I am in a very good mood today, what with tomorrow being the start of a 2-week holiday in Tokyo which includes plenty of sumo (my daughter, the family expert, is predicting Hakuho 白鵬 to win the yūshō in a canter and Tochinoshin 栃ノ心 to win the 10 matches needed for promotion to ōzeki).  I’ll be off blogging next week but back the week after, but before I leave, as I am in such a good mood, I thought I would take an opportunity to get away from my usual routine of critique and do a blog just about stuff in higher education which I think is unabashedly great.

Let’s start with access.  One of the most absolutely amazing things that has happened over the course of the last twenty years has been the enormous increase in the number of students attending post-secondary education.  In Canada, the number of students has gone from about 1.2 million to about 2 million in that time; globally, numbers have increased from just under 100 million to a figure now approaching 250 million.

Access to higher education is transformative.  It opens doors to better lives.  The spread of that to hundreds of millions of people across the world every year represents an enormous change for the better in the human condition.  People may kvetch about how much of it is low quality or whatever, and yes, obviously quality can always be improved.  But you have to start somewhere.  And this is a very good start. It’s a Good Thing, and we should celebrate it more.

Speaking of access, within Canada I have been very impressed by the commitment that post-secondary education institutions have shown over the past couple of years to improving opportunities for Indigenous students.  I admit to having been skeptical, in the wake of the TRC report a couple of years ago, that institutions – particularly the more prestigious ones – would do much more than lip-service.  I think one could fairly argue that a lot of universities have dodged some of the harder recommendations around curriculum, and undoubtedly not all of the initiatives have been implemented equally smoothly.  But still, the amount of attention paid to improving the lot of Indigenous students has been truly impressive.  Maybe the best example of this is at Laurentian University, which now leads the country in the percentage of its faculty who are Indigenous.  And of course, we have a whole new class of Indigenous higher education institutions coming on stream over the next couple of years.

Another reason to be happy is the amount of experimentation I see in Canadian higher education.  Yes, yes, higher education is an incredibly conservative industry.  But given that, I see lots of interesting experiments going on around the country.  We have the phenomenon of an entirely new class of institutions – polytechnics – which have been developed over the past decade or so.  We’re seeing institutions start to grapple with hard questions about skills and employability in the new economy – and this in a system which (I think anyway) has always been among the world’s top when it comes to focussing on employment.

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We have whole new institutions starting to blossom and take shape at places like Mount Royal and MacEwan.  We have one of the most fascinating experiments I’ve ever seen going on at UBC Okanagan, which is taking a small teaching-oriented university college and turning it into a full-fledged research university in the space of fifteen years – and it’s working!  We have Ryerson morphing into a fascinating type of new urban university with deep connections into an expanding tech sector.  Almost un-noticed by the rest of the country, UPEI has turned itself into a very professionally-oriented institution without ditching the Liberal Arts setting or background.

We see institutions striking out and making important new types of partnerships and alliances (Dalhousie and its new Oceans supercluster partners comes to mind).  We see institutions not just reaching for “world-class” scientific excellence (hi, U of T!) and schools whose graduates get snapped up by some of the top companies in the world, particularly in the tech sector (good morning, Waterloo and Sheridan!).  But we also have institutions which are genuinely starting to experiment with new ideas of excellence, particularly when it comes to notions of service to and integration with the community (Bonjour, Simon Fraser).

But amidst all this new stuff, we also have people working doggedly to fulfill the system’s eternal missions, too.  I think of all the Manitoba colleges I worked with over the past year working to bring affordable post-secondary education into thinly-populated rural Manitoba.  Serving new Canadians?  Attend a graduation ceremony at Humber or Seneca sometime, you’ll be amazed.  Or good old-fashioned (but still highly relevant) Liberal Arts?  Somehow, while battling rising costs and frozen government funding, the Maple League (Bishop’s, Acadia, St. FX, Mount Allison) manage to keep on delivering the goods to some of the country’s best students every year.

I’m a professional gadfly.  My job is to keep pointing out places where the system falls short and where we could do better (and believe me, there’s no shortage of ways the system could improve).  As a result, I sound like a scold a lot of the time.

But every once in awhile I take a step back and think about our huge, sprawling, crazy system and what it somehow manages to achieve, and I remember why I work in this sector.  Warts and everything, it’s still kind of glorious. 

Sayonara, and see you the week after next.