Many know UW’s reputation in STEM disciplines — students get co-ops at big name companies in tech and finance and donors fund new buildings like QNC and M4. But what about the arts at UW? Students and faculty members both discuss the existing challenges of being in arts, and what the upcoming faculty reorganization holds for their uncertain future.

From a broad perspective, studying a humanities discipline at UW inherently comes with its unique advantages and drawbacks. By official headcount, the faculty of arts is the second-largest faculty at UW, topped only by the engineering faculty. Official headcount statistics show that about one in five UW undergraduate students is in arts (20.7 per cent in fall 2025 and 20.3 per cent in winter 2025). Even when adjusting for students in the accounting and financial management (AFM) program, whose enrolment between 1,000-1,800 per term over the past three years has outnumbered other arts programs, arts only falls to third after the math faculty. With a large student body encompassing incredibly diverse programs, arts students feel a strong sense of community among their classmates.

“I love my peers, I love my classes, [and] my professors have been incredible,” says second-year English literature and classical studies student Bridget Coleman. Fourth-year arts student Amaya Kodituwakku agrees, noting not just the kinship among arts students but the commitment of its faculty to quality education. “The [professors] are some of the kindest, most supportive, and admirable people that I have ever had the pleasure of learning from … you can tell how much they care about connecting with their students.”

That dedication also transfers to official academic programming. The Arts Student Union (ASU)’s vice president of academics Tanraj Dulai notes that compared to other universities’ arts programs, UW has many interesting courses “theoretically available … that offer [great] depth of understanding” for field-specific studies. The undergraduate calendar’s offerings include upper-level courses like ENGL425: Transnational Feminisms and Contemporary Narratives and HIST231R: The History of East Asian Communities in Canada.

However, in practice, arts students have faced chronic systemic issues at UW that have been worsened by internal and external changes. On the academic side, many officially listed courses are now seldom offered regularly, save for foundational 100 and 200-level courses and courses explicitly required for degrees. Both ENGL425 and HIST231R have not been offered in the past three years. 

When courses are offered, Dulai says they are often “broad surveys” that cover a large scope of topics and fail to empower students to specialize deeply in their field of interest. Faculty policies and constraints set by the university result in these courses often not being taught by instructors who are experts in the relevant content. This also takes time away from faculty members who want to pursue research in their domains, but can’t due to teaching requirements. Dulai has spoken to students whose professors “[have] not had an opportunity to do [their] research in however many terms or years they have been around … They want to teach these courses that they’re passionate about, but they have to teach [another] course that is the money maker, the bigger course, the required course.”

The lack of options for arts students is also apparent in the co-op sphere. Official statistics from the Center for Experiential Education (CEE) show percentages of co-op hires in industries sorted via the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). From winter 2024 to fall 2025, 22.5 per cent of arts students were hired by employers in accounting and financial services, with the university sector hiring the second largest proportion at 11.8 per cent. While these jobs help AFM students jump-start their careers, opportunities in other arts disciplines are lacking. Jobs classified under “Universities” in reality are, anecdotally, often administrative jobs not relevant to degree studies. All other industry proportions for hires come in at 1 per cent or less.

“When co-op is such a big draw for students to come to this university … it becomes a thing where we’ve kind of been lied to,” Dulai remarked. “We were told that there’s all these jobs available, but there are a bunch of [finance] jobs or marketing jobs that aren’t appealing to, say, a student that wants to become a lawyer or a student that wants to work in the heritage industry.” 

Kodituwakku also observes that most jobs posted in WaterlooWorks “skew in the realm of tech and AI … [while] jobs in the realm of teaching, publishing, or research for the arts are few and far between,” a discrepancy which has worsened during their time at UW. The Center for Experiential Education (CEE) said in a statement that while factors affecting available co-ops are often a product of the highly competitive market, it strives to “facilitate access to meaningful work opportunities related to all students’ academic studies and their aspirations.”

When Dulai brought up student concerns about employment, faculty leadership pointed to AI and machine learning certificates like the Data Analytics for Behavioural Insights credential offered by WatSPEED, which allows arts students to market themselves as having both technical and creative competencies. The response received mixed feedback, in no small part thanks to ethical and environmental concerns in using generative AI.

Kodituwakku said that given these concerns, many arts students want the university to do more in developing relationships with potential employers that don’t prioritize AI. “Those jobs do still exist,” they clarified, “but because they are not being actively sought out and shown to Arts students, it creates this false narrative that the only way to secure a job is to sacrifice our values.”

Furthermore, arts students are starting to lose dedicated physical spaces on campus. On Jan. 16, Dulai was informed by a university staff member that the storage room ASU had been using would need to be mostly vacated by February to make room for furniture storage.

“What we have been told is that this storage room is historically shared by ASU and the Arts Undergraduate Office [AUO] … but the AUO has not used that room in at least five years,” he said. “The tuck shop cannot hold all these things; we cannot hold them in a corner.” Imprint reached out to the AUO, but did not receive a response in time for publication.

