A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a series of pieces looking at the economics of teaching loads; specifically, I was focussed on the relationship between per-student funding and the teaching loads required to make universities self-sustaining.  I had a number of people write to me saying, in effect, “what about research?”

Good question.

The quick answer is that in provinces with explicit enrolment-driven funding formula (e.g. Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia), governments are not in fact paying universities to do any research, and neither are students.  They are paying simply for teaching.  There is nothing in these funding formulae or the tuition agreements with students that says, “this portion of the money is for research”.

Now that doesn’t mean governments don’t want faculty to conduct research.  It could mean that government just wants any research to occur after a certain number of credits are completed.  But I’m not sure this is, in fact, the correct interpretation.  In Ontario, for instance, universities sign multi-year agreements with governments.  Not a word can be found in these agreements about research – they are entirely about enrolments and teaching.  Admittedly that’s just Ontario, but I don’t think it’s substantially different elsewhere. British Columbia’s institutional mandate letters, for instance, do not mention research, and while Alberta’s do, they really only suggest that the institution’s priorities align at least somewhat with that of the Alberta Research and Innovation Plan, a commitment so loose that any half-way competent government relations person could make it appear to be true without ever bothering any actual academics to alter their programs of research.

So I might go further and say it’s not that provincial governments want research to occur after a certain number of credits have been offered; rather, I would suggest that provincial governments do not actually care what institutions do with their operating grants, provided they teach a certain number of credits.  Certainly, to my knowledge, there is not a single provincial government in Canada that has ever endorsed the formula by which professors spend their time 40-40-20 teaching/research/service.  That’s an internal convention of universities, not a public policy objective.

There’s a case to be made that the research component of provincial funding needs to be made more transparent – a case, for instance, made by George Fallis in a recent book.  But universities will resist this; if research subsidies are made transparent, there will inevitably be a push to make institutions accountable for the research they produce.  That way lies assessment systems, such as the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (formerly known as the Research Assessment Exercise), or the Excellence in Research for Australia.  Both of these have driven differentiation among universities, in that institutions have tended to narrow research foci in response to external evaluations.  This, of course, is something universities hate: no one wants to have to tell the chemistry department (or wherever) that their research output is sufficiently weak that from now on they’re a teaching-only unit.

To put this another way: sometimes, ambiguity benefits universities.  Where research is concerned, it’s probably not in universities’ interest to make things too transparent.  Whether this opacity is actually in students’ and taxpayers’ interests is a different question.