It’s hard for universities to do things differently. Although they are evidently capable of being flexible and doing somersaults in an emergency (see: COVID), their collective desire for ongoing change is pretty small. It’s a very conservative industry, where isomorphism rules and the most important question to be asked of any change is “do prestigious institutions do it that way”?
One consequence of this is that even when it comes to times where universities are under financial pressure and the ability to think and experiment should, in theory, be greatest, organizational responses can seem depressingly familiar. Staff buyouts? You don’t say! Eliminate a program or two? Get outta town!
Now, partly the limited range of responses stems from the way institutions’ finances are structured. If 70% of your budget is staff compensation, then it’s pretty much guaranteed that most solutions are going to rely substantially on reducing headcount. But what we at HESA Towers are a bit depressed about is the failure of many institutions to think creatively about what everyone at an institution does and why they do it. In so, so many cases, what we see is institutions trying to do exactly what they used to do, only with fewer staff. In a word, enshittification.
All that said, though, there are two very interesting changes/experiments going on right now at two institutions which, in theory at least, should not be in the least bit financially challenged. Namely, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Turns out that just because an institution has a very high income doesn’t mean its spending can’t get out of whack. MIT might have an annual income of US $430,000 per student and a $27 billion endowment, but that doesn’t mean that the intense chaos that Trump has wreaked on government science spending plus the effect of a new endowment tax hasn’t blown a $300 million hole in its annual budget. And Harvard might have an annual income of US $277,000 per student and an endowment of $57 billion, but that doesn’t mean that it’s Arts and Sciences division can maintain a 9:1 student-to-faculty ratio (especially when more than half of the students are in graduate school), and a 4:1 non-academic-staff-to-faculty ratio without running a simply massive structural deficit (estimated earlier to be about US$365 million/year, and again that’s just the Arts and Sciences division).
So, what are these big changes? Let’s start with MIT, where this year, the institution has closed two of its five libraries, is preparing to close a third next year, and has outsourced its printed material conservation land. That’s huge. But, interestingly, it’s not actually being done for financial reasons. The genesis of the move is rooted in a policy document that pre-dates the Trump Administration and which committed the institution to being a “digital-first” library. The move does come with savings of course – but they are tiny (about $1.6 million according to this article). So, although this is happening in the context of austerity, it’s really a long-anticipated move that aligns with changes in technology. Nevertheless, it’s a pretty big one in terms of how a campus actually operates.
And then over at Harvard (along with a few other Ivies) we have its language departments joining something called the Shared Courses Initiative. The idea, basically, is that Harvard (and others) offer far more language courses than any cost-benefit analysis could possibly justify – 80 different languages spread across nine departments averaging about 2300 course enrolments per semester (there’s a fantastic student analysis of language department enrolment data here, which includes the mind-blowing sentence “the fall of 2024 saw the disappearance of West African Pidgin, Gullah, Aramaic, and Sudanese but the reintroduction of Syriac, Kinyarwanda, Chagatay, and Somali” – which is a reminder of how ludicrously rich Harvard is). Through the shared courses initiative, Harvard along with Columbia, Yale, and Cornell would pool some of their teaching in some of their lower-enrolment course like, say, Uyghur. This is being positioned internally as an alternative to program mergers (a 2023 suggestion of merging three of the nine language departments a few years ago went down very badly).
I am being a bit snide about this, but I do actually think there is a great deal of potential here. I mean, here in Canada, offering pooled language courses was one of the early ambitions of some members of the Maple League but the idea died because faculty just didn’t wanna. Part of that was job security, of course, but a lot of it came down to a view that i) a university just wasn’t a university if it didn’t have an Italian department and ii) an Italian department couldn’t just accept credits from elsewhere willy-nilly because that’s not what serious universities do. But now, if pooling courses is good enough for Harvard and Yale, can’t it be good enough for Canadian universities, too? If the cost per-student of preserving certain course options is too high, isn’t pooling resources with other universities a more student-centred solution than closing departments or programs outright? This is an idea that deserves a lot more consideration than it currently gets.
Anyways, my point here is not that changes of this nature are likely to save universities financially: they aren’t. The point, rather, is that innovation needs to continue all the time – not just for reasons of financial exigency, but because there are always new and higher-value projects that are begging for money. The notion that we have to keep doing things the way we always have just because we always have is the most painfully wrong. If budgets are frozen, the only way to keep investing in the newest and coolest stuff is to find ways of identifying and squeezing lower-value activities and processes. And most institutions, quite simply, are reticent to do this.
The good news, though, is that there is a growing constituency in Canadian post-secondary for change. Partly, it’s a recognition that economic and technological change (mainly but not exclusively AI) is, as always, changing the social and political environment in which our system operates and, as always, a response is required. But mainly, it’s a recognition that there is more than one way to catch a fish and that institutional isomorphism is – in a word – boring. There’s simply no reason our institutions can’t be more creative and can’t try to accomplish different and better things in more efficient ways.
That’s why we at HESA created the Re: University Conference, the first iteration of which was such a success earlier this year. And why, today, we’re announcing that we’re coming back for a second kick at the can early next year.
Re: University will return on February 18-19, 2027, taking place in Toronto in partnership with Toronto Metropolitan University. Once again, we’re bringing together university leaders, innovators, policymakers, and sector partners from across Canada for two days of candid conversation, bold thinking, and practical exploration of what comes next for higher education.
We hope you’ll join us in Toronto. The conversations at the first Re:University were among the most thoughtful, candid, and energizing discussions about the future of Canadian universities that we’ve had the chance to witness, and we think this year’s conference will be even better.
