WLUExposed.org

March 17, 2006

Today, Wilfried Laurier University celebrated Laurier Day by unveiling its secret recruitment strategy: pretend we’re a small, close-knit community.

“The academic quality goes hand in hand with the small class sizes,” says the press release posted today on wlu.ca. “The best thing about Laurier is how small the campus is,” says Diaz, one of the students quoted in the article. She added, “It’s nice when professors actually recognize you.”

The ideas of “smallness” and “close-knitted” are repeated 12 times in the relatively short article. This repetition is misleading at best, and malicious at worst. Laurier is not a small school — it hasn’t been a small school in years. The student population nearly doubled in the past seven years, and right now over 10,000 undergraduate bodies collide every day on the main campus alone.

Any school with over 10,000 students is no longer small. To put it in perspective, University of Waterloo, the “big” school, has an undergrad population of 17,000 students — we are definitely catching up.

To claim that Laurier offers a “smaller” community ignores the reality students encountered every day. For instance, first year classes have ballooned over the previous years. I’ll venture to guess that the average first-year lecture at Laurier has well over a 150 students crammed in a tiny space. Laurier has fully embraced mega-lectures, and as a first year student you’ll be as anonymous if you go to Laurier as everywhere else.

Of course, things look different in a press releases. Officially, the student-teacher ratio at Laurier is 24-to-1. This ratio is kept artificially low because grad students (and tutorials) are included in the count (and some grad courses have only one or two students enrolled). The 24:1 ratio is not something that first year students will ever get to experience.

Instead, first year students will experience crowded classrooms, constant line ups, crowding, and extremely little interaction with their instructors. In this way, Laurier is no different than any other university in Ontario that has had its budget savaged by deep government cuts.

It’s disingenuous to suggest that Laurier is “small,” even though it’s true that 10,000 bodies are crammed into a very small space. The only reason the community is so “intimate” is because the campus is so crowded you’ll have a hard time moving from one end to the other without rubbing against everybody else. Laurier is “intimate” in the same way a packed subway car is “intimate.” And that is nothing to brag about.