So, this is the final entry for Year XI of the One Thought Blog. I hope you have enjoyed another year of my semi-structured scribblings. Regular service will resume sometime around Labour Day (not quite sure about the exact date yet).
I usually end my writing years broadly assessing where we are as a sector and overall, I tend to the positive, if for no other reason than to throw my usual curmudgeon persona into sharp relief. But this year, I am not sure. I think things are on a bit of a knife-edge right now. We could go either way.
The case for optimism rests, I think, on the fact that there is a fair bit of renewal and experimentation going on in the sector. COVID did open a lot of eyes to new possibilities, and there are some interesting new approaches to teaching and learning going on. Some institutions are becoming significantly more flexible and entrepreneurial. This is all good.
The case for pessimism is, I think, three-fold. The first is that the outlook for more higher education public funding is almost non-existent. Outside of BC and Quebec, provincial public finances are a mess and getting worse every year. Conceivably this gets fixed through some big federal-provincial financial settlement, but the chances of this seem slim in the short term. Second, even if there were money to spend, governments need coherent theories of growth where higher education and skill development translated into future growth and prosperity. We don’t have that. Very few Canadian governments this decade seem to have a theory of anything other than “affordability” (which means either that taxes are too high and need to be lowered or tax revenues are too low and need to be raised, so that services can be bought collectively and hence rendered cheaper). Basically, everyone wants to spend money in ways that alleviate current problems; no one wants to spend money to invest for the future. It’s a real problem.
It’s not just that post-secondary education needs a better narrative because no one buys the old economic impact and innovation stories, though those stories certainly need to change. It’s that the post-secondary sector needs to engage in much broader coalition projects to re-engage the whole notion of thinking about – and investing in – the future. This is hard because educational institutions, both individually and collectively, are monumentally self-centred and have difficulty singing off the same hymn sheet amongst themselves, let alone other sectors. But there are no winning conditions for post-secondary education unless the public and politicians start to believe again both in growth, and in knowledge as a contributor to growth. And for that to occur, higher education is going to need to make common cause with other sectors.
But the third problem is perhaps the biggest one, and that is simply that within all our respective organizations there are unprecedented levels of exhaustion and crankiness making it very difficult to have the clear and honest internal discussions institutions need to have to make the big decisions that will be needed to get through the next few years. It’s not just two years of COVID and a gut-punching six months of Omicron: rather, it’s the exhaustion that is being layered on top of widespread (though not universal) governance practices that are perfectly designed to serve the universities of the 1970s, but not those of the 21st century.
Now, we’ve managed to paper over those cracks for the past few years simply by having central admins distribute more money within institutions, taken mainly from international students. But take away that hitherto inexhaustible source of cash – and I think new sources of international students are going to disappear over the next couple of years – and we’re going to be at a serious inflection point on the way higher education is funded and run. And I am not sure how many institutions know how to deal collegially with the kind of tough decisions that will ensue from that.
There’s room here, for those so minded, to get into an argument about labour and management, and the (IMHO) often-ridiculous attempts of some academic unions to challenge institutional management rights and fulfill CAUT’s long-held secret desire to replace most functions of Senates with ever-longer and detailed collective agreements. But really, this is as much a symptom of a deeper inability of faculty, staff, and administrations to connect. Its not that faculty are inimical to what you might call “new public management” styles of leadership – the re-election of Sophie D’Amours as Rector of Laval University is proof of that, I think – rather, the means of actively discussing university futures has, through design or neglect, put much of the system in a place where it has difficulty pursuing reform.
It’s interesting that many university-types bemoan politicians’ increasing fondness for community colleges and polytechnics, mainly because they think it implies a preference for “mere” skills over deeper theoretical learning. That might be part of the story, but I think the preference stems from colleges’ greater ability to project agency: simply, they can deliver on things much faster than can universities, and this matters a lot to politicians. Collegiality which comes at the expense of speed is usually not a winning bargain.
Basically, facing the next few years is going to require a lot of inspiration, hard work, and collaboration. I have no doubt that Canada’s universities have the first in abundance: I am worried that after 20-odd months of COVID we may not have the necessary reserves of the second and third. So, here’s my hope for this summer: that everyone takes a lot of extremely well-deserved time off and comes back relaxed, chilled and in more generous frames of mind.
As for us at HESA, we’d love to hear from you about your thoughts this blog, but also with respect to two other things. The first is a study on what Canadian institutions collectively learned from their COVID experiences. The second is our new “Exit Interview” project: if you’re leaving the sector, either due to retirement or to pursue opportunities elsewhere, we’d love to talk to you and hear from you what you think works and what doesn’t in Canadian post-secondary education. Contact us at info@higheredstrategy.com for more details.
Thanks all again for reading and have a great summer. You earned it.
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Perhaps it is part of the erosion of confidence in ‘the old economic impact. . . stories’, but I suggest that one of the reasons for the falling enthusiasm for higher education is the perception that graduates don’t benefit as much from higher education as they used to, and thus an erosion of confidence in human capital theory as a rational for students, parents and governments to invest in higher education:
Brown, Phillip, Lauder, Hugh, & Cheung, Sin Yi (2020) The death of human capital? Its failed promise and how to renew it in an age of disruption. Oxford University Press.
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-death-of-human-capital-9780190644314?cc=ca&lang=en&
“Catch you on the rebound,” as Houston tells Apollo in the movie.
Two comments: first, while it would be more difficult, I think it would be better in the long term to try to break the connection between education and growth. We don’t expect National Defence or health care to promote growth: we just accept that territorial integrity and a healthy populace are good things. Similarly, we should try to come to see a highly-educated population as a good thing, and the effect on growth as a side-effect (as are better health care and stronger defence, for that matter). To do otherwise is implicitly to stigmatise the eighty or ninety percent of everything universities do which isn’t obviously going to make us all richer.
Secondly, I think you’re missing the point of collegial governance. It isn’t ultimately a matter of labour relations, or even of efficiency, but of what makes a university into a community of scholars, as opposed to just another NGO or corporation. Without it, we are not.
Finally, when looking for instances of people withdrawing, I hope you include people basically giving up on their institutions or academia as a whole. Quit lit may be a cliché, but ignoring it altogether in favour of self-satisfied administrators listing their accomplishments would be a lost opportunity. I could recommend a few people, but on the back-channel.
Always the same recurring rant about the lack of collaboration between universities and who knows what exactly (private sector, government, non-profit?) and academics irrationally clinging to their ivory tower, etc., etc., etc. Short on specifics.
As if there aren’t any collaborations of all kinds going on already. Collaboration with other entities have their limits for academia since one of its primary functions is to be critical of other entities, sectors, and itself also in the process (ask university administrators who have had a “long-held secret desire” to curb academics’ freedom to criticize their institution and limit it instead to their specific discipline). Universities are not there to fall in with the trends, they are there to observe, study and analyze trends. make no mistake, many academics have already become too cozy in many instances to remain credible with what they do. That’s a loss for everyone.
The capacity to criticize and to take the time necessary to reflect on things is what sets universities apart form colleges. That is why universities are needed.