Why a double issue? This is only the second such in the fifteen-year history of this journal, the first being Volume 13. Whereas the former double issue's purpose was to gather together a large number of articles bearing on issues of theory and methodology, our motives are rather practical.
First, we have a large Forum section, leading off with Richard P. Knowles's article "This Discipline Which is Not One", calling for a pedagogy in academic theatre programs informed by critical theory, continuing with a dozen responses from across the country and from a wide range of positions on the matters Knowles raises, and concluding with a lucid theoretical statement by Josette Féral on the relation between theory and practice in the study of theatre. Our hope is that the lively debate you will find in this Forum will provoke continuing debate and discussion. In the final analysis, what will matter will be not so much the Forum itself as all of the ideas that all of those papers light in our minds. A double issue allows us to present this extended Forum section, along with a backlog of book reviews and the journal's usual range of articles, without having to wait another six months to put any of these in circulation.
We have another practical reason for publishing a double issue, and that is to reduce expenditures. We are in the midst of a transition year, in which the grant we receive from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council will be at best only one third of the former level of funding, and in which the Ontario Government's funding cuts will very likely impact on the level of funding we may receive in future from the Ontario Arts Council. While we wait for the funding situation with respect to scholarly journals such as ours to clarify, some small economies are in order.
Indeed, the Forum itself, examining as it does the health and viability of academic theatre programs, takes on an even greater urgency as postsecondary institutions across the country face deep cuts in government funding. In the lean years ahead, theatre programs may well be required to justify their existence for higher stakes than is the case at present. How will they do so? On what foundation will they rest their claim to have a vital role to play in universities and colleges?