Having little in the way of resources and support is not new to anyone in arts. But the impending reorganization, which takes effect July 1, has exacerbated these issues and accelerated what many see as the decline of the faculty from an already shaky place.

The reorganization has been in the works since 2014, but is now being pushed forward during a period of financial strain for UW. A presentation from members of the Reorganization Working Group at the Jan. 26 student town hall noted that “current financial challenges experienced by all universities and colleges in Ontario and beyond have intensified the need for organizational changes that will help us continue to deliver our programs.”

Dulai and other faculty members he’s spoken to agree that a restructuring of arts is needed for the faculty to survive, but the process has been criticized for a reported disregard for community feedback and a lack of transparency.

According to associate professor of political science Anna Drake, each department was asked to propose ideas on which other departments they would work well with together as “natural fits” during the initial consultation stages. However, Drake said that “it became clear that this was not going to happen, that [they] actually did not get to pick who [they] wanted to work with” as the department groupings were assigned without that input. The current plan dictates political science be grouped with six other departments under the school of social, political, and historical research. Six other departments will combine to form the school of critical and creative humanities.

Both Drake and Dulai also draw attention to the discrepancy in the treatment of departments in relation to faculty leadership, visible in the reorganization planning. Out of all five arts associate deans, only one — Katherine Acheson, associate dean of undergraduate programs — is from a humanities discipline that will be absorbed into a conglomerate school. The other four associate deans are from departments that will be grouped into their own schools — namely, the schools of economics, psychology, and accounting and finance.

“If the [associate deans] went back to their teaching roles, they would be teaching in schools that would fundamentally be the same,” Dulai noted. Drake shared this opinion, saying that the four aforementioned departments “get to carry on what they’ve been doing the whole time … they get to not be part of the reorganization process.”

Meanwhile, the two conglomerate schools have been planned in a way, said Dulai, “that is not conducive to people [who] understand the actual meanings of disciplinary and interdisciplinary scholarship” despite interdisciplinary collaboration being a stated motive. “People who are economists are saying, ‘why don’t we combine courses like Canadian history and Canadian politics?’ while political scientists and historians are saying, ‘no, you can’t do that,’ because those are fundamentally different… in methodologies and pedagogy.”

At the Arts Faculty Council meeting on Sept. 9, 2025, where members voted were set to vote on approving the reorganization, faculty in attendance were divided in opinions, expressing both approval and skepticism. Those who voiced concerns, according to Dulai, “were not being combative, but they were fighting … they know what has happened at other universities that have done similar things.” Last year, Western University reorganized its humanities and arts programs, resulting in staff layoffs that sparked protests. In February 2025, York University halted admissions to 18 undergraduate programs, the bulk of which are humanities programs. UW itself has suspended admissions to its German and Spanish undergraduate programs. All but one Applied Language Studies (APPLS) course are marked as “no longer available” on the APPLS minor web page.

Dulai says that “professors were shut down … someone asked a question [along the lines of] ‘what happens if we vote no?’ They were [essentially] told, ‘we’re not going to vote no.’” Drake corroborated this account. Ultimately the notion for “agreeing to the principle of re-organization” was approved, but answers to remaining questions about the process have been unsatisfactory, like the impact on administrative staff and faculty workload. “Despite the flowcharts provided, it’s still not entirely clear how [that] will take place, like who we’re reporting to, why, and all the other important details,” Drake commented.

Information provided to students has also been unclear and sporadic, often only arriving when decisions have already been made without consultation. A moratorium on course changes until 2029 was announced on Nov. 11, 2025, “blind-siding” Dulai and fellow students. It was then postponed after more than 100 students in and outside arts programs signed Dulai’s open letter to Acheson. The next opportunity to submit curriculum changes is in September 2026.

Despite the positives of her experience at UW, Coleman feels “hoodwinked into picking a university that claims to have a diverse arts faculty, only for that faculty to be attacked a year and a half into [her] degree.” For her, the past few months have signalled that “the university sees the arts faculty as an afterthought or inconvenience, rather than a fully realized faculty.”

Drake continues to call for more transparency and accountability from university and faculty leadership on plans involving arts. She also wants to strengthen communication with students to help support each other during this tumultuous phase. “I would like to know how much the students are aware of this and how it’s affecting them, because those voices haven’t been brought to our meetings,” she stresses. “We’ve been so busy trying to do what feels like damage control, and trying to make sure that we will still be able to do our jobs.”

“Believe it or not, the arts [reorganization] will affect all of us,” Kodituwakku said. They call upon arts students to get involved with their majors’ sub-societies to have their voices heard by leadership within the faculty and the university at large. 

Dulai also calls on university leadership and administration to better support the faculty, not just in spirit but also in intentional practice. “Arts is the second largest faculty [and] the second eldest faculty. We deserve your respect. We deserve your investment. The students in this faculty deserve to receive a quality education.”