We have an exciting little announcement for our BC and ON subscribers today – see the bottom of this blog for more details on ways we are supporting discussions and convening in the Canadian PSE sector.
One of the things that distinguishes Canadian post-secondary education from those in other anglophone countries is – for lack of a better term – the difficulties we have in sustaining a national discourse on the sector. This matters a lot, I think. A lack of national discourse means fewer ideas get exchanged; innovation suffers as a result. It’s a major reason why Canadian institutions are so conservative and have difficulty adapting rapidly to changing circumstances.
It’s easy, of course, to blame the state of modern journalism for the problem. The hollowing out of newsrooms means there are fewer and fewer dedicated higher education beat reporters. But that is not really the issue. Go back a couple of decades and the national “discourse” was no better. One of the reasons universities put up with Maclean’s Rankings for so long was that the annual rankings issue was really the only time you could be sure of someone covering the sector. And besides, the lack of any newspaper which can be called “national” is a real problem (yes, yes, the Globe and Mail, but it has very little presence in either Quebec or Alberta). And while the Globe did put some significant resources into higher education coverage back when Ed Greenspon was Editor-in-Chief, it never commanded the kind of space that higher education gets in major newspapers in the UK. We have never had anything like the once-a-week higher education section that The Australian puts out, let alone stand-alone sector-specific outlets like The Chronicle or Inside Higher Education. Universities Canada and the Canadian Association of University Teachers’ both have in-house journals (University Affairs, the Bulletin) but these are meant largely to bolster member voices, not be a forum for challenging ideas.
No, to my mind there are other culprits that contribute more significantly to the challenge of sustaining national discourse.
The first is federalism. There is a pan-Canadian discourse about research and to a much lesser extent about student aid. But as far as regulation and funding are concerned, Canada is thirteen different countries. It’s just too fractured to be able to cover news and events well. A few years ago, I was having a drink with Mark Leach, the founder of the UK’s premier higher education news/events site WonkHE, and I told him that I wished I could adopt his business model. When he asked why I couldn’t, I said: because higher education policy in the UK mainly comes out of a space of about ten square blocks in Whitehall whereas Canada is effectively thirteen Scotland’s. (Mark: “oh, God, no, there’s no way to make that work”).
The second, and it’s a closely related reason, is that federalism is partially responsible for creating fractures in institutional types. This is a bigger deal on the college side than the university side. Canada’s colleges do not even vaguely constitute a single sector which would be capable of supporting a sustained national discourse. CEGEPs in Quebec are completely unlike colleges elsewhere in the country; polytechnics are quite different from non-polytechnics (and even in that group, the ones in western Canada differ markedly from those in Ontario), the country’s four multi-campus provincial institutions by their very nature are quite different than stand-alone institutions, etc., etc. Given all the diversity in the sector, it always amazes me that CICan as an organization is as cohesive as it is, because having conversations that actually resonate across the entire sector is really difficult.
The third – and it’s also closely related to the federalism thing – is the fact that Canada is quite sparsely populated and that means institutions are spread quite far apart, too. The relative thinness of institutions on the ground contributes to the phenomenon of regional media not having regular coverage of higher education. One result of this is often a reinforcement of a sense of isolation, and a lessening of awareness of innovations occurring elsewhere (which in turn contributes to the “constantly-reinventing-the-wheel” phenomenon most of you know pretty well.)
The fourth is Canada’s almost non-existent think-tank culture (which, I guess, is also an issue about philanthropic culture). The US and the UK both have a deep ecosystem of think-tanks that traffic in ideas about higher education. Canada does not. What that means is that the only voices that one tends to hear around higher education are those that belong to membership associations (i.e. institutions, faculty and students). Those are not bodies that will come up with new ideas: their job is simply to ask for more money and defend the status quo or the status quo ante. We are deprived of voices like the Grattan Institute in Australia, the Higher Education Policy Institute in the UK, or any one of a dozen similar organizations in the US. We’re also deprived of organizations that foster critical inter-institutional co-operation, coordination and innovation like the University Innovation Alliance.
The fifth is the very functional nature of “official” higher education bodies. Universities Canada is, by design, a president’s club, as are most of its regional equivalents (the Council of Ontario formally has some faculty participation, but functionally it runs fairly similarly to UC). We also have lots of “functional” organizations, for registrars, university business officers, student financial aid administrators, and so on – but what that means is that most bodies with members from multiple institutions are focused pretty tightly on professional development rather than broader discussions of institutional change or innovation (CAUBO is a partial exception here, perhaps). This is not a slight on any of these organizations: they all do what they are supposed to do. It’s just that what they are supposed to do doesn’t involve creating a broad dialogue with anyone outside of their membership.
Add all that together and you get a pretty sad state of affairs. It would be nice if Canada could have a more lively public discourse and debate about higher education, along the lines we see in other anglophone countries. To some extent, the purpose of this blog – indeed, the purpose of Higher Education Strategy Associates as a whole – has been to try to create greater space for discussion, innovation and collaboration in Canadian post-secondary education and to create more informed debate about the sector. That’s why my colleague Tiffany MacLennan runs her regular bi-weekly Focus Friday webinars and why we’re running a whole conference this month on how universities (but not colleges – see above on the difficulty with that) can re-invent themselves.
The World of Higher Education: Innovations That Work — and Why
In this vein, a quick announcement about upcoming events in Vancouver and Toronto on February 2 and February 3 (respectively). I’m joining up with Dara Melnyk, host of theInnovative Universities Webinar (and formerguest of the World of Higher Education podcast) and Tiffany MacLennan to deliver a couple of interactive half-day events that bring together fresh insights and global examples of institutional change to see how institutions are re-thinking programs, structures and funding models and what all this means for the future of higher education. We also wish to thank our partners at The Rogers School of Management, at TMU, for helping us co-host the Toronto event.
Everyone, and we mean everyone, is welcome. The more the merrier. We can’t start our own version of The Chronicle, but maybe – just maybe – we can start to create spaces where faculty, staff, students, governments and anyone who loves our sector – can join together to just rap about what might make our sector better and more resilient.
Join us to be part of the sharing and conversations. Limited space, so please register quickly.
2 Responses
I would definitely take 13 Scotlands over one Whitehall both policy-wise and anything else)
It’s long been appreciated that the very term ‘university’ is a misnomer. I recently asked the boss of the U of Calgary’s ghost town retiree faculty association just what we had in common with one another besides a generous pension and he admitted not a whole lot. I worked in philosophy for decades. Did i know a soul across campus in pipeline engineering? Time perhaps to retire fantasies about halls of learning, no?