If anybody wants to know what Ontario universities are going to look like over the next couple of years, they could do worse than check out what’s going on in Edmonton.
To recap: In its spring budget, the Government of Alberta cut 7% from university operating grants. Since then, Alberta universities have been working out how to deal with this cut. At Athabasca, it’s meant significant layoffs. At Mount Royal it’s meant program closures. At the University of Alberta, so far, there’s been more sound and noise about the size of the cutbacks ($60 million over two years) than details.
The university initially tried to persuade the faculty union to give back some or all of the raises it won for 2013 and 2014 in the last round of collective bargaining. Predictably, this went nowhere, although the faculty union’s rationale (“it doesn’t matter if we refuse because saying yes wouldn’t come close to delivering a comprehensive solution”) had the merit of being amusingly reminiscent of those used by the anti-Kyoto crowd (“it doesn’t matter if we don’t meet Kyoto commitments, because China”). This seemed to take the administration by surprise and out came a buy-out plan which – it is feared – could see many productive mid-career faculty leave (though I’m skeptical – where would they go? Not many universities with salaries comparable to Alberta’s are hiring these days)
Note, though, that the 7% cut in operating grants does NOT mean a 7% cut in the budget. That’s because the University of Alberta only gets 65% of its money from government. When you add in all the new money it is getting from students – mostly international ones – income for 2013-14 is likely going to be almost close to what it was in 2011-12 budget. Yet this is enough to force the university into salary buy-outs, position terminations, the elimination of travel and hosting budgets, etc. And if you think it’s bad being a prof, try being a grad student: in the Arts faculty, 20 percent of TA positions are being cut.
How is it that all these positions and activities could be funded three years ago but can’t be in 2013-14 on exactly the same budget? The answer, unfortunately, is simple: tenure, low productivity and the prioritization of research all cause serious cost inflation such that even the tiniest reduction in university budgets causes absolute chaos.
Here’s the thing: no sane President can go to the public and argue that their institutions are doomed without perpetual budget increases of 3-4%. The ONLY alternative is to make university cost structures less rigid. Any university not focusing on that problem is in deep trouble.
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Less rigid cost structures in universities is “the ONLY alternative”? Here’s another thought for the week: What is the annual profit of the resource extraction industries in Alberta? And what is the rate at which the province taxes those industries for the resources they are taking? If we look to other resource-rich countries where higher education is free, we will find that those countries tax resource extraction at a rate appropriate to paying for the opportunity to make profits — even at high taxes. And no, such industries do not simply pull out and go elsewhere for cheaper labour and cheaper or no taxes: unlike manufacturing and retail industries, the resource-extraction industry and its workers need to be where the resources are. So government revenues for education, health care, and other public goods in a socially literate democracy need not be so constrained as Alberta’s government claims. This is not to say that higher education does not need to make some changes; it is rather to say that contrary to governmental “common sense” and thinkers to the economic right, there are MANY alternatives.
/dp
Hi Donna. Thanks for reading.
What you say is true from a government policy perspective but those are things over which institutions have absolutely no control. They are takers of policy, not makers. So for institutions wishing to deal with the vagaries of politics and public policy, flexibility really is the only way to go.
Interesting: institutions have “absolutely no control” over policy? Is our state as totalitarian as your reply suggests? Only institutions, not government, need to be flexible in finding alternatives? Things are worse than even a jaded ex-administrator thought! /dp
I’m not sure why you;d think this controversial. Universities don’t have a say in discussions about taxation. Never have.
Thanks, Alex, but I guess I am not making myself clear. I do find it controversial that you would say that universities have absolutely no say in government policy decisions. My response to your column was not a response simply to taxation policy and who (literally) makes it: it was a response to someone saying yet again that there is no alternative to government’s inflexibility on public financing of public universities — so I gave you an example of an alternative that has been tried elsewhere and seems to work.
If we live in a country where people believe that higher education, health care, and other institutions of public good are only, and can only ever be, on the receiving end of government policy decisions, then I see little to differentiate such an attitude to government decision making and government practices from those of a totalitarianism government that simply says “this is how it is, there is no alternative.” Yes, I know: taxation is never a popular election issue unless you are a politician who is planning to cut taxes further, but I am talking about much more than taxation. I am talking about the apparent absence of anything like a democratic public sphere, a political and social awareness of the scale of changes being wrought such that an educated commentator can say universities only take, never make, policy.
I find it extremely disheartening that so few educated people have been paying attention to the local, national, and global fallout since The Iron Lady introduced the world to TINA — or that so many educated people are ignored in public discussion and governance. You said in response to another commentator (on a different issue) that you were limited in your 450 words per column. Yes, 450 words per thought is a lot like bulleted points and executive summaries instead of full paragraphs and full reports: the less context that is provided, the less able people are to have the wider view, to practice the reflection, the comparative analysis, the lateral thinking that are required to tackle complicated scenarios with something more interesting, more multidimensional, and more democratic than “there is no alternative.” /dp
Could you clarify, Alex, what you mean by the phrase “low productivity” in this specific context? Not sure of the direction you’re pointing the phrase!
Hi Richard.
