Many of you seem amused by my use of the term “enshittification” (“word of the year” for 2023 by the American Dialect Society) to describe much of what is going on in Canadian higher education a the moment. I suspect just as many of you dislike my use of the term (hi, Mom!), but I’m going to keep using it anyway because it so concisely expresses today’s state of affairs.
Technically, I am using the term incorrectly. When Cory Doctorow first coined the term, he talked about specifically as something that internet platforms use to lock in users (and in some cases distributors as well) and then gradually start increasing the prices and making the service worse in order to ramp up profits. Remember what uber used to cost? Remember when streaming services didn’t have ads? Yeah. That.
When I use the term, I am not talking about anyone using quasi-monopoly power to drive down quality and raise prices (I mean, come on, the problem stems first and foremost from the fact that universities are being forbidden to raise prices). No, what I am talking about is the process of everything slowly, quietly, and inexorably being made worse. Obviously, it is a term I use in respect to certain specific governments (mainly but not exclusively Ontario), who want the system to starve.
But I also use it to describe institutions that, when given a choice between adaptive change and genteel impecunity, choose the latter. In practice, enshittification manifests itself as a desire to try to keep doing everything an institution is currently doing, only with slightly fewer resources, or slightly fewer staff. It means making everything slightly worse every year through a desire to avoid making hard choices. It means a refusal to actively invest in those areas that should matter most for their long-term visions, because to do so would require antagonizing vested interests of one kind or another who want things to remain as they are. Many of you may recall my argument that Canada is “eating the future”: that is, failing to make hard choices about investment in the future. Well, institutions that are overly protective of current structures, programs, and staff while failing to anticipate and invest in the future are guilty of exactly the same thing. They are both forms of enshittification.
Look, we all know that universities and colleges do a lot of stuff that they don’t need to be doing. Many, many Deans at large universities have spent the last decade or so replicating central university structures at the faculty level in fields as varied as Finance, IT, Student Services, Communications and Fund Raising. At a certain level, you can justify all of this as being a matter of “improving service,” bringing all these services as it does closer to the level of individual students, professors, and units. But at another level, it’s an obvious duplication, a place where we need to ask, university-wide, how many of these positions do we really need? How many can be shared, merged or done away with altogether? A refusal to answer this question honestly is what leads to enshittification. So let’s try to answer it, a bit at least.
A colleague of mine at a U15 university noted to me recently that an Australian university which his university uses as a benchmark (similar size, mandate, and level of prestige) employs only one-sixth as many people in accounts payable as his does. Why and how? It comes down to i) process management ii) investments in automation and iii) not duplicating work or processes all over the damn place.
Some people are obviously going to hate this, even if in many cases it leads to better service on campus both because it means headcount reductions and because process re-engineering is inherently difficult and time consuming. There will be resistance (there certainly was at U Alberta). But the trade-off is this: you can spend money on duplicative/inefficient services, or you can spend it on core academic activities, whatever they may be. Institutions that choose to maintain duplicative/inefficient services are, by definition, choosing enshittification.
(Note: sharing or merging services doesn’t necessarily mean full centralization. A couple of years ago, the University of Alberta took a lot of this stuff from its mindboggling eighteen faculties and put it into three big bundles, one each to serve colleges in Arts/Social Science, Science/Engineering and Health. Last I checked, they saved a lot of money by doing so, and the university’s services are not notably worse for wear, given the size of the cuts the institution was required to absorb). This won’t be an option for all institutions, but any institution with more than 20,000 students and ten faculties need to at least consider this path).
Now I say “core” academic activities because we all know—even if no one wants to say it out loud—that not all academic activities are core. Institutions need to know where their strengths are and invest accordingly. I know of one university in this country (not a particularly wealthy one, I might add) that maintained a Music department in which for many years the staff complement outnumbered program majors. I am a big believer in cross-subsidization of programs—that is one of the core functions of a university or college, after all—but this is absurd. Maintaining departments like this—no matter how lovely the staff are—it is not harmless. Using institutional resources to keep departments like this alive deprives every other discipline and service at the institution. Or, to put it another way, it is a classic way to choose enshittifcation.
