This is the last blog of a terrible year. I won’t dally. I often do a bit of an annual re-cap but Buddha on a Bouncy Castle who the hell wants to relive 2020? So, we’ll skip that bit.
I only have a few things to say. The first, and most important is to say thank you to everyone who works in universities and colleges (which is nearly all of you, dear readers). Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. This has been a harrowing year. It has required everyone working flat out in extremely trying circumstances. Getting to this point in the year has been a lot like trying to rebuild an airplane while it is still in flight. It has taken enormous effort to get this far. And though results might not always have been optimal, I think when we look around the world – at the chaos in European universities as they went into a second lockdown largely unprepared, at the desperately pathetic efforts of American universities to try to stay open because they couldn’t imagine how to make a remote session work – I think we Canadians can take some quite pride in how well we have managed.
In fact, I think we should take a lot more note of the pride that is quietly there on campuses these days. Yes, everyone is tired and cranky. But when I talk to people across the country, I find that buried beneath that is not just satisfaction that we have pulled through as well as we have, but bewilderment as well. To manage it all, we upended all sorts of systems and processes that we thought were sacrosanct or unmovable. Where there is pride, it is often because change has been made in ways that has never happened before. The pride is a function of the change. Which is as good a reason as any to make sure that higher education institutions remain as open to change in the future as they have been these last twelve months. We will, of course, all be greatly relieved when the vaccine comes and a resumption of normal life occurs, probably in time for next fall term. But the spirit of rapid iteration and improvement needs to be preserved. Ossification is not an option.
And finally, I want to echo something in this very good article from University World News by Peter Eckel and Aida Sagintayeva, who argue that above all in difficult times, what universities need to do is to maintain a sense of optimism (they say “research universities”, but I think the advice applies more generally). Times are going to be tough for the next few years. Provincial finances are ugly (see Trevor Tombe’s chart in this piece from Maclean’s) and that is going to make things difficult for awhile. If you stay focused on trying to make the current system work on what are likely to be attenuated public funds, it’s easy to be gloomy.
But I do see new and more interesting horizons ahead. I think that even after we return to a principally face-to-face world, there are a lot of options for experimentation that the routinization of remote teaching opens up. New ways of helping people in rural and remote setting access higher education. New ways of promoting internationalization without leaving the classroom. New sorts of institutional alliances on teaching and research. More ways, in short, to expand the boundaries of universities and colleges which will make new forms of collaboration and competition possible.
I also think that overall, institutions and research communities are becoming more focused on “big challenges” which will change academia significantly not least because these challenges are explicitly global and will require global alliances to tackle. This won’t happen quickly, but I think it is an inexorable trend – and again one that opens a lot of possibilities. And there is also a significant possibility that a new Biden administration will turn the taps on with respect to science spending – something that will have knock-on effects in other countries which feel the need to “compete” with this. There is, in short, reason for optimism and the higher education sector has good reason to stay positive for the medium term even while the next year or two might be a period of difficult adjustment.
It is darkest just before dawn, but morning, I think, is not far off. There are better times – maybe even much better times – ahead.
Happy Holidays & New Year to all of you. See you back here January 4th.
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Hi Alex,
Just finished your year-end Blog “Dawn”.
Such a wonderful post… You hit all the right notes for a year-end message particularly in this most unique year. Empathy for the difficulties being faced, appreciation for the efforts, compliment without fawning and acknowledge the challenges ahead. And, most important… motivating and looking to the future.
As the Axiom goes, or for those of a certain vintage, to quote John Snobelen, ‘One should not let a crisis go to waste’. I do hope that all the possibilities for the postsecondary sector which you outlined do gain momentum from this pandemic.
Your ongoing efforts and that of your team at Higher Education Strategy Associates do make an important contribution. Continue to prod and continue to push. Thank you for that.
Have a safe and restful Christmas break.
David Lindsay
“Where there is pride, it is often because change has been made in ways that has never happened before. The pride is a function of the change. Which is as good a reason as any to make sure that higher education institutions remain as open to change in the future as they have been these last twelve months.”
In my mind, what this has shown is that universities, and especially university faculty members, weren’t the hidebound institutions and people they have long been accused of being. Henceforth, administrators or consultants who wish to vandalize tenure, or humanities departments, or the connection of teaching and research, or curiosity-driven scholarship will be immediately recognized as transparent liars when they patronizingly ascribe faculty concerns to “fear of change.” They ought, instead, to take these concerns seriously, for we have shown once and forever how dedicated we are to our work, our students and our institutions.