Morning all.  Ready to go?  No, me neither.  But the show must go on.

It’s going to be a busy few weeks.  Our annual State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada comes out on Thursday.  We’ve got an election on September 20^th, which may have some pretty significant consequences for post-secondary education (the childcare accords of the last few months are hugely consequential for higher education in a way that has not properly been appreciated, and I’ll be writing on that subject later this week).  And of course, everyone is going back to school with the pandemic that should have been over by now. 

So, how’s that going?

Canada’s incredible vaccination effort from April to June should have been good enough to get us to herd immunity.  Then it turned out that the Delta variant was a lot more transmissible than the other varieties, and that herd immunity would require extremely high, near-100% vaccination rates.  The question for both for societies and educational institutions, was: what can we do to get there, and how do we make things work in the interim?

At the societal/governmental level, we saw a continuation of the same principle we’ve seen since the start of the pandemic: namely, governments dithering for a couple of months before doing what they quite obviously should have done from the start, which is creating vaccine passports and using them to allow businesses to restrict entry to crowded and indoor spaces to reduce the spread of disease (Ontario, of course, is still dithering, because it is a Buffoonocracy). 

The question, then, was how to handle passports with respect to essential services, and whether and how to apply them differently with respect to staff and clients.  For instance, people may agree that hospitals should be able to force staff to get jabbed, but no one would suggest that patients not be admitted unless they have the jab.  Same with schools: most provinces have policies requiring vaccines for various diseases (Quebec, significantly, does not) but with fairly generous opt-outs.  It was reasonable to expect at least this in universities and colleges, I think.  And yet, institutions – Seneca College aside, which introduced a vaccine mandate in mid-July – hesitated to do anything along these lines until well after it was feasible for the vax-hesitant to become inoculated before Labour Day.  Not a good look for the sector.

Why did everyone wait so long, especially when hundreds of American institutions were bringing in vaccine mandates?  Well, to some degree it mirrors what happened at the beginning of the pandemic – American universities make their decisions without reference to public health offices because public health in the US is a shambles, whereas up here public health officials command more respect and institutions are loath to get ahead of them.  We were ok with that in March 2020.  In summer 2021, we were not.

I think the problem was partially that many of the loudest arguments made in favour of vaccine mandates – by professors at least – were not very convincing because they tended to be framed in terms of individual risk.  What if I get the disease (unlikely to be serious if vaccinated), what if I pass the disease on to my yet-to-be-vaccinated children under-12 (COVID is typically a less serious disease among the under-12s, and to the extent children are endangered by it, they are more likely to catch an ailment from other children than from their parent in a high-vaccine workplace)

The better arguments – and the ones that ultimately seem to be prevailing – were firstly that vaccine-mandates are critical to protect the rights of immune-compromised students, and second that if life is ever going to get back to normal(ish), then all institutions need to do whatever they can to raise overall vaccination rates.   But it took quite a bit of stumbling around to get there.

Some provinces, of course, are still not there.  British Columbia and Quebec appear to have taken the position that HEIs are public services and that public service need to be open to the public, regardless of their vaccine status.   In fact, BC’s position as of late last week seems to be even weirder, with institutions seemingly allowed to impose vaccine mandates for everywhere on their property *outside* the classroom, a policy which could only have been developed by someone who had never been on a campus before.   Meanwhile, in Quebec, professors at McGill are getting louder and louder about the absence of a vaccine mandate, while the administration takes the position that Quebec is lucky to have vaccine passports, and the best contribution that McGill can make to public health is not require them in any shape or form.

(Why is McGill being this dense?  You need to understand that eight years ago, when the Board hired Suzanne Fortier, her one and only mandate was “keep the peace with Quebec”.  As soon as there is daylight between McGill and Quebec, her usefulness is over.  This has come through most clearly around issues of academic freedom, but this is what is behind the vaccine policy as well.  So dedicated is she to never offending Quebec that the administration will not even admit it is under orders from the Premier’s office not to do this, which staff would at least understand if not appreciate.)

So as usual, what we have here is a tale of most of the sector mostly muddling through.   I still think most universities and colleges would be well-served by conducting a structured examination at how they performed during COVID, and what lessons around governance can be learned for the future.  (I mean after all, we’re learning organizations, right?  We’re supposed to learn and get better over time, right?) 

Overall, I think Canadian institutions did tolerably well under adverse circumstances.  But the last month or so – to me, anyway – seems to show a creeping arrival of something different.  It’s not a return to a vacillating normality – it’s more than that.  I think universities around the world, not just in Canada, are exiting the pandemic more worried about offending governments than they were before.  As more and more of public life has been politicized, so too are universities seen as public political actors.  Which, you know, would be fine, if they weren’t so dependent on public finances and hence worried about offending their paymasters.

It’s going to take awhile to work out how to navigate a post-COVID world.  I expect this will be the main theme of the blog this year. 

But one way or another, I’m glad to be back alongside all of you for the ride.  In bocca al lupa, everyone.