I have had a few interesting chats over the past couple of months about the issue of institutional differentiation and its desirability. You will recall perhaps that I spoke favourably about it back in the fall as a means of bringing greater focus to institutional strategy.

From these conversations, I have come to understand the need to be clearer about how one is defining the term “differentiation,” because it has two different possible meanings. Most often, I find that people take it to mean specialization at the program-level, and is usually offered as a response to questions like “does every institution need a philosophy department?” Basically: policymakers (and indeed the general public) often seemed bemused by how similar universities are and assume that some kind of gains to specialization are possible through consolidation. Aren’t there savings to be had, or improvements to talent development through agglomeration if we close a bunch of science departments (or physical therapy units, or whatever) and move their staff and budgets to a smaller number of larger departments?

Well, yes, possibly there are advantages to agglomerations, if—and it’s a big if—you could get faculty at universities losing a given set of programs to pack up and move to a new city where new larger facilities are being built (more likely, agglomeration would happen slowly through new hires). But there are two very good sets of reasons why nobody does this: first, it will create barriers to access and second, the communities in which universities reside will hate it.

Let’s start with the access angle. Students for the most part tend to stick close to home for school. We’ve known this for ages. It’s the whole reason that we’ve spent the last 50 years sticking new universities in places like Sault Ste Marie, Kamloops, and Whitehorse. If you force people to move for higher education, you will get lower participation rates. If you take away some of their smaller programs in the name of efficiency and expect them to travel hundreds of miles to attend it, you’re only going to get one of two outcomes: students taking on a whole lot more debt to travel, or students choosing a program which is not their first choice.

Then there is the community angle. Every community wants its institution to be as big as possible both so they can hang on to “their kids” for as long as possible, but also to fill as many local jobs as possible. Look at what’s happening to medical training: we’re putting new schools in places like Sudbury, Thunder Bay, Sydney, and Charlottetown precisely because we don’t think graduates of big schools and big cities will want to practice in these small towns. You might not think it obvious the same pressure is there in fields like law, social work, kinesiology, and engineering, but it absolutely is. There isn’t a small-town institution in the country that doesn’t feel the pressure to open new programs to meet even the tiniest local labour market demands (and if anything, the situation is worse for small-town community colleges who regularly get roasted by their communities for not putting on programs that quite clearly cannot be run except at a substantial loss). So, however much provincial governments might wish institutions would do nothing but churn out nurses and skilled tradespeople, the other 80% of the workforce still exists and needs to be developed and trained. Preferably locally.

Raising these points is not to reject greater institutional program specialization, of course. It is just to say that there are costs and trade-offs that have to be considered. And over time, people (policymakers just as much as institutions) have looked at these trade-offs and said this type of specialization simply isn’t worth it. And that means institutions over time tend to converge on their program coverage and thereby become more similar looking. Case against differentiation…closed.

But there’s another kind of differentiation that we don’t hear enough about, partially because policymakers only dimly understand it and most institutions shy away from it. And that is the kind of differentiation which involved focusing on certain themes or modes of education. For instance, Waterloo has an excellent reputation both for co-op education and entrepreneurship (which, given that it does not have a B-school, is maybe the biggest possible indictment of the overall mediocre state of Canadian B-schools), the four Maple League schools have a reputation for small class experiences, etc., and other institutions have over the years tried to bathe their identity in certain types cross-disciplinary areas of research excellence (UNB and rivers, UPEI and islands, etc.). Over time, these themes and modes become a kind of cross-cutting mission for the institution—exactly the kind of thing that can help you drive institutional strategy. This, obviously, is quite a different notion of differentiation, since it doesn’t require eliminating programs at an institution (although, depending on what kind of area of focus is chosen, it may give a steer in one direction or another in terms of how strongly to fund certain programs).

So what, you ask, is the argument against this kind of differentiation? Basically, it’s twofold: first, the genuine difficulty of shifting academic culture and second, less edifyingly, academic whining about the idea that anyone else’s area might be favoured above one’s own.

Let’s start with culture. It’s well-understood that those institutions that were designed to be different from the get-go tend to be the ones with the most distinct academic cultures. Waterloo, for instance, is so good at co-op, because co-op is literally its raison d’etre (its founders loved the idea while its former parent institution, Western University, did not). It was born that way. Same with NOSM U and its focus on community-based medicine. It’s hard to bring in a new, distinct culture when one already exists, though it is sometimes done at the faculty level (for example, McMaster’s Faculty of Medicine when it adopted Problem-Based Learning fifty-odd years ago). The problem here is two-fold: let’s say an institution wanted to make its name as the most skilled deliverer of hybrid education, or to become the institution best-known for producing graduates skilled at “team work.” To really change the culture, you would need to overhaul every academic programs to accentuate that desired outcome, which would be a long and difficult slog even if everyone were onside and you didn’t have some recalcitrant instructors who refused to revamp their own individual course curricula under some misguided notion of “academic freedom” (which, as I noted in May of 2020, is sometime erroneously defined as “classroom sovereignty” or, more colloquially, “nobody tells me what to do in my classroom.” I don’t think either of these challenges is insurmountable given enough time and will, but nobody should think it’s easy, either.

The second issue is more problematic. To the extent that any differentiation is seen to favour one set of fields of study or mode of inquiry rather than another, any institutional leader who tries to push for differentiation along this axis is likely to encounter an unholy amount of professorial bitching about how they “don’t feel seen” by that definition, or that it’s unfair that some fields/models are given priorities over others (also known as the “what are we, chopped liver?” defense). I personally don’t have a huge amount of patience for this line of argument, not just because there’s no obvious reason why any institution should treat all questions of scholarly interest as being of equal value, but also because the fact that an institution prioritizes one are doesn’t mean others can’t still be excellent (see MIT’s English department for one very obvious examples, or for that matter Waterloo’s entire Arts Faculty). For the most part, this line of argument is just academic preening masquerading as principle.

Anyways, all of this is to say that differentiation, either by mission or program specialization, always comes with trade-offs, and not every institution is going to think these trade-offs are worth making. I happen to think the cost-of-trade-off argument is a lot stronger with program specialization than it is with mission specialization, but YMMV. But regardless, given the existential threats surrounding higher education these days, every institution needs to have better arguments about why it looks the way it does, why it does or does not offer particular programs and why it does or does not look so “plain vanilla,” and in pretty short order.