre History in Canada, the move to the current location, and the use of our two theatre spaces. A point I found particularly interesting was Michael Sidnell's argument that the university has moved through three phases, from a social model, to a professorial model, to a market model.
The reality of the market model was brought into focus by Domenico Pietropaolo, the current director. The Drama Centre's budget had been cut by 12% for 1997-98. While the yearly production budget under Ronald Bryden (whose term ended in 1991) was $27,000, it was $10,000 for the 1997-98 season.
While the Centre places a high value on the practical component of the programme, with many discussions over the years as to what purpose productions should serve, the implementation and dissolution of a subscription programme, a guest director programme, and so on, the main area of concern in an academic institution is the availability of courses and faculty, especially faculty who are able to supervise theses. Currently, the biggest difficulty for the Drama Centre is offering a range of courses; being a Centre, most of its faculty are actually attached to other departments and only teach at the Drama Centre part-time. If another department decides not to offer a cross-listed course one year or a cross-appointed faculty member retires, the Drama Centre suffers but has no recourse. This status as a Centre is not unusual in the context of drama at the U of T: undergraduate drama is a programme rather than a department at the St. George, Scarborough and Erindale campuses. Until 1998, there had been no new tenure-stream appointments at the Drama Centre (in drama) since 1984. The Drama Centre is able to offer about 8 to 10 full course equivalents each year, from a core and cross-appointed faculty of 35. Due to recent retirements, we now offer no courses in Asian theatre, and have never offered one in, for example, African theatre. While almost all new thesis proposals are on modern or contemporary topics, the specialty of many cross-appointed English faculty members is the Renaissance. In most cases, contractually-limited professors, who might come in to teach courses in more contemporary areas, are not able to do thesis supervision or committee work.
Our status as a Centre and the lack of connection to the undergraduate programmes contributes to a scarcity of teaching assistantships, since they are offered through other departments or programmes; most notably, the undergraduate programme and the English department and other language departments, which require an English or other language background. Someone like me, for example, with a purely Drama background, stands little chance of an assistantship through those other departments. Since the Drama Centre has moved into offering graduate level cinema studies courses over the past few years, assistantships with undergraduate film studies have also opened up, and almost as many film studies courses are now offered as drama. But the status of this new programme is also still in development, as one cannot pursue a thesis on a topic based purely in film.
To get a better idea of just how the Drama Centre has changed financially for students over the past eight years, I asked Rob Moses, the administrative assistant for the Centre, for some numbers. I compared figures for 1989 (the year I entered the programme to do my MA), 1991 (the year I began the PhD programme), and 1996.
In the fall of 1989, there were a total of 61 students (16 MA and 45 PhD). Among the 61, there were 26 scholarships in total.1 There were eight and a half assistantships offered through the Centre at that time, and this has subsequently been reduced (these are practical assistantships, involving work in publicity, the costume shop, and so on). Beyond this, there were four or five half-course teaching assistantships available, in English or perhaps French or German; this has remained consistent. (There are no statistics kept on how many students receive student loans.)
Two years later, in 1991, there were 73 students in total (up from 61); 22 MA and 51 PhD. At this point there were about 24 students with scholarships.2
In the fall of 1996, we were up to 97 students in total; 34 MA, 62 PhD, and one special student, with 28 of them holding scholarships.3 So, while the student population has gone up from 61 to 97 in eight years (an extra 36 students), the number of scholarship recipients has only risen from 26 to 28, and the percentage of Centre students who are scholarship recipients has decreased from 43% in 1989 to 29% in 1996. Likewise, the number of available assistantships has not increased.
