Yakshaving Chronicles: SFU English Department – No English for you!

OK, so I’m being a little facetious with the title – this has nothing to do with computers. But it is similar, in that there is a system in place that I’m trying to work with or around in order to achieve my goals, and it just isn’t happening. The only difference is, this is a system of people and institutions, and hacking or entering a Google search with my problem is not as much of an option, so I will be downing this bitter pill for a while.

First, a little backstory….or

First Year: When The Living Was Easy

In high school, one of my points of pride was an achievement on the Advanced Placement exam in English Literature, that brought along with it 3 unspecified English credits in my post-secondary institution. At SFU, that meant I could bypass a first-year course and head straight on to the fun stuff. It was pretty nice, once I surmounted the bone-chilling fear of how to write an academic essay (even 2 years of English challenge didn’t properly prepare me for that). In the summer, I consulted with the English academic advisor for the first time, in order to see the possibility of me getting into the 2nd-year academic writing class without taking the required first-year prerequisite.

She asked me if I was intending to do a minor in English, or double-major with Communication. I stated that I wished to do the minor. While we were in the office and she looked up my academic history in the old text-based computers (back in the day before goSFU – I feel so old!), I asked if I should go ahead and declare it now. She said the words that now haunt me: “No, you can do that when you’re closer to graduation.” So I took 210 that summer (by distance), and felt generally good about including “Major: Communication; Minor: English” on my resumé.

In the Thick of It

I continued my pursuit of an English minor – when I was on co-op in 2004, I even took an English course by distance education so I could feel like the number of credits I had was still growing even though I wasn’t doing full-time classes. I was back in school for all of 2005, then the opportunity of a lifetime came up for me to spend 16 months in Toronto at The Behemoth. I finished up my 300-level English class (Critical Perspectives on Literature) in my one and only 16-credit semester before I moved to Toronto, excited to put my learning and my skills – especially in writing, which I had been learning about in the English classes I had been taking alongside my Communication requirements – to work.

Wake-up Call

I returned from Toronto in May 2007 and dived immediately into 6 intense weeks of the condensed Summer Institute in Dialogue. I realized that despite my careful tracking and planning in my second and third years (there were Excel spreadsheets involved), I didn’t even have an accurate idea of the number of credits I had – and I was also contemplating pursuing an Honours thesis. It wasn’t until October, a month into what I thought would be the last class I needed to complete my English minor, that I discovered the news.

In Fall 2006, while I was in Toronto, the English Department introduced 400-level coursework, and new major and minor requirements to match. All the new requirements include the 400-level classes (which I was not taking this past fall), as well as some other breadth requirements that also didn’t exist prior to the change.

I reviewed the new requirements with a sinking heart. To fulfill the new requirements, I would need to go back and take another 200-level course (since not one of the three 200-level courses I’ve already taken meets their new requirements), as well as one more 300-level course from Group 2.

Short of taking two more classes, I was no longer getting an English minor.

Paid for and not received

I’ve plead my case to both the English academic advisor as well as the English undergraduate chair (whose excellent class on Literature and Film I took when it was a special topic). Both their responses to me are the sort of reasoning you might expect from the people who took care of me at daycare over ten years ago:

If we make an exception for you, then we will need to make an exception for several other students who have made similar petitions, all of whom were late declaring their majors and/or minors [...]

As I’ve stated to them, I’m well aware that they have all the right to deny the minor to me based on the technicalities. And I know that major and minor declarations are picky things, since what I think of as the small stuff of eligibility is the difference between time there being worth something and time there being worthless.

But you know what else seems to appear entirely worthless to my case? That over the course of 16 months, I paid close to two month’s worth of wages to the SFU Co-op program to represent the university – as well as, indirectly, the SFU School of Communication and SFU English department – on the other side of the continent, to a Fortune 500 company. This, apparently, isn’t enough to get me an exception from the, “If we do it for you, we’ll have to do it for everybody.” Neither is the fact that I worked so hard at my English classes that my English GPA is higher than the one for my major. (yes, *shame*)

Am I willing to pay for and take another two courses to get a minor, where I’ve already completed all the previous coursework? At this stage of the game, no. I’m quite ready to move on from English, and undergraduate life more generally.

Am I also saying I deserve special treatment? Absolutely not. Who else is “petitioning” the English department and on what basis of the validity or invalidity of their cases being judged? Is fairness and justice the blanket application of a rule so that we can all get equally screwed or minimize the paperwork for somebody? I’d like to think my case is qualitatively a little different from others. But that appears to be just my opinion, and nothing more than that where SFU English is concerned.

Lessons Learned

This is certainly not the last time I’m going to be shot down by an institution with policies that are, for lack of a better phrase, screwing me over royally; I’ve learned this in my time sitting on the other side of the desk at an organization where approvals were based on whether someone was able to get around to reading all their email that day.

Moral of the story is: if it ain’t on paper, it ain’t true. No one’s here to do any favours for me. Academia, like those systems of government I love and hate so much, is a bureaucracy, and in all corners, generally, doing the work does not guarantee the recognition unless we play the game the way we’ve been asked to, and that’s all there is.

(We’ll talk about my youthful optimism for designing forgiving systems another day.)

This is nothing I didn’t know before – I had a similar scare when the SFU Communication major requirements changed in 2004 or so – but it’s too bad that the cost of learning this again, is a title I would have liked to have had. How common, I wonder, is this sort of thing – not just for this particular English department or this university, but for the entire world? To cast people out on technicalities.

My only regret is that I spent the last Fall semester doing an English class. I would have much preferred to have done the Human Computer Interaction course in CMPT, which I have all the prerequisites for. Scratch that – I had all the prerequisites for it, before I left. Who knows how their programs have changed and what other guillotines await me exploring that path.

Oh well.