On Friday, Newfoundland’s Premier Andrew Furey ruffled some feathers at Memorial (now officially “the Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador”, so no more calling it MUN, please). In trying to explain what he intended to do with respect to the “Big Reset’s” recommendation of a 30% cut in grants without actually saying anything of substance, he stated:
In some variations of the quote, another line was attached about needing to turn out “educated students for the jobs of tomorrow”, and to make things a bit worse, not all quotes included the bit about Memorial having amazing potential. Unsurprisingly, people got a bit upset.
Now, the “grown up” crack wasn’t the most tactful opener. And it really is not clear what point Furey thought he was making about Memorial being a “university for everybody every day.” I mean, it’s the only university in the province: in at least one sense it has to be the university for everyone every day – it’s not as though there are any competing universities who can pick up the pieces and offer complementary suites of programs. (I understand he later clarified this part of his remarks to indicate that he was talking about offering all sorts of programs at bargain-basement tuition rates, to which one can only respond, i) yes ok sure, ii) in no universe is “being a university for everyone” is not a synonym for “having low tuition”).
But if you’ll excuse the observation, I think what Furey was doing was no more than uttering what is actually a commonplace inside academia. I run consultations at a lot of institutions (including Memorial, it should be said, for transparency’s sake), and I can’t think of a single one where I have not heard someone say, very solemnly, that “we can’t keep trying to be everything to everybody”, and seeing heads nodding vigorously in agreement. Not a single one.
I don’t think I have ever nailed anyone down on what they meant by this. Occasionally, I ask people this as a follow-up question, just to see if anyone is willing to articulate what activities should cease. No one ever bites: all I ever get back waffle about “priorities” (obviously, no one is suggesting that their own area of activity might be of lower priority – heaven forfend). At best, it’s a way of signalling that some staff would really appreciate it if senior administration would make some tough decisions – although again, presumably on the condition that their own ox not be the one gored.
I mean, I get why no one ever names which bits of the university they think should be cut – academia works on peer review and so it’s generally not for one discipline to comment on the quality/merits of another, which means most universities implicitly run on an “I’m ok, you’re ok” basis where no one discipline can ever be described as better than another. But the fact that this kind of comment is so ubiquitous is kind of interesting: it indicates at some level that there is a good chunk of academia that kind of knows that lack of focus is a problem, even if no one outside of senior admin actually wants to suggest a solution.
Very few universities are excellent across the board. And while some pockets of expertise do arise often by the magical confluence of a few brilliant academics just happening to do their brilliant stuff at the same time without special institutional support, more often excellence in a discipline or domain comes at least in part by an institution choosing to place a bet and give those researchers the support they need. To that extent, universities do choose which pockets of excellence they have: they are not “all things to all people.”
There is no easy solution here. Even if “focus” means something relatively benign like concentrating research funds in certain domains, rather than the nuclear option of doing away or merging some fields, it’s not easy to pull off politically in a university, where not being part of an area of focus is widely interpreted to mean one is a second-class citizen (it can all seem quite personal and in my experience, not all professors have an easy time distinguishing between “your area of study is not a priority for the institution given current budget restraints” and “you are a bad academic”). And it’s even tougher when you are the one university in the province and there is no one else to pick up the slack if something gets left by the wayside.
But I suggest that maybe everyone should cut outsiders like Furey some slack when they say things people on the inside say all the time. Who knows? Furey may even have picked up the phrase from an academic.
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You may never meet anyone who doesn’t acknowledge the need to specialize, but I’ve certainly argued against strategizing in public institutions, and I’m increasingly thinking that it’s contrary to the broad-mindedness which ought to characterize a university. A really sharply focused institution ceases to be a university at all.
Universities may indeed, as you say, find strengths by focussing consciously, but this suggests that anything on which the university decides to concentrate will inevitably succeed. Not only does this seem like central planning, but it leaves out the opportunity cost, which nobody seems to notice. How many programs have been lost over the decades? How many ideas not developed? Personally, I think immediately of Oxford’s decision to abandon sinology after the Chinese revolution. And that was despite having large endowments and no clear commitment to innovation.
Perhaps, like your unanswered question about what must be abandoned, the embrace by politicians of the rhetoric of specialization may jolt us into recognizing its threat.