It’s been an interesting couple of weeks for me. It’s end of term/conference season, and so I get a lot of requests to go around the country speaking to Boards, Senates, leadership groups, etc. And the most interesting parts of these discussions are the Q&As, particularly when the same theme crops up multiple times. And the bits that keep coming up are around budgeting.
There’s an obvious reason why everyone is worried about budgeting. It’s because the sector is screwed. Governments decided to stop funding growth fifteen years ago. Institutions, as is their wont, tried to solve the problem entirely on the revenue side. Higher domestic tuition fees (until provincial governments cut off that angle). Higher international student revenue (until the federal government mostly cut off that angle). Now, revenue-side solutions are a lot tougher, seeing as they basically consist of generating higher domestic enrolments through program innovation. And a much higher proportion of the solution lies in cost-side solutions, which are also tougher.
Cutting and collegial governance do not sit easily together, for two main reasons. The first is that collegiality at heart rests on the assumption that everyone in the academic community are equals. And if everyone is equal, how can it possibly that some people (or more accurately, some units) have to absorb bigger cuts than others? It offends a sense of fairness. And yet equal cuts across the board offend common sense.
But the second stems from the fact that different actors in the system have fundamentally different points of view about budgets and how they work. As Nick Rowe put it in Confessions of a Central Planner (still the greatest thing ever written about Canadian higher education finance and everybody who hasn’t already read it needs to click that link and give it a read):
“The university as a whole faces a hard budget constraint. Individual departments face a soft budget constraint. Individual profs face none.”
To be clear, Nick was talking about this in terms of how to distribute teaching loads (the university collectively has to teach all the students it accepts, but departments and individual professors have ways to try evading teaching “their share”); I am pretty sure the statement wasn’t meant to imply that departments or profs have greater access to cash resources. But when it comes to budgeting there is still a certain truth at work here. Institutions “see” far more problems than do individual departments or profs. They are solving for much complicated equations. That doesn’t mean the institutional is “superior”, let alone that it is necessarily solving these more complex equations well. But it does mean that that different actors in the system can systemically different points of view about priorities.
You might think, so what? Governments and citizens have different POVs on budgets and we manage just fine. But the difference is that governments—thankfully—aren’t required by customs of collegial governments to work towards consensus on annual budgets, and they certainly aren’t accused of breaching core principles of governance by senior civil servants in disfavoured departments, which is pretty much exactly what happens in universities.
Again, I am not arguing here for one side or the other. What I am arguing is that there actually isn’t enough understanding about each others’ perspectives. For the most, I think this means admins need to be a lot more patient and transparent when it comes to presenting financial (I’ll have some more thoughts on this next week), and faculty need to have a better understanding of how institutional finances actually work (as an aside: this Chronicle article on faculty budget activists is worth a read). Not because greater mutual understanding is a panacea in and of itself, but because it is a pre-condition for something much more important: trust.
If there is one lament I have heard consistently over the past couple of years on campuses, it is the disappearance of trust. Different folks obviously have disparate views about who is responsible for this, evidently, and of course actual responsibility varies from one campus to another. I don’t think that’s particularly important: what is important is that everyone acknowledge the value of trust and that everyone in an institution works to restore it. And of course, that people at the very top of an institution need to model it, continuously.
We need trust in order to make institutions work better. Without it, we will descend into pure managerialism; with it, we can ascend into what I have previously called “rapid collegiality”: the ability to make consensual decisions —including budget decisions—more quickly. One way to do that, as I have also previously said, is for everyone on campuses to have more meals together or what I like to call the “more free food strategy.” Getting more people onto campus where they are not connecting exclusively over screens should also a big part of any big trust initiative. Anything that increases the number of short random interactions that allow for low-stakes discussions of educational/institutional issues (including institutional financial issues) is good. Anything that tends to decrease these interactions and force more discussions into formal settings like committee or Senate meetings is an incredibly bad idea.
Make no mistake, every institution has some very tough financial decisions ahead. Nobody expects it to be easy. Nobody expects everyone to agree about it. But we need to give each other the benefit of the doubt, to trust each other, and trust that we all have our institutions’ best interests at heart.
Because if we don’t have that as a bare minimum, then we really are in trouble.
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Things do look bad, budget-wise, especially in Ontario!
It is not quite true that universities have done nothing on the cost side.
At most universities they have taken the easiest cost-cutting action: raise “efficiency” by drastically increasing student/faculty ratios. For example, at McMaster the student/faculty ratio in the Faculty of Science has increased by about 30% over the last ten years (constant absolute faculty numbers).
It is true that over the last five years faculty compensation has increased (by about the rate of inflation), but there is no denying that costs have been controlled by not hiring faculty. In addition, the proportion of operating budget going to faculty compensation has also declined.
It is also true that taking gobs more students while keeping faculty numbers constant is a gradual form of cost-cutting that is likely to go unnoticed for a long time. But eventually the work loads for faculty and the quality of instruction provided to students will become unacceptable.
Then again, McMaster has *the worst* student/faculty ratio in the country, so maybe we’re an outlier!
Faculty at my campus have not had a raise close to the inflation rate since 2016. There has been a massive erosion in standard of living for almost all faculty. Yet the admin have not cut their pet projects one cent. Resource allocation decisions shows the admin do not value faculty at all. My campus is going to be spending millions and millions on a transdisciplinary program to solve a nonexistent problem – myself and many colleagues write tones of this stuff. We need a raise instead. We spend millions on an army of DEI staff, but our prized DEI faculty get poached by other universities that pay competitive salaries. We need a raise instead. Now the admin want to expand the admin of every faculty with a dean of community, but faculty actually running community ordinated programming get nothing. We need a raise instead.
Faculty are called on to do so much service and committee work as part of a trusted relationship with the admin. But trust is gone, all admin care about is building their empire. Voluntary service will become fee for service- how much does committee x pay is the question faculty ask now. Faculty are no longer partners in the university, but independent contractors who are obliged to only do what is in the contract. Admin keep asking faculty to do more for the university, but we resolve to do less until the burden is shared.
Universities face a brutal moment and desperately need to focus on protecting core activities of teaching and research. Admin needs to cut extreme mission creep and unnecessary pet projects to show faculty the burden is being shared. So far faculty are taking it on the chin while the admin keep living in fantasy land.