The Faculty of Arts and Sciences nixed the Creativity and Society major. Why didn’t they ask students first?

When I was eight years old, what I wanted more than anything else in the world was a watch. Not a Spiderman watch or a Dora watch (gauche) like my classmates had, but a real, adult timepiece—sleek and professional. I settled on a seven-dollar digital with a pink strap and used my mother’s credit card to buy it off Amazon while she was at work. I sat back in the rolling chair by the family computer, imagining the elegant flash of plastic as I checked the time during recess, and I had a horrific realisation. Credit card purchases were recorded on the bill sent to our house every month. Two days later, when the watch arrived—this was before Amazon had managed to entirely pay their way out of having to obey the laws of time and space—I did not even remove it from its packaging. As soon as I saw the box on the porch, the smiling Amazon logo taunting me from beneath our front door, I dug a hole in the backyard and buried it.

The lesson I learned was this: the easiest way to reduce backlash against a bad decision is to not tell anyone about it. Just ask the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In the fall, the faculty chose not to move forward with the Creativity and Society program’s application to create a major. Yet when I spoke to Madison Gagnon, the President of the Creative Expression and Society Student Union, days before writing this article, she told me she was hearing what the faculty had done for the first time. Ditto for Nina Katz, a fourth-year student who has studied Creative Expression for the last three years. 

Creativity and Society, formerly Creative Expression and Society, is a Victoria College program that currently offers a minor to 225 students. “This program really thinks about various arts, especially music, the visual arts, and literature as working together and feeding each other,” says Adam Sol, the program director. 

Students, including Gagnon and Katz, rave about it. “It’s a brilliant program,” says Katz. “It offers something really valuable […] Creativity isn’t given serious academic effort. That part of ourselves that is such a valuable part of who we are […] that is such a rich topic for scholarship.” Not only is the program academically stimulating, Gagnon, a Biology major, tells me, but it also improved her social life. “I’ve made the most friends at UofT through the Creative Expression program because I got to know everyone so well […] you get to feel comfortable talking in front of groups, you get to feel comfortable sharing your work, and those are really valuable skills that UofT doesn’t focus on a lot.” 

Yet, despite the students’ passion, there were no emails from the faculty asking what they thought. No TBuck-compensated interviews, just a rejection—one that even took Sol, who has taught at UofT for more than half of a decade, by surprise. “There had been previous drafts of this proposal that had gone to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences…we felt very, very positive going in and that we had responded to the concerns that had been expressed in earlier versions.”

Those concerns? That there was too much overlap with creative writing programs offered by the Department of English. Yet, in preparing the application, Sol did what the Faculty of Arts and Sciences did not: he consulted. “We did a lot of consultation with the English department—they were sort of our main partners to make sure we were not overlapping,” he says. 

Seemingly, the faculty doesn’t just think it knows better than its students; it thinks it knows better than its own English department. All evidence—glowing testimonials from students, positive feedback from professors, and strong enrollment in the minor program—indicate a clear justification for a major. So, why would the faculty turn Creativity and Society down? 

It’s a disappointing but not surprising part of a broader trend of programs offered by colleges— rather than departments—being scaled back. At New College, the beloved Buddhism, Psychology, and Mental Health minor was discontinued, and the proposed elimination of the Health Studies specialist—which has yet to be presented to the Faculty—sparked an uproar at the November meeting of the University College Council. 

I’ve had my disagreements with the Vic administration, but the Faculty of Arts and Sciences seems to have reached a new and unprecedented level of obstinacy. It’s unique programs like Creativity and Society, Buddhism, Psychology, and Mental Health, or my major, Canadian Studies, that make UofT a vibrant place to study. That provides students with an option other than crammed, thousand-person lectures at Convocation Hall and readings from the same, decades-old textbooks professors use everywhere. It allows students the opportunity to develop skills and gain knowledge that is often neglected by the rest of academia. It helps form the interpersonal bonds that last longer in students’ lives than any course content. Katz recounts how a Creativity and Society course offered a reprieve after the difficult months of the pandemic: “We got into these smaller poetry groups […] we would just bring snacks and share each other’s work and grow together as artists.” 

As a VUSAC executive, I do not intend to let the Faculty bury this issue like my illicitly obtained watch. Creativity and Society, and Vic’s other college-run programs are worth fighting for. After all, they teach collaboration and socialisation—skills the faculty, which couldn’t work with or talk to students before they deprived them of a major, clearly lack. At least they have creative excuses down pat.