I meant in terms of teaching. For tenure-track staff, time spent teaching has gone into reverse over the past 15 years. The institution as a whole can look more productive in terms of hours taught, but that’s mostly down to increased use of sessional faculty. It;s the flip side of the empahasis on research,
I also want to push on the “low productivity” point, Alex, expanding from the twitter exchange.
We produce graduates. The mechanism is credits. Faculty teach credits. Enrolment and degrees awarded have been increasing steadily, without a matching increase in faculty numbers. Higher output per input ratio is a productivity gain, is it not?
I suppose the reliance on contract instructors and graduate TA instructors is the fly in that ointment, but that is emphatically NOT a concern of the Alberta government, which views reliance on contingent labour as an “efficiency” gain.
Research is the other “output,” and “productivity” in that is notoriously hard to measure. However, the cumbersome evaluation process at U of A is also rigorous, and the conviction on campus is that research productivity on the whole has been and remains strong and rising. Tri-Council results and rankings (both highly flawed measures, admittedly) seem to bear this out.
I would suggest, therefore, that 1. using classroom hours per faculty member is too narrow a measure for “productivity;” and 2. if graduates and research outputs are both holding steady or rising, then so is “productivity.”
Hi Ryan,
I should be more careful with words, I supppose. With a self-imposed limit of 450 I sometimes lapse into shorthand which doesn’t do much for clarity.
Yes, you’re right – if you look at it from an institutional POV, the use of sessionals is a productivity increase. This is a point I think I;ve made myself on occasion. I have stopped making this point, because people tend to fly of the handle if I make an argument about a straight substitution of work from TT to sessionals (what about quality? etc etc).. So I was making an argument just about TT faculty (which, to be fair, is where most of the dollars are spent).
And you’re also right that universities have more than one production function – research being the other principle one. I wasn’t referring to that when I mentioned “productivity” (I though I covered it in the next phrase about “over-concentration on research”. But as i reader I suppose you weren’t able to know that. So, my bad, mea culpa.
Now, back to your specific point about productivity. What you’re saying is: “same input, more output, more productivity”. Which is true only if we ignore the sessionals thing. But to accept that point, you;d need to accept that the education they’re getting from sessional is comparable to one they would be getting from TT staff (otherwise it’s not apples to apples). Now one can argue that, but it does rather raise the question of why we’re paying so much for academic staff when it’s clear a cheaper product can deliver something similar.
So – a point for another column I suppose: how much (if at all) does quality deteriorate with the additional use of sessionals? The answer presumably depends somewhat by discipline…which in turn has some interesting implications for pricing policy, I think.
Cheers,
Alex
As one of the staff that works with prospective international students at the university, I can say that while this year, our international student revenue might be on par with last year and might still provide one of our largest sources of revenue, I don’t know if it will happen for sure, and even if it does, it’s a fairly precarious reliance on that revenue source. Changes in many of our global markets (the slowing of economic growth in emerging markets like Brazil and Indonesia) and the drop in the value of the Indian rupee, among other countries, mean that fewer students are able to afford studying abroad, and I have already received communications from a few students stating that this will indeed create too large a challenge for them to study here. If this is coupled with the university being less attractive because of faculty members leaving, programs being cut, and/or classroom sizes being larger or harder to get into because fewer sections are available, then it becomes more difficult to recruit these students that provide us the revenue that they do. In fact, even if they wouldn’t be affected at all (especially since they don’t tend to go into the programs being cut), the knowledge that these measures have occurred puts a fear in them that maybe in the future, their program will be cut, too, and the perception is what makes them fearful to choose us, irrespective of reality.
Personally, I feel like at this point, a large part of the controversy has been based on fear of the unknown. We at the university do not really know what all of this means or how it will affect us with a lot of certainty. Much of the discussion is speculative. We’re having philosophical and theoretical debates on what education means, what the role of post-secondary institutions are (vocational vs. research, etc.), and I think these discussions are good, but most of us don’t have enough information on which to really understand what’s happening. In some ways, I feel like the situation is similar to the companies back in 2008 that were projecting billions of dollars lost in the global recession; these companies weren’t actually in the red, and I doubt we are either. But it was the plans for the use of the projected funds that was at stake, and as faculty members are being asked to volunteer to leave, perhaps the Dean of Arts is just trying to make an easier pathway for them, who knows? In any case, no matter what all of this means, the mood on campus is tense and morale is low; stress levels are increasing, and all of that can only add challenges to good discussions about what our next steps should be.
The only way to make finance less rigid is to get rid of tenured professors. Exterminate tenure -> no reasonable professor come to work to such University -> University become a community college. Easy.
At the current, the problem is that the cuts were in fact from 2009. Faculty of Science at the UofA was cut by 10% (the envelope grant was removed) in 2009. Then other cuts were so called “underfunding” – when the government grant was growing smaller than the university required budget. So department had to execute cuts *every* year from 2009, 4 cuts by now (yes, this year we already had a cut by 4.5%). We did loss staff every damn year starting from 2009.
So by now we left with 4 administrative persons at our department, 2 lecturers and 45 professors. Ok, lectures will be gone. 2% of the budget. How exactly would be possible to make 11% cut? Involuntary layoff of a professor is not possible w/o declaring financial emergency for the whole University, but the top admins are not going for that. I have no idea how it will be possible to make the ordered right now 11% cut.