To be absolutely clear: not all small departments should be considered non-core. That would be ridiculous. But if they aren’t covering their costs by attracting majors, they had better be delivering a serious amount of value through phenomenal amounts of service teaching or through their research and community engagement activities. It is of course up to each institution how to define what “core” means and what the balance between financial and non-financial considerations is in determining core status. But a refusal to be honest about determining core/non-core, or worse, determining core/non-core in a less-than-objective or inconsistent way, is again a way of choosing enshittification.
But even if an area is considered “core” there are lots of ways it can be made better/more efficient. Sometimes it’s about shifting resources from upper-year courses to lower-year ones (or vice-versa), or being rigorous about enforcing minimum class sizes, or changing how course sections are organized, or optimizing timetabling, or requiring certain courses to be held online (with appropriate accompanying investments in instructional design). Or, at a pan-institutional level, it can be about finding ways to simplify program application pre-requisites (absurdly and unnecessarily complicated at every Canadian university I know of)or about simplifying program structures (within a faculty, set a single number of credits for honors, majors and minors and stick with it—you can literally save millions in academic advising and registrarial IT costs this way, if only program directors could put aside narcissistic desires to be a picayune exception-to-the-rule). All these, too, are important pieces of keeping institutions lean and generating savings to invest in core functions.
As you can see, avoiding enshittification is a difficult business. As in any organization, universities are going to contain any number of interests who will fight attempts to focus spending strategically. This is true of colleges, too, but universities are a structural disadvantage in two ways. First, they usually have collective agreements which make it very difficult to get rid of employees on a department-by-department level (it is possible abolish programs, usually following a vastly over-wrought process and in which institution usually need to keep paying staff for anything up to about two years, but often they are forced to relieve people of duties in reverse order of seniority, which is the exact opposite of anything that makes sense in a financial emergency). Second, the common understanding of collegiality in Canadian universities requires academics to extend an “I’m OK, you’re OK” attitude to scholars in other disciplines, which makes it impossible for them to ever agree to make comparisons across fields, which is deeply inconvenient if an institution needs to make serious decisions about what to offer and not offer (this is, in fact, the precise reason no one ever asks Senates to be responsible for cuts: they are temperamentally unsuited to do it). These are both powerful forces that push universities towards solutions which involve equal across-the-board cuts and as-minimal-as-possible adjustments to programming and staffing. In an era of stable or growing resources, these forces would be merely unfortunate: in an era of diminishing resources, they are literally a recipe for enshittifcation.
This is why enshittification is undoubtedly how many institutions will choose to get through the coming carnage: it is, in the short-term, the path of least resistance. In that sense at least, it is a strategic choice. But it is only a good strategic choice if the institution has no long-term goals that involve differentiation or excellence and mere survival with a minimum of fuss is all that matters. But if an institution does have such goals, then genteel impecunity/gradual enshittification makes no sense—better by far to protect and even increase investments in the areas that matter, whatever those happen to be.
But by their deeds you shall know them: we’ll see over the next few years which institutions have intelligible long-term strategies that drive strategic investments come hell or high-water and which just want to survive with as little change as possible. I’d like to think the former will outnumber the latter, but it may be a near-run thing.
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Has HESA been purchased by the Nous Group? At the time of Laurentian’s CCAA battles this blog was quite hard on Nous; now it’s all about the value of benchmarking (against Australian institutions, no less) and about York and U of A style transformation.
If it’s not a sale, why the change in outlook?
I’d like to talk about accommodations for students with disabilities and enshittification. Accommodations are becoming enshittified, and not because there are too many, as is a common narrative. It is because the path of least resistance that you write about makes them ripe for being the outlet for all manner of institutional dysfunction. The result will be worse outcomes for students with disabilities, even as disability rates continue to rise.
