Good morning from the Brussels-to-Paris Eurostar, where I am hanging out with the good folks of the University Vice-Presidents’ Network on our study trip to Belgium and France. We’ve had some excellent meetings, including a really fascinating visit to KU Leuven (one seriously well-run university), and a chance to catch up with some old friends at the European Universities Association. And I just wanted to pass along some of the similarities and differences I am seeing between Europe and Canada right now.

The first and most important similarity is financial. The recent bout of inflation—which on the whole was much more significant in Europe than in Canada—has created real problems for institutions across the continent. For obvious reasons, Ukraine is a bigger deal here than back home, and the looming prospect of continental re-armament is reducing the funds available for things like higher education operating funds.

Another similarity is the slow deterioration of state-university relations. In Europe as in Canada, we are seeing a slow increase in red-tape and regulations regarding institutions. Partly, that’s due to pervasive issues around knowledge security. It’s also due to the fact that regulation is increasing generally and universities are simply getting sideswiped by general regulations affecting large swathes of the economy. But what is increasingly happening in both places is less an increase in accountability than it is in ad-hoc-ery: governments reacting to events with one-off fiats instructing universities to do various things (e.g. Bill 32 in Quebec, Bill 166 in Ontario). Knees jerking rather than system thinking in other words.

That said, there does seem to be one significant difference and that is that Europe does not yet seem to be having a crisis of confidence in science or scientific expertise. This is part of the reason why the university research enterprise seems to be growing in Europe, with a significant prospect of increased spending on research through whatever program replaces Horizon Europe after 2027. The other reason, I think, being that European private enterprise is itself getting more knowledge-intensive and needs more public-sector research partners, something which is definitely not the case in Canada.

But as we have been talking to colleagues here, there is one other interesting set of differences and similarities that have become obvious to me at least, and that is academic culture. It is fairly common in the Canadian discourse to talk about the competitive and exclusionary nature of academic culture, the two-tier nature of academic employment and the inequality between tenured and sessional faculty and blame it on some kind of “neo-liberalism,” which in turn is either the result or cause of a system which relies on market-based sources of income.

And yet.

Europe is home to many different types of institutions and academic cultures. But one of the things that marks literally all of them is the fact that they are organized around the principle that permanent employment is not the norm. Some people obtain permanence through a tenure system; others through various forms of “tournament-style” competitions (this article by Jurgen Enders and Christine Musselin—a bit out of date but still admirable in its clarity and brevity—is a good introduction to academic career paths in Europe). But no matter where you are, regardless of whether a system is substantially exposed to markets or not, the professorial corps is divided between well-paid, high-prestige insiders and substantially less well-paid and lower prestige outsiders. (I recommend a short new book by Charles Bosvieux-Onyekwelu entitled Précarité Générale: Témoignage d’un rescapé de l’université if for no other reason than to flip through the statistics on short-term contract teaching in France in Chapter 2 and realize the numbers are basically exactly the same as they are in Canada).

So maybe it’s not the total amount of money universities have that makes them hierarchical and cliquish. Maybe it’s not the amount or percentage of funding that comes from private sources that does it. Maybe it’s not governance structures. Maybe, just maybe, it’s academia itself that just isn’t very nice.

(An aside here: I recently read Jessica Riddell’s book Hope Circuits: Rewiring Universities and Other Organizations for Human Flourishing. I have a few thoughts about this work, most of which I will address during my semi-annual book review in June, but one that struck me as relevant here was that the basic assumption of the book was that institutions— that is, universities—which are at fault, rather than, say academia itself. One could of course have a fairly tiresome chicken-and-egg debate about whether universities shape or are shaped by academic culture, but at the very least it seems to me somewhat simplistic to suggest that the influence is all one way).

In any event: there’s nothing like going abroad to help understand key elements of your own country. And in this case, it’s been nice to see that Canada’s challenges are widely shared, encouraging that there are so many different solutions being offered, but a bit of a bummer to see that at a pretty basic level, different governance, funding, and policy arrangement sometimes don’t really seem to change very much.