The Casting and Makeup of Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies in Canada: A Report on the Discipline by the Numbers (and Letters)

Are we poised at the outset of a faculty hiring crisis in Drama, Theatre, and Performance (DTP) studies at Canadian universities? The question has been raised before, and perhaps at no time more frequently than in recent years as more students are entering graduate school and completing their degrees following the worst financial downturn in seventy-five years. Reactions range from malaise ("It was bad twenty years ago too") or comparativism ("It's bad in other disciplines, and in other countries too") to economic determinism ("As the stock market goes, so too university hiring; things will get better") and even panic ("After years of sending out job applications I'd be a fool to stay on the job market any longer"). But what do we really know about DTP graduation and hiring rates in this country? This quantitative report updates and deepens past attempts to analyze perceptions about DTP education by offering aggregated "personnel flow" and "student flow" statistics generated from current Canadian university tenure-stream DTP faculty and graduate student population data. Faculty data were gathered primarily from university DTP and English department websites, and graduate student data were gathered primarily from records held at the University of Toronto's Graduate Centre for Study of Drama, the largest single source of DTP faculty in Canada.