I was in a postgraduate certificate program at an Ontario college during the COVID pandemic. I was, unexpectedly and to my great delight, approved for funding for a rather pricey set of headphones due to my auditory processing difficulties caused by my disability. I was not able to otherwise afford these but was told to purchase them on a credit card and apply for reimbursement, which I was led to believe I could reliably expect. I did so and, when going to my college’s disability services office with the paperwork, was asked for a specific receipt. It turns out that type of receipt was discontinued due to the contactless pickup I did due to COVID, but I had another. It was not acceptable and I was told I was on the hook for the headphones after all.
I desperately appealed to the voice on the other end to reconsider, but the voice was unmoving. I ended up having to get my case worker from an entirely different agency (unrelated to postgraduate education anything) to intervene to save me from being on the hook for the headphones — which, by the way, were already transforming my learning and access to other forms of engagement in my community in ways I never could have foreseen.
As a result, I knew I would never go through the humiliation of re-applying for headphones to be covered under OSAP while I was at that particular college, even if/when the current ones broke or wore out. The voices like that one on the phone were simply everywhere across the college, and they are the voices of enshittification, only they think they are doing the noble job of keeping out the disability “fakers” and “frauds.” They think they are doing the hard work that need to be done, but actually they are creating more and harder work as disabled students leave programs (and often, the labor market writ large).
It is crucial to keep this in mind as enshittification continues and spirals and we are told disabled students (and people in general) are “necessary” sacrifices as we “all” tighten our belts.
I’m a faculty member of the University of Alberta. Yes we saved money but our remaining workforce is over worked, turnover is very high, and services being delivered to students are considerably diminished. Enshitification is rampant as a result
Alex, this is contrary to my experience of Canadian universities where I have seen them aggressively replacing in-house IT with large American corporate cloud services. The argument is always cost-cutting but of course once say Amazon Web Services is central to your operations its very hard to break away as the bill starts to rise. Robert W. Gehl has described this as universities abandoning the Internet.
Its possible that “many Deans at large universities have spent the last decade or so replicating central university structures at the faculty level in fields as varied as Finance, IT, Student Services, Communications and Fund Raising” but those are not the circles I or my friends hang around in!
Could you expand on “But if they aren’t covering their costs by attracting majors”? That sounds like a classic red herring from administrators of ill will, because for cost purposes, what matters is the cost per credit-hour. Small arts and humanities departments in Canada tend to be profit centers because they teach lots of students and don’t require expensive equipment or administration. What those students major in is irrelevant and it can HELP if some (say) engineering majors take a few credits of Old Books: A Lecture with Slide-Show instead of more Supercomputer Welding on Human Subjects: A Lab with Work Experience.
You have talked elsewhere about how the people who want universities to be trade schools may see them cut expensive trades, labs, and technology courses before cheap arts and humanities.
I’m going to criticize this, but I want to start by conceding that you make a number of good points. We all want a certain sustainability in academia, and it might be more equitable, as well. In your example of a Music program, the faculty are probably getting a much lower teaching load than their colleagues in (say) Chemistry.
OTOH, automation usually doesn’t lead to less work. It leads to more work running the supposedly automated system. One thinks of people who help with automatic pay stations at the local Save-on-Foods, or possibly of Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. I certainly think of well-paid colleagues at UBC, squandering their lives on wrestling with Workday.
But that’s a side-note. I think the major problem here is that while administrative functions can be judged on their efficiency, academic ones cannot, or at least not fully. Admin, after all, has an instrumental goal: the accounts receivable staff exist to receive accounts. If we can speed that up with automation and maintain fewer accountants, then great. It’s an overhead expense, alongside heating, security, janitorial services, and the higher admin.
On the other hand, in the words of Katniss Everdeen in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, “I rank music somewhere between hair ribbons and rainbows in terms of usefulness. At least a rainbow gives you a tip about the weather.” Of course she’s right. Much of what we do in academia doesn’t have instrumental value. To judge it on instrumental value is a category error, and we still want it despite its lack of instrumental value. Even in the Arena, there’s a felt need for music.