Keep in mind as well that for someone coming into the graduate programme in 1989, the tuition fees would have cost about $2,500, while in 1996 that had risen to $3,980.81. Obviously, while tuition fees have increased significantly (by 59%), forms of financial support have not. Furthermore, it used to be that once a PhD student entered the post-programme phase, meaning s/he was not taking any more classes or writing exams but was strictly working on the thesis, s/he paid only a partial fee. This is being phased out, as the Governing Council approved the progressive removal of this post-programme status as of September 1992. Students continuing from that year are assessed the full fee, but until 1997-98 they received a graduate student assistance rebate of between 70 and 80% of the difference between the full fee and a nominal post-programme fee (in 1996 we had to pay about $2,000). As of this year, post-programme students pay full tuition. According to the Graduate Students Union, while PhD graduates in 1991 paid a total of $4,829 in tuition for a five-year programme, in 1998 they will pay $15,915, largely because of the elimination of the post-programme fee.4
Another significant change has been the length of the programmes. When I came into the MA in 1989, it was a two-year programme. It is now a one-year programme. When I started the PhD, the programme was six years, and it has now been reduced to four (with the option to continue for an additional two years). While this might be of financial benefit to someone trying to get in and out quickly, it doesn't solve the problem of how a student is to find the money to begin with; in my experience, the reason it takes most of us a full six years or longer to finish the PhD is because we're also working part- or full-time while we're writing our theses. The reduction of the PhD time limit does nothing to take this fact into account, but simply encourages greater student loan debt, especially since students are not eligible for most scholarships after their fifth (now their fourth) year.
Here are a few final figures concerning the Drama Centre. About two-thirds of PhD students actually complete the programme. Rob and I took a very informal look through the people who have graduated in the past ten years, since 1987, and out of a total of 37 graduates we were able to identify maybe five to seven people who now have tenure-track jobs; that's one in five.
I don't mean to be negative about the Drama Centre itself, only about its financial position within the university. There have been new and successful initiatives over the past few years: the student-initiated and -run Festival of Original Theatre and symposium series; annual mini-conferences in the spring; annual visiting directors who teach a workshop and direct a major production; and, starting this year, cross-appointed faculty from other Ontario universities. But we need more faculty who are able to supervise a wider variety of thesis topics, more courses, more opportunities to gain teaching experience, and a greater awareness of life after graduate school.
For some students, the feeling at the Drama Centre is sometimes one of isolation, that what we do there has little to do with the larger world of academia (attending conferences, getting jobs), the theatre community, or even with the larger university community (there is little or no contact with the undergraduate programmes or other graduate departments, either with their students or faculty). For example, while the Graduate English department offers seminars on professional issues, introducing students to topics such as lecturing, grading procedures, getting published, non-academic career choices, and so on, there is nothing specifically for Drama students, who must surely have issues unique to our discipline. Similarly, the visiting director workshops focus on how to direct, not, for example, how to teach a course on directing or acting. When I started at the Centre in 1989 it was possible to take workshop courses on Voice and Movement, but they were discontinued within the next couple of years. I think the result of this absence of "career planning" is that students leave the Centre moving in the same direction as when they came in: people with teaching or practical expertise coming into the programme will likely go out in the same direction, and the rest of us will have course work, some practical experience, some job experience, research and writing skills, and minds trained to think critically, certainly... but with little sense of how we might fit into a very tough job market.
We hear of other departments or disciplines where students can teach undergraduate courses or are guaranteed funding or guaranteed work experience after graduation, and are amazed that such things exist. Of course, I believe that education is valuable for its own sake, and I'm not advocating that we succumb to the market model mentality entirely. But I do think that we, as students, need to be encouraged to think of ourselves as (junior) members of a profession and to be conscious of ourselves in a larger, more politicized, context.
NOTES
1 The scholarships included 3 from the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), 4 Ontario Graduate Scholarships
(OGS), 27 units of Open Fellowships (which come in 3 units per term, so
that 9 students could each get a full one, or more students could get partial
ones), 2 Connaughts, 7 special entrance scholarships which have since been
discontinued, and 1 private scholarship.
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2 4 SSHRC, 4 OGS, 23 units of Open (so, about 7 students
with 3 full terms), 1 Commonwealth, 1 Connaught, 3 Simcoe, 2 special entrance,
and 2 private.
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3 1 SSHRC, 11 OGS, 43 units of Open (so about 14 students),
and 2 Connaughts. The rest of the assorted scholarships were, in Rob's
words, "creations of the 1980s" which have since disappeared or been subsumed
into the Opens. Recently, a cap has been placed on the number of new PhD
students admitted to the programme each year, which should translate into
Open Scholarships for a full year rather than just a term or two.
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4 These figures are from a letter sent to all graduate
students on March 24, 1997, from Michol Hoffman, Vice-President of the
Graduate Students' Union.
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The author wishes to thank Rob Moses for his assistance.