A few weeks ago I went to have my car fixed and I hung around this old garage while it was being fixed. It’s in that kind of punchy village, poorer village. Everything is crumbling and slums and the garage is full or dirt and oil. And you like that stuff, you know, rusty stuff, that kind of atmosphere. You know how one always feels connected with deteriorating things.

Phillip Guston, Conversation with Morton Feldman

Perhaps we feel an affinity with deteriorating things because we are deteriorating things. Life winds down and past a certain point you cannot deny that truth. But it’s ok; that’s life, as the saying goes. Rust is natural and nothing has a claim on eternal existence.

Or perhaps Guston is simply expressing an eccentric aesthetic position. In any case, I know what he means and feel the same way. I like oily garages and grimy factories and broken machines and the patterns of eroding surfaces. I grew up amidst enormous smelters and giant smokestacks and old cars and junk abandoned to the bush. People who grow up in big cities romanticise the bush as pristine wilderness, but if it is anywhere near a town or city it it is full of the shit people think that they have a human right to discard anywhere they please. The romantics would no doubt see these artifacts of human industry as ugly violations of the integrity of the forest, but the pretty and picturesque are easy and boring. Human beings build things that break: junk is our record of having been.

Where would archaeologists be without the refuse of peoples? And if our junk is a trace of our having been, why should we not look at decaying materiality as beautiful? Comedies are fun, but tragedies are art.

One does not need to walk in the bush to discover decaying structures. Cities are also full of corroding objects and the random interactions of nature and culture. The back streets and alleyways of any city are like the bush: hidden spaces where people dump their old appliances and furniture because they think that no one is looking.

Like other cities, Windsor is Janus-faced: an outward-facing cross-hatch of arterial roads and residential streets and an inward-facing, hidden world of alleys running behind backyards and store fronts. In a less regulated country than Canada the alleys might be a second world of informal-economy workshops and kiosks like one finds in the Medinas of Marrakesh and Fez.

My neighborhood is something like the punchy village where Guston waited while his car was fixed. It is certainly no Fez or Marrakesh but mostly students houses, a little grimy and unkempt. Riverwest- as our neighborhood association re-christened the area a few years ago– has its problems, but also its charms. Most families have left the few blocks near the university where we live and their houses are now filled with mostly international students. There are no kids playing road hockey but there are Indian students playing driveway cricket and setting off fireworks for Diwali. What the neighborhood now lacks in well-manicured middle-class order it makes up for with a genuine urban energy. The main street is lively with pedestrian traffic, we have the best Chinese and Indian restaurants, the river is only a block away, and behind almost every street there is an alley open to the solitary walker.

I feel that it is a duty of those who live in a neighborhood for any length of time to fully immerse themselves in the spaces that might be hidden from the casual passer-by. The long-time resident should know the shortcuts, the hidden gems, the trouble-spots, and alleyways.

I began my mental mapping of the alleys during Covid. Lockdown after lockdown, frustrated, enraged at the ultimate pointlessness of being confined to home, and with nowhere else to go, I would take long walks. I am a creature of habit but also appreciate variations on a theme. The streets got old quickly, but I learned to distinguish driveways from the entrance to alleyways. Languishing under Covid-induced boredom, even the most banal discovery seemed exciting. I felt like a spelunker might feel discovering the new entrance of a cave, but also a little twinge of anxiety as I entered, wondering whether there was an exit or if I would have to turn around. I have passed the age where anyone would suspect me of lurking, waiting to break into a garage, so I was free to explore the backspaces where no one else– I have never encountered another person– treads (not because they don’t dare, there is no danger, they just don’t think of walking up the alleys).

And so I would walk, but not for exercise, but to look. I think of walking as an essay on looking. Most people see the obvious: a lot of garbage, over-grown patches, boring graffiti tags and cartoonish portraits. The challenge is to look again, and then one finds the sort of accidental art and sculpture that I think that Guston was referring to when he felt drawn to the grit and grease of the small town garage.

To look at the familiar in an unfamilar way is to frame the visual field in a deliberate way. From a distance, paint peeling off a wall is just paint peeling off a wall, but impose a novel visual frame and it becomes abstract painting as interesting as any you will find in a gallery.

A rusty autopart separated through some violence from the car is just a piece of metal trash, but look at the material form and it becomes an accidental sculpture.

Given how so much contemporary art is derivative of Duchamps’ ready-mades, save the thirty bucks major public museums will charge you and go for a walk. Look differently at the things and surfaces that you encounter. Our back spaces are free open air museums of the random deterioration of things which produces material forms far more visually compelling than Duchamps’ coat racks and urinals. Decay sculpts and paints: unintentional transformation is still creative, i.e., productive of that which would not be were it not for that process.

