Morning everyone and welcome back. 

I want to alert everyone to a bit of a shift in the way the team here at HESA Towers is handling the blog.  As you know, we have been trialing a podcast these last few weeks (there’s a great one with Alma Maldonado-Maldonado of Mexico’s CINEVSTAV this Thursday).  Later this month, the podcast format will change a bit and become a regular weekly feature focusing specifically on global higher education.  The regular blog will remain Monday-Wednesday, but Thursdays will just be edited highlights of the interviews (and you’ll be able to subscribe to it on your favourite podcast platforms).  We’ll try it until June and see how it goes.

In any event, I am returning from a nice vacation (this blog is coming to you from the EVA lounge in Taipei); and one thing that always happens to me on vacation that I manage to get some distance from work and think about why I do what I do.  Here’s what I came with:

Many of you probably see me as the “higher ed finance guy”: the one who does all the leg work at working out how institutions are making a buck – and indeed that’s partly true.  But it’s boring.  Every university and college in the world want more money than it has.  At the system level, the only way that countries differ from one another is the extent to which the gap between wants and actuals are met by suppressing staff wages, suppressing non-staff expenditures, or opening up the system to market forces, either by raising tuition in a controlled way, or using market forces to raise funds (that is, allowing institutions to enrol students at market rates either inside or outside the public system).  That’s it, that’s the whole game.    At the end of the day the only bit that’s in any way interesting in there is the variety of ways institutions choose to try to adapt to the market.

What’s really interesting to me in higher education is the nature of competition outside of market forces.  It’s the competition to be better than other institutions, or simply the drive to be better relative to prior performance.  It’s not just that there are so many legitimately different definitions of “performance” and institutions are always free to pick the areas in which they choose to excel.    Or that virtually every single measure of performance is highly contested (often rightly so) as an indicator.   And even where there is some kind of agreement, (say, for instance, graduate outcomes in terms of both jobs and life satisfaction beyond a 2-year time horizon) the burden of measurement is often so heavy that people do not bother.  No, it goes even further than that. Many people don’t feel the university is the right level of aggregation to compare performance preferring “department” or “program”. 

(Despite this, nearly every prof will tell you they can tell the difference between a great university and a mediocre one, and nearly all of them have an internal scale that can grade if not rank dozens of departments in their own field.  It’s an interesting paradox; academia tends to dislike measuring collective academic outputs, but academics themselves have a finely-tuned “connoisseurship” of academia which operates in much the same way and comes to many of the same conclusions.  Go figure.)

But maybe even more bizarre than that is that the people tasked with making universities “better” – that is, mainly, Presidents and Provosts – have, thanks to modern notions of academic freedom, very little direct control over the employees whose performance contributes most to the common notions of what makes up performance.  Can they affect teaching?  Not without a major set of arguments about academic freedom.  Can they affect research?  Yes, but they mainly do this by finding money to give to professors to do what they were going to do anyways.  The idea that institutional management controls or directs much with respect to either research or teaching – that is, the two major areas of performance that people care about – is simply laughable.

The thing is, though: while it’s easy to say that modern universities are ungovernable, and that initiatives that make a difference on and institutional scale are impossible, the fact remains that there are institutions which rise or fall in public esteem.  Toronto Metropolitan’s reputation has come a very long way in thirty years.  Among research universities, McMaster, Calgary and Ottawa all have much more solid profiles than the ones they did at the turn of the century, and UBC has more or less definitively passed McGill as the country’s #2 university.  Carleton looks nothing like the way it did 30 years ago; neither does UPEI.  It is, in short, eminently possible to change an institution’s profile and its level of prestige.

The question is: how to do it? What’s the secret sauce?  And that’s the amazing thing: no one really knows.  Even the people who ran the above-named institutions in the periods when they shone would have trouble explaining exactly what it is they do differently from other institutions.  At a certain level, I expect that a lot of it comes down to a certain esprit de corps, a non-reproducible coming together of just enough bright, dynamic people (on both the academic and non-academic sides) that allows the institution to make big strides in a short space of time. 

It might be more than that of course and finding this secret sauce – or at the very least being able to shine more light on some aspects of it – are what keep me most intrigued in this whole business.  And in 2023, I’ll be writing a lot about it and hopefully sparking some useful thoughts amongst this blog’s ever-growing readership.  I hope you’ll enjoy it and profit from it.

Onwards!