So how do we judge academic work, if not on instrumental grounds? As you point out, this is a hard problem, and one unlikely to appeal to academics. Rightly so — I’d hate to be on a campus where different disciplines outwardly despise one another, all considering themselves to be academically core, and everyone else for the pot.
The more likely alternative to faculty cannibalism is some sort of Nous Group approach, probably run by the spreadsheet jockeys who’ve failed to keep their own administrations lean. Tu quoique would be the damning and correct response to everything that they suggest, or even could.
Enshittification seems a lesser evil, frankly, than any sort of Hunger Games or rank-and-yank regime.
Most of us working in Canadian Universities these days would agree with the idea that the institutions are being “enshittified” in the sense that they are getting higher in price but lower in quality, but I think that this column misses the point of the term and advocates more of the practice and policies driving enshittification rather than suggesting realistic fixes.
Just to be clear, let’s get straight what “enshittification” actually means:
“Enshittification (alternately, crapification and platform decay) is a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.”
(Wikipedia—”Enshittification” accessed 2024-11-5)
In the context of the university, the analogical “vendor” would be higher admin, “business customers” I suppose would be governments and industry players seeking to download the cost of training employees to taxpayers (and to the prospective employees themselves via tuition), and users would be the ordinary students. Enshittification would be the reduction of courses and programs in quality, number, and variety, that students demand in favour of diverting resources towards a smaller set of things that government and powerful industry lobbies see as desirable—which seems to me to be pretty much what this column is advocating.
The enshittification analogy is actually a poor one because the root causes of the decline in quality in education are not down to the desire of university admin to trap customers into paying higher prices for poorer services in order to maximize profit. What is really going on is a response to declining social investment by governments, which has led universities to adopt business models imported from the private sector (which is also a poor analogy for post-secondary education). One component of this response is indeed to enshittify, but a much bigger and more pernicious part of it is the re-direction of resources away from frontline activities (teaching and research) towards central administrations. This is done in the name of “efficiencies” that supposedly derive from the type of centralization lauded in this blog. The actual result of centralization, however, is more often administrative bloat that efficiency. Centralized services have a hard time dealing with as diverse an environment as a university and in the end often end up creating more work, usually downloaded to faculty who no longer have access to admin staff and resources that have been removed to central admin (or just plain removed).
A case in point is the college system at the University of Alberta that this blog speaks so highly of. The colleges were not created, as the column implies, in the interests of reducing any proactively identified type of administrative duplication, they were created largely to address the fallacy (propagated above) that, obviously, 18 faculties are “too many”—that is, it was about optics as much as anything else.
Once the colleges were created, UofA faculty, staff, and administrators were invited to meetings, townhalls, and other fora where senior folks wondered out loud what the colleges could do and what they were for. Years later, we still don’t know. The few functions now housed in the college I belong to, the College of Social Sciences and Humanities, seem redundant and in many cases create additional work rather than reduce duplication. The College, for instance, has a research office which appears to duplicate services offered by the Vice-President of Research and Innovation and the Faculty of Arts. The College has also tried to take over timetabling, with laughable results. Where before the department advisors entered course schedules into the registration system, now they fill in a spreadsheet and someone in the College enters the courses. This means that there is one more person in the workflow—how is that more efficient? In fact, because the College person doesn’t know the courses and programs of the many departments they “serve” across three faculties, more errors are made. These have to be fixed, via a new and more Byzantine administrative process. This costs more, not less, and increases the workload of faculty and staff at the department level.
How much the colleges cost has not been made clear to us, but when they were founded the initial proposal was to “tax” the Faculty of Arts (to which I belong) around $850K per annum for its “share” of the new structure. That funding model for the colleges was not adopted, but the figure gives us an idea of how much the College costs us. While funds are being diverted to this enormous white elephant, departments in the Faculty are being told to cut courses, lay off precarious academic staff, and re-design programs as entertainment rather than education. This means fewer students and less tuition revenue, and an overall enshittification (in the broad sense) of students’ education. The claim—promoted by admin and their business consultants like NOUS—that taking resources off the frontlines to serve administrative functions will make things better and more efficient is simply magical thinking.