Although its release didn’t get much play last week, HEQCO’s report on the results of the Strategic Mandate Agreement process was noteworthy.  Read casually, it’s a formal and polite response to a government request for advice.  But it’s actually better understood as a primal scream – albeit one elegantly rendered in true Embrace-and-Contain style – demanding some grown-up policy-making for a change.

The SMA process was initiated back when Glen Murray (remember him?) decided to negotiate Strategic Mandates with each of the provinces’ universities and colleges.  To start the process, Murray asked each institution to write a brief document, outlining that institution’s top three priorities (scroll down to see them, here), which he then gave to HEQCO to “evaluate”.

I put “evaluate” in quotation marks, because it really wasn’t clear what HEQCO was supposed to do with these documents.  The Minster charged HEQCO with answering questions such as, “which five institutions could best be described as “leaders” (and hence deserving of extra money), and “would these plans help the community economically” – but Murray never provided a sense of what standards would actually be used to judge the submissions.

But give HEQCO, and the expert panel it convened, some credit: section IV of this document is devoted to explaining why it chose not to answer those questions.  The reason – and I’m paraphrasing a bit here – was that evaluating those things based on a few pages of self-submitted, largely unverifiable claims would be really dumb.  Good on them.

Much of the rest of the document is devoted to telling the government that promoting change in the system is most easily effected by altering the funding formula to make it more output-oriented, which in turn requires the government to be much more articulate about the outcomes it expects from the system (this, hard as it seems to believe, is actually a new-ish idea in Ontario).  It also endorses the idea that some additional institutional funding could be awarded by means of competitions (a point that should be familiar to regular “One Thought” readers, through pieces like this).

But this kind of systemic thinking, as the document says, takes discipline, consistency, and commitment.  And in Canada these days, that’s in short supply, especially where governments and higher education are concerned.  Glen Murray’s loopiness may have been gloriously unique, but he was nothing more than an extreme manifestation of the trendy, quick-fix mentality that has taken over policy making in higher education in the last few years.

As a result, my guess is that the new minister, Brad Duguid, might not find the HEQCO report to his taste.  Not quick-fix-y enough.  That said, it’s the best advice he’ll get all year.  He should take it.