Ours is a visual culture, people say, but it is a visual culture once removed from material reality. The screen is the frame through which most people see the world. The smart phone manufacturer and the content creators pre-determine and limit the experience of the virtual world. These photographs are my way of seeing the alleys, others would frame things differently. On-line, one scrolls and swipes and imagines that one is active when in reality that which one experiences has been determined by the engineer and the uploader.

To walk the alleys is to explore, and to look, concentrate, narrow or broaden one’s focus is a completely free act (in both senses of the term). That which is there to be seen is given, but what one sees when one looks is an act of concentration and imagination, a collaboration, even, between the natural and social forces that structure the physical environment and one’s conscious, active attention.

After reading the report of the panel that they assembled to look into the financial sustainability of Ontario’s postsecondary institutions, the Ford government probably wished that they had heeded the advice implied in an aphorism from the 1001 Nights: He who asks what he ought not ask will hear an answer he does not want to hear. Asking the panel to look into the financial health of Ontario’s universities and hoping to hear that it could be improved by slimming down faculty fat cats, the government instead heard that their own funding policies are the primary threat to a secure future for Ontario’s post-secondary system. Surprisingly and encouragingly, the panel urged the Ford government to increase funding. Unsurprisingly and discouragingly, the government ignored that recommendation and insisted that institutions find more “efficiencies” in the way they use resources.

The panel defines financial sustainability as: “the financial capacity of the public sector to meet its current obligations, to withstand shocks, and to maintain service, debt, and commitment at reasonable levels relative to both national expectations and likely future income, while maintaining public confidence”(15). They boldly concluded that any threats to the financial sustainability of the sector were functions of government policy. Ontario colleges and universities receive the lowest per capita provincial funding in the country. That low level of funding has fallen further in real terms because of inflation. The negative impact of both factors is exacerbated by the on-going tuition freeze in the province. Adding these factors together, the panel found reasons to worry about the financial sustainability of this model. None of the provinces universities are in danger of becoming the next Laurentian, yet, but an over-reliance on international students, especially in smaller and comprehensive schools, jeopardizes their future should international enrollments dip.

Since I work in the university sector and have no direct knowledge of the college system I will limit my comments to the panel’s analysis of universities. I find myself in broad agreement with the panel’s recommendations on the need for increased funding, but worry that whatever good increased funding might do will be compromised by the committee’s assumption that changing labour market needs should guide university program development.

Before I fuss about the potential bad, I will discuss the good. The report begins with a frank acknowledgement that provincial policy and not wasteful spending is the root cause of the ‘challenges’ that universities and colleges are facing: “The province’s colleges and universities have faced significant challenges to their financial sustainability in recent years. In 2017, as part of the Strategic Mandate Agreement process, direct provincial funding to support domestic enrollment at colleges and universities was effectively frozen. The number of funded domestic students a college or university could enroll was fixed, as was the finding per student.. Two years later, the finances of Ontario’s colleges and universities were further challenged by the province’s decision to reduce by 10% the tuition rates paid by students.” will continue through 2023-24.” (6) While most everyone involved in the sector would agree that the tuition reduction was a good thing, it nevertheless increased the financial strain on universities because it was not matched by higher government grants. As the report notes, the opposite happened: tuition was frozen and grants reduced (once inflation is factored in, the per capita domestic student grant fell from from $8514 in 2008 to $8350 in 2021)(18).

At the same time as grants and tuition fell, the Province’s enrollment corridor system effectively capped the number of domestic students that universities could enroll (17). One might wonder why the government would impose an upper limit on the number of domestic students an institution can enroll. Aren’t higher enrollments the key to sustainability? Yes, and no. The government has not imposed enrollment limits, but only enrollment limits on domestic students, because government grants to institutions must increase as enrollment increases. By limiting the number of domestic students it will fund, the government thus limits its costs. (The corridor model also indirectly serves the interests of smaller schools outside the Greater Toronto Area, by preventing the three big Toronto schools from throwing open their doors and enrolling everyone they can. The limits mean that it is at least possible for schools outside the GTA in regions with stagnant population growth to attract students who cannot get into U of T, York, and Toronto Metropolitan).

