On Friday, I talked a little bit about rankings which looked at universities’ “Third Mission”.  This is a new term for many North American readers, but it’s not much different than when we use “service” at an institutional level rather than an individual level.  But the notion of “service” is itself a pretty slippery one, so perhaps it is of interest to delve into this topic a bit.

Universities were, from the very beginning, seen as economic assets.  Italian cities certainly competed to attract colonies of scholars throughout the late middle ages, though this was more to do with being able to capture the money students brought with them than it was because of “spin-off” benefits to the institutions themselves. The notion that universities needed to be useful to the state in the sense of producing graduates whose skills could extend state power originated in the French Revolution; the idea that universities could spark economic growth grows from early nineteenth-century Prussia, during the same movement that provided modern notions of academic freedom and the concept of doctoral degrees.

For most of the nineteenth century, Prussia was the bomb as far as educational wonks were concerned.  Every American scholar worth his salt spent time in Germany, and educational leaders spent most of the century working out how to be more Teutonic. In 1861, Yale issued the first Ph.D. in the United States; Johns Hopkins University was founded in 1876 following a German university model. Another response to the Prussian model was the creation of “land-grant” universities, which were meant to focus on agriculture and engineering and – this is the key bit – spread that kind of practical knowledge not just to students but to the broader community through “extension” activities.  This philosophy reached its apotheosis in the form of the “Wisconsin Idea”, originally enunciated by the University of Wisconsin’s Charles van Ise in the following terms: “I shall never be content until the beneficent influence of the University reaches every family in the state”.

(It should be noted that this movement has not had entirely beneficent consequences.  The growth of college football as a form of mass entertainment stems from an early twentieth-century perception that universities, as recipients of so much public cash, needed to give something, perhaps in the form of sports/entertainment, back to the plebs.  For more on this, see Charles Clotfelter’s Big-time Sports in American Universities)

This notion of the university contributing to community other than by conducting research did not readily make it back to Europe.  In fact, the idea of a third mission, in addition to teaching and research didn’t not really penetrate the policy world until early last decade.  And as Universitat Politecnica de Valenica’s Patricio Montesinos pointed out in a seminal article on the subject about ten years ago, when universities talk about their “third mission” they tend to conflate a bunch of separate concepts around i) contributions to local social  development, vague notions of “entrepreneurialism”, and broad economic “innovation.” The vagueness of the concept of third mission is one of the reasons universities’ contributions in this are so difficult to measure.

In Canada, the notion of institutions having a service mission is mixed.  The three historic prairie universities (Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta) were all influenced by US land-grants and so their conception about universities serving the communities of their respective provinces is ingrained there in a way it is not elsewhere (if you’ve ever spent more than a couple of minutes at U of S, you’ll have heard the mantra that it’s not just the University of Saskatchewan, it’s the University for Saskatchewan, and they actually mean it).  Memorial carries some this DNA as well.  But in Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes, this is not part of the culture, at least at the institutional level.

That’s not to say that there isn’t an idea of “service to the community” in academia in the rest of Canada.  There is, and it’s embedded in that 40-40-20 view of how faculty are supposed to spend their time (40% teaching, 40% research, 20% service).  The problem is that in effect this privatizes the notion of service.  In practice, the individual faculty members have historically been the ones who gets to define what service is, rather than the institution itself having a service “role”.  And while many faculty members do play significant roles in their communities, that 20% is often deemed fulfilled either by service to the institution itself (committee work) or service to the discipline (editing journals, organizing conferences), neither of which is very Wisconsin-y.

As Canadian institutions have started to realize the value of greater community support (see this note on recent initiatives in Ontario here), they have followed the same kinds of routes as European universities, mainly emphasizing their role in entrepreneurship (see any number of “incubator” initiatives) or, God help us, promoting their role in “innovation” (usually followed by pleas for research infrastructure).  Still, outside the prairies they are fairly new at this.

Might this change?  I think it’s quite difficult to do, in some ways.  Canadian universities are so loosely coupled, and institutions have such little control over what faculty actually do, that it’s hard to imagine any administration trying to steer an institution towards community commitments that involved the whole campus.  In some ways, the entrepreneurialism/business incubator angle is easier precisely because it can be done without asking any teaching faculty to change anything they currently do (see Ryerson’s DMZ, for instance).  For institution-wide change, an institution would have to change the incentive structure within institutions so that faculty saw greater value and reward in community-related work (and not just inside-the-academy community) either for themselves or for the department.  It is possible to do – Simon Fraser seems to be making a serious go of being a community-focused institution, for instance – but it’s neither quick nor easy to achieve.