Pressure on Professors

Since 2004, I have been teaching HLTH 101 — Social Determinants of Health — here at Queen’s. The size of HLTH 101 was stable for many years at 400 and then 450 students, drawn from all over the University. In the summer of 2013, I received a frantic message from our undergraduate coordinator that the demand for the course had outstripped the room capacity. With only 80 per cent  of the first-year students enrolled, the course was already full. After years of intense budget cuts imposed by the University, my department, the School of Kinesiology & Health Studies didn’t have the resources to add an additional section of the course. It was decided that 100 students would sit in an overflow room and watch a small video of me on the screen, along with my PowerPoint slides.

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