The government attains cost certainty but the institutions have no way to earn additional revenue, unless they can recruit international students. The provincial government does not fund international students. Institutions are free to recruit as many international students as they can, and charge them whatever tuition the market will bear, and they have. The intense recruitment of international students is not an act of multicultural solidarity but pure financial necessity. The report notes, in sombre tones with dire implications that “many colleges and universities are past the point where they could survive financially with only domestic students. They are financially sustainable only because of international students.”(38)

The dramatic increase in the number of international students and the creation of programs tailor made to attract them (and the much higher tuition that they pay) prompts the question of whose interests are being served? The panel addresses the question and answers that, in principle, increasing numbers of international students are good for institutions, the country, and the students. The panel notes that international students are a “source of needed talent and desired population growth. They also bring a number of benefits to the on-campus experience for all students.”(37) The federal government seems more concerned that a tipping point has been reached. A new policy will double the financial requirements applicants must meet in order to obtain a student visa in an effort to put a stop to unscrupulous recruiters exploiting prospective students, put “degree mills” out of business, and reduce pressure on local housing markets unable to cope with the influx of international students.

But there are also critics in the home countries of these students. The report notes that international students bring a needed supply of talent to Canada, but that means that those talents will be realised here and not in their home country. He was speaking to a domestic audience, but the point that Indian Marxist political economist Prabhat Patnaik was making should inform Canadian thinking on the matter of international students as well. “If using tax payers money to subsidise students who go on to have lucrative careers is ethically questionable, using tax payers’ money to subsidise students with lucrative careers providing services in the advanced countries is even more so. It constitutes both private appropriation of public resources and a ‘drain of wealth’ overseas … The existing system of allowing ‘brains’ to ‘drain’ away needs to change.”(203, Re-Envisaging Socialism) To be fair, the report was not commissioned to work out just political economic international relations, but everyone involved in higher education in Canada needs to think about the consequences of attracting the best students from the Global South for the nations from which they are recruited.

The focus on international students is also having a profound (and mostly negative) impact on the intellectual structure of Ontario universities. The report notes that in 2021-22 63 new University programs were approved, 75% in health and STEM, because those are areas “of high labour market demand. All these programs identified career pathways and strong ties to business and industry.” (13) Many of these programs are designed explicitly to attract international students. Getting institutional and government approval is a massive undertaking. Any new program must prove that there will be demand for its graduates and it must be at least cost neutral (bring in as much money as running the program will cost). The implications of these trends are dire for the humanities: undertaking the sorts of innovative pedagogical transformations that I think we need to undertake would require approval of new programming, but proving to the institution and government that labour market demand exists for graduates will prove a difficult task.

The problem is not that humanities graduates do not find work, (at the University of Windsor, 83% of Humanities graduates were employed after 1 year, 97% after 2– a higher rate than Sciences, Social Sciences, and Engineering). The problem is that the government wants to see very specific demands for very specific credentials. I have never seen a job add (outside universities) for a philosopher in the way one sees ads for physiotherapists and medical diagnostic experts. Humanities departments, already threatened by low enrollments, could well enter into a death spiral: low enrollments rule out investment, lack of investment impedes the ability to re-think and re-organize how we deliver humanistic education, our faculty ages and retirements are not replaced, course offerings need to be consolidated, consolidations impedes our ability to recruit, until finally the last retiree turns out the lights and the corridors go dark, forever.

The report was not concerned with how Universities spend their revenues, but one cannot disconnect provincial and institutional priorities. In public, administrators and politicians always say the right things about the importance of the student experience and the enduring significance of the humanities, but when push comes to shove, as in the case of Laurentian, the philosophers and literary critics lose their jobs. Institutions cannot simply buck provincial demands: they remain dependent on government grants for a large portion of their revenue and the government has the final say on the creation of new programs. I prefer catastrophising to naive optimism (I am never disappointed when worse comes to worst). Perhaps we humanists will find away out of our precarious state, but simply increasing operating grants will not help us. Other things being equal, those additional resources will be allocated to the “growth centres” in the university, and, with very few exceptions, those disciplines will be in STEM and professional programs.

I do not begrudge my colleagues in those fields the resources that they need, but I do think the universities need to reject the activity-based budgeting models they have adopted in favour of a more whole-institutional approach. Such a model would start from the assumption that the university is a single institution articulated into faculties and departments. Instead of forcing departments into contrived competition for scarce funds, the administration would treat them all as organic elements of the institutional whole. The first principle of resource allocation would be sufficient funds to ensure consistent delivery of existing programming, with increased funding allocated to growing disciplines and departments. Secure in the knowledge that retirements will be replaced, smaller enrollment disciplines like philosophy will be better positioned to re-imagine themselves and hopefully attract larger numbers of students.

Nevertheless, re-imagination and re-invention of the humanities is a complex problem for another day. I doubt very much whether the Ford government will respond favourably to the recommendations of the the panel to approve a 1 time increase of 10% to the grant and then index future grants to the Consumer Price Index in subsequent years following.(20) Change will probably not come unless the federal government’s policy changes cause a crisis, and the last time an institution was forced to change because of a crisis– Laurentian– the result was disastrous for academics, staff, and students.