Rays of Optimism, Paths Forward

Last Thursday and Friday, HESA held our Re: University conference in Ottawa. It achieved what we wanted it to achieve – to get people to have hard, tough conversations about what’s ahead and how to deal with the still-growing threat to Canadian universities. Today, I want to clue everyone in on a couple of highlights and meditate on a way forward.

The opening session, with RBC’s John Stackhouse and two former Ontario premiers, Dalton McGuinty and Bob Rae, was in many ways the high point. John effectively conveyed the mood at Davos (from whence he had just returned) and specifically, how quickly policy windows are opening and closing. The implication: if higher education is going to remain relevant, the pace of change needs to speed up. Dalton, reflecting on his experience of having delivered the largest ever boost to Canada post-secondary education – a $6.2 billion package in 2006 – explained that contrary to investments in health and K-12, the money delivered to post-secondary education seemed to have delivered no measurable results (it was a bit unclear whether he really meant no results or if he meant no results that anyone could be bothered to measure, but regardless he clearly didn’t think it was a success). And Bob Rae reminded us all that Dalton was perhaps the last provincial premier to genuinely care about post-secondary education – certainly none of the present crop come close. And if he doesn’t think investing in PSE brings returns…well, it was a sobering moment.

We’re in an ugly situation. The institutions we love and wish to preserve are in danger. But as Tancredi Falconeri famously says in Giovanni de Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard: “if we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change”. That’s the simple truth, and it’s why the conference was mostly focused on the issue of how best to change. 

We had great sessions all the way through – on science policy, on the barriers to change in higher education, and on innovations and coping strategies being seen throughout the world. Many thanks and kudos to everyone who came from across Canada and around the world to help animate all our sessions (and of course to the conference’s many volunteer, sponsors and partners). But the greatest thing about the conference, really, wasn’t the panelists. It was the audience. 

The audience was probably the biggest gathering ever of troublemakers in Canadian higher education. People who from all corners of Canada understand Tancredi’s maxim and wanted to understand how universities can change, to participate in that change, and to force the pace of that change. Despite the poor financial and political headwinds the system is facing, that alone is a reason for optimism. There are simply a ton of people across the system that want change. They may not be a majority at any single institution, but together, across institutions, they can collectively be mighty – something everyone may not have understood going into the conference, but they sure as heck understood at the end. I’ll come back to that in a bit.

Look, the impetus for change is all around us. The recognition that many institutions are in a financial crisis – heck, we lost a pretty innovative public college in Manitoba last week and there are a lot of rumors that the BC Post-Secondary Review will result in at least one institutional merger.  This is concentrating minds wonderfully, in most places at least. Trump’s antics are making it clear that all of Canadian society – universities included – needs to be thinking powerfully about how to contribute to national sovereignty (and also at the same time, is driving a shortage of public resources available to higher education). Again, this is a major spur to change.

I also think there is also a growing realization in the air that a lot of the stories we have told ourselves that our sector is impervious to change are just that – stories. There are actually ways that many ways that things can change, provided i) there is a modicum of trust within an organization and ii) leaders can show a little bravery and not allow small groups of voices to exercise vetoes. A lot of the conference was about people encouraging each other to stop the go-along-to-get-along approach to university management, as one of our guests pointed out in a highly entertaining blog on the matter.

(Aside: during the week he was here, WonkHE’s Jim Dickinson somehow managed to pump out nine blogs about Canadian higher education with a strong student union slant. They can be found here.  Worth a read just to see how what we think of as normal can seem so very odd to outsiders).

I don’t think I was the only one to come away from the conference energized. There were quite a lot of people who came up to me and asked questions along the lines of: “why has no one ever put on a conference like this before?” My answer to that question is pretty similar to the one I outlined a couple of weeks ago about how Canada discusses post-secondary education. Some of our conferences are tightly-restricted to a certain class of folks: Presidents, Provosts and the like. Others are professional conclaves, say of CIOs, GR folks, Registrars and the like: places which may provide a lot of insight into a particular domain, but a) not usually focused on innovation and b) tend to restrict their focus to a narrow occupational specialism. No organization in the university sector really has much incentive or inclination to focus on sector-side change, to argue for something new rather than protect the status quo.

Except HESA, of course.

So, we’ve been pondering what happened at the conference a lot over the last couple of days, with a view to making sure that it was the beginning of something bigger, rather than just a one-off. And I think the main conclusions we have come to are these:

• There are communities of change-makers in every university in Canada.
• These communities do not self-organize at a local level because it’s a very rare university that makes regular space for general discussions of changing university priorities (some people blame collective agreements for this, but I don’t think that’s really an issue in this case).
• More to the point, most people in these communities want to contribute to a broad movement of change and innovation.
• That said, these communities cannot and should not try to take on the entire burden of institutional reform themselves – as an American friend of mine often said: no university got into the present mess alone, and no institution is going to get out of it alone, either.

Given all that, the most important contribution that we at HESA can make to the sector is to try to bring together as many change agents from as many universities as possible, to work out approaches to change. We might do that through hosting smaller versions of events like Re: University across the country (if you’re interested in hosting something please let us know). We might also do it by hosting online communities who contact us to focus on a specific issue or two. Basically, anything we can do to keep bringing people together to force the pace of change, in a way that’s financially sustainable for us, we’re going to do. You’ll be hearing more from us soon on this.

Meanwhile, if you have any thoughts on what kinds of conversations you might like to be a part of, just send us a note at info@higheredstrategy.com. We’d love to hear from you.