Newly graduated from high school, Alexis Deighton MacIntyre says like many teens she experienced some difficulty when it came time to choose a specific major for university.
She thought about taking linguistics at the University of Victoria, but also had an interest in learning to play jazz and a background in classical music, so she started looking into the music program at Vancouver Island University.
“I was [starting to play] guitar a little later in life, so finding an inclusive, accessible program was really important for me,” she says. “And I thought, well, I’ll get a really well-rounded education if I study music. I’ll learn about music theory, music history, but we still have to write essays and do research. But I’ll also be able to learn more about some of the other things that interested me, like auditory perception and studio recording.”
In the end, that well-rounded education served her well, says MacIntyre.
After graduating with a bachelor of music from VIU in 2012, she went on to eventually get a PhD at University College London and now works at Cambridge University in England as a cognitive neuroscientist where she studies music and the brain, and how we perceive sound.
This background in music education has been crucial to her interdisciplinary work, and the university’s recent decision to potentially eliminate the music program entirely amidst a deficit crisis is “reductive and short-sighted,” MacIntyre says.
“I’m constantly drawing on my music school education as a researcher. And I meet other people who have really similar [musical] backgrounds, especially since I research auditory perception,” she says. “I didn’t even realize this was a possibility. So music really did lead me here.”
A $20.2 million deficit crisis has left the university administration with some hard choices to make, and has resulted in 10 per cent cuts to academic and non-academic programs as part of a deficit mitigation plan that aims to return to a balanced budget by the 2026-27 fiscal year.
On April 4, the university’s senate will hold a meeting to vote on whether to cancel the bachelor of music and jazz diploma programs. If the vote goes ahead, the senate will advise VIU’s board of governors to cancel the programs.
The senate also recently voted in favour of canceling the integrated engineering technologist diploma (IETD), and both the advanced diploma and master’s level Geographic Information Systems (GIS) programs, which goes to approval at a public board of governors meeting on March 28.
Alumni, instructors and musical luminaries like Juno Award-winning jazz musician Phil Dwyer as well as organizations like the Nanaimo International Jazz Festival — which often feature bands made up of alumni — were stunned by the move, but cutbacks to the program have been decades in the making.
VIU music program cut ‘slowly but relentlessly’
VIU’s music program began in 1970 at what was then-Malaspina College, and offered 20 courses to 120 enrolled students, according to a 1972 article in The Daily Free Press.
The next year, the college began to offer a two-year music diploma, and by 1972 enrollment had grown to 200 students and offered 38 courses.
It was a pivotal year for music education in general, due to a provincial initiative to fund music education in all schools and for all grades, remembers retired music educator Bryan Stovell, who taught for 17 years at VIU and at a variety of schools all over Nanaimo.
Despite this promising start, according to Dr. Mike Quinn, VIU’s Provost and Vice-President Academic, problems with low enrollment started as far back as 2012, and led to the suspension of the bachelor of music program in 2020. No new students have been admitted into the bachelor’s program since.
Stovell remembers it a little differently, saying it was actually the university that originally imposed an intake limit of 32 students total in 2011, after a faculty strike led to a need for program cuts.
“In years past, [enrollment] had been 60 or more,” he says. “They say, ‘Well, you don’t have the numbers.’ No, because you cut them.”
Koerbler says when she looked at meeting minutes and the application report from 2009, she saw that 134 students had enrolled that year, for a variety of programs.
Stovell says he could never quite figure out the exact reason why enrollment was capped, but speculates it might have been due to logistics around classroom size. If there were too many students enrolled for something like jazz theory, for example, then another class would be needed — along with the cost of hiring another instructor.
“There could have been other solutions. If you want to be paranoid about it, you could say they wanted to cut music, and they did it. Slowly but relentlessly,” he says.
With this cap on intake, the number of graduates dwindled, which was then used as justification to stop offering the classical transfer program, though courses were still embedded within the bachelor’s program, says Sasha Koerbler, VIU’s music department chair, who started as a sessional instructor at VIU in 2007.
