Back in the early days of this blog – lo, fifteen years ago now – I used to offer an annual award for “worst back-to-school article” in which I would excoriate whichever columnist had chosen to write something incredibly lazy, cliché-ridden and wrong. I eventually stopped giving out the award because the genre went into decline (I like to think it was because of HESA’s encouragement of data-enriched discourse) but this year, unfortunately, the bad takes have returned, albeit with a twist. First, they aren’t being put out by mainstream media anymore, and second, they are being published in the dogdays of summer rather than around Labour Day. This year, three such articles got a lot of play. If you will permit, I would like to spend some time today eviscerating these steaming turds.
Two of the pieces came out from an outfit called Breach Media, a mostly supporter-funded outfit which stakes out its territory as being the opposite of Canada’s establishment media, with a very definite line on racism, inequality, colonialism, and climate breakdown. The first was about Nous consulting and how it “sells austerity” to Canadian universities. Now, trust me, there is lots to criticize about Nous and its advice on university management (my take on their reports at Laurentian university is here), but saying that Nous is “selling austerity” is like saying Oncologists “sell” cancer. Do they make a living off it? Sure. But they’re not advocating for it.
This rather basic point seems to elude the piece’s author, who seems incapable of grasping that in cases like Alberta, the university was going to absorb a $100 million cut in provincial funding regardless of which group of consultants got hired to help the university adjust. For God’s sake, LEARN HOW COUNTERFACTUALS WORK. Not hiring Nous doesn’t bring back the $100 million and obviate the cuts! It just means the cuts get distributed differently! Christ.
Intriguingly, the closest thing to a note of sanity in the piece comes from OCUFA President Rob Kristofferson (by no means a friend of Nous), who is quoted as saying “Nous didn’t cause that situation, but they found a way to profit from austerity.” Which raises an interesting question: is it OCUFA’s position that management consultants are OK if they are structured as non-profits? Is it really the profit they are concerned with rather than the quality of advice? Or is this just a case where someone with a left perspective uses the word “profit” in connection with education as an ad hominem dismissal?
The second Breach piece, by Evan Thomson and David Slater, is entitled Canadian universities set up a secret network to crack down on student Palestine demonstrators with the subhead “Universities in Canada coordinated to spy on and violently clear student encampments. Then, they deleted the evidence.” Almost every word of that subhead is deeply misleading as even a cursory read of the article itself would show, but this has not stopped the article being widely shared on social media.
The article actually conflates two very different stories about the Gaza occupations. The first is one about university emergency managers at universities and colleges across the country got together during the spring of 2024 to share stories and perspectives on how to best manage the occupations. While the authors assert upfront that this was group was actually“surveil(ing) and suppress(ing) Charter-protected political activity on their campuses”, there is exactly zero evidence presented to that effect in the article. Like, I mean ZERO. There is perhaps some evidence that some universities who were part of the network group were less than fulsome in responding to access-to-information requests, but look: absence of evidence not only isn’t evidence of absence, it’s DEFINITELY not evidence of presence, which is what Breach wants you to believe.
The second story, about meetings that Alberta institutions held among themselves and with officials from the provincial government, is more consequential but has already been covered by other outlets like The Orchard. Most of the article in fact does not centre on what Alberta universities did or did not do in May 2024, but rather on their attempts to evade complying with FOI requests about these events (this is, IMHO, evidence that institutions should take a less Nixonian approach to records retention and the press, but that’s just me). I have seen chatter on socials to the effect that the article “proves” that universities were in cahoots with the provincial government: but all it suggests to me that many people have no earthly clue how university-government relations actually work.
In Ontario, where there is a greater tradition of institutional autonomy than elsewhere in the country, universities invited by a provincial government to engage in crowd suppression could (politely) tell the province to do one. The University of Toronto, in fact, more or less did that just with in early May 2024 when it simply ignored Premier Ford’s declaration that the encampments “had to end” (the encampments were permitted to stay for two months before being disbanded via a legal injunction). But this is not how it works in the rest of the country and especially not in Alberta. In most provinces, if a government says jump, universities – as servants of the state, that’s what the “public” in public university means – ask “how high?”. In Alberta, institutions also ask how many somersaults and axels the government wants on the way down. If anything, upon reading this article, it became clearer to me that Alberta universities didn’t have much freedom at all in the way they handled the demonstrators – the UCP was calling the shots. This, too, was a subtlety that seems to have eluded Breach.
Anyways, I’ll stop beating up on left-wing outlets, because by far the worst summer article offender was published by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI). Yes, the same Macdonald-Laurier Institute I was talking about yesterday, but a different article. Back in late July, the MLI decided to publish an article by an allegedly serious (PhD University of Toronto) thinker named David Polansky called Degrees of decline – Credential creep, lost trust, and the reckoning facing Canada’s universities and it is the worst thing I have read on Canadian academia in a long time.
There is a tendency in Canadian policy discourse – both on the left and right – to see things happening in the US, assume they are happening in Canada too, and then argue against them. Polansky’s article takes this approach to infinity. In the first three paragraphs of his piece recounting how academia has “lost its way”, he outlines a five-count indictment against universities: i) bad labour-market outcomes, ii) overreliance on adjunct professors, iii) a shrinking student pool, iv) too much EDI, which is creating v) public skepticism of its value. In defence of these five propositions, he links to nine articles, eight of which are American, and the ninth of which is RBC’s piece on Skills and Post-Secondary Education which speaks to exactly none of these problems (there is also a tenth link, to MLI’s page on “university reform”, which at the time, prior to that heinous paper on equity and efficiency, mostly consisted of links to Peter MacKinnon’s increasingly unhinged collection of National Post op-eds about EDI in academia, but was not in itself an article per se).
And it goes on like this. Polansky then pivots to his real themes: the Canadian academy is too politicized, too many young Canadians go to university and hey, what about all the cheating and lazing around? About 90% of the links he shares to buttress his arguments are American in origin, including one Allan Bloom’s 40 year-old The Closing of the American Mind (yes really). There are a couple of Canadian links (one of which materially misstates a Statistics Canada paper with respect to enrolment in degree-granting institutions), I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that Polansky, in fact, has no clue about Canadian academia. This is the single laziest hack analysis on Canadian academia in the last decade. I mean, read it for yourself, but it’s genuinely terrible.
(I think the fact that MLI is willing to sponsor something this bad, this lazy, combined with its decision to publish that massive turd of a paper on race, gender and research productivity, suggests very strongly that MLI thinks it’s a good idea to be seen to be stoking a culture war in Canadian universities the way the MAGA folk have in Canada. The fact that it isn’t very good at it – yet – doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be watched very closely).
Anyways, rant over. But I suspect that, given the tenor of the age, such ideological hit pieces from the left and right won’t go away any time soon.