This elimination of the classical transfer program meant the process of transferring to other universities became much more complicated, which further limited options for students, she says. It also meant the loss of conservatory-trained musicians who gave up on going to VIU in favour of other, more established universities.
The option of transferring credits “worked like a dream” she says, because many students who want to study music are uncertain about what they want to accomplish and how far they want to take their studies.
VIU’s music program offered them a more graduated introduction that was lower-stakes and came at a lower cost than other universities, she says, many of which have a more rigorous audition process, want students with a conventional musical background or are focused on classical studies, not jazz.
COVID-19 restrictions aside, Koerbler says she’s unclear what interest there might have been from new students over the last four years, because there’s been no new enrollment for the bachelors of music.
“The existing program started out as a jazz diploma, and then transitioned into a degree program in music,” says Quinn. “It was decided that we were better off to focus on looking at whether it was possible to revive a diploma program … faculty members were working on that. We’ve been monitoring registrations into that program, and they’re very low.
The intent was to start this revised jazz diploma program in September — but those plans have also now been scrapped.
“Our general conversion rate of applications to people who actually show up is somewhere in the order of 50 per cent,” says Quinn. “So given the situation we’re in right now, we’ve made a decision not to allow that diploma program to go forward.”
Last time she checked, Koerbler says there were 15 domestic and three international students enrolled in the new jazz diploma program, which is low, but remarkable considering the program’s lack of advertisement.
“I don’t even know how they found out about it, because nothing was out yet,” she says. “Through word of mouth?”
The university’s approach in promoting this program is “akin to the rest of the advertising that we’ve been doing,” says Quinn, and that the low enrollment issues it is experiencing are not unique to VIU.
“This is a trend across post secondary in general,” he says.
‘Low hanging fruit‘
MacIntyre says that though support for some programs and not others is likely strategic, she thinks that interdisciplinary work like her own — which combines music and neuroscience — has a strong future in the academic world.
These cuts “imply a level of certainty and confidence that they know what will always be popular,” which she thinks is dangerous.
“It takes a long time to cultivate these things. You can’t just cut it and there be no fallout from that, like reputational harm,” she says. “It takes a long time to develop an effective program with a through-line where you can look back, and look at graduates, and assess the cultural impact on the broader community of this institution, of the music department.”
MacIntyre is also concerned that external spaces that support the cultivation of musical talent — accessible venues, cheap practice spaces to jam in — are vulnerable to market forces, which makes institutional support all the more crucial.
She thinks rather than destroying what has taken decades to build, the university should consider the possibility of a revised program that has a broader focus, encompasses more musical genres and brings learning objectives more in line with the way musicians and people who work in music tend to actually support themselves.
Stovell agrees, and says there’s still a strong demand for elementary and post-secondary music teachers throughout Canada, despite cuts to these programs as well, according to connections he has within the BC Music Education Association.
Having the option to study music supports many more people than just those who want a musical career, he adds, and these things — more than just “bums in seats” — need to be considered when it comes to what a university offers.
“I think it’s a good precursor to a lot of other subjects,” he says. “If you can play jazz, you have to have a certain level of intelligence, it’s quite a difficult thing. And you also have that creativity. We need people who can think sideways.”
For Koerbler’s part, she thinks the music program will rebound if given space and opportunity after the limitations that have been imposed on it, and that there are other options for cuts across the arts and humanities department instead of solely in music.
“I understand their rationale from the point of numbers. But our sadness about it all is that the low enrollment has not just simply happened, it was created by the limited intake,” says Koerbler.
“The fact that it was never lifted, but made worse by limiting intake altogether… that’s what brought us here, essentially. By looking at the numbers, it’s logical. We’re low-hanging fruit. Who wouldn’t take it out? But the impact of that kind of decision is going to be felt widely.”
Editor’s note, March 22: A section of Sasha Koerbler’s quote was removed as it implied the revised program had not launched yet.
