It’s Friday, so I thought I’d skip the heavy stuff and lay out some quick notes on my recent higher ed reads.

I’ve been trying to read more about the history of Canadian institutions.  One very short pamphlet-like read is called Hatching the Cowbird’s Egg by David R. Murray, about the origin of the University of Guelph (the title vaguely make sense if you read the whole book; in context it’s a reference to the fact that Guelph is a weirdly bolted-together set of institutions).   Guelph does have a fascinating origin-story: it was originally a state agriculture and veterinary school, directly accountable to the provincial government, but also technically part of the University of Toronto for degree-granting purposes.  Then in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the provincial government decided it needed to expand the higher education system, it attached a liberal arts college onto these agricultural organizations to help absorb demand.  It almost failed to launch; unlike new universities in Sudbury, Peterborough and St. Catharines, no local booster group emerged to fundraise and lobby for the institution.  For some time, it seemed that the Government might try to run the university directly as a ‘University of Ontario” without a traditional Board or Senate.  Sanity prevailed, mainly because faculty insisted the university’s prestige would be irreparably impaired under this arrangement, though government might actually have learned something about how institutions work.  In any case: this is a good 90-page essay and we could sure use more of these types of works and fewer 400-page institutional history doorstoppers.

Another book on Ontario PSE history is Collective Autonomy, written by one of COU’s ex-Presidents, Edward Monahan. It bills itself as a history of the Council of Ontario Universities from 1962 to 2000. Ontario has never really had a “system” of higher education and by the time the idea of a system emerged, the province already had a group of very powerful, headstrong universities, who basically told the government to go pound sand every time something resembling a collective approach to an issue was suggested.  In fact, what this history shows above all is a monotonous cycle of Ontario universities resolutely refusing to get ahead of every major policy curve of the late twentieth century (usually in the name of institutional autonomy) and paying the price as a result.  Indeed, one could argue that to a large degree the shape of Canadian higher education is the result of this refusal to ever put system ahead of institution.  It’s a good book to help one think about alternative paths the Ontario system might have taken; but be warned – it’s also fairly depressing.

Further afield, I was pleased to finally make it through Adam Habib’s Regels and Rage, which is a history of the #feesmustfall movement at Wits University in South Africa.  Habib is Wits’ President, but he’s also, ironically, a Marxist professor specializing in social movements, which in many ways made him the right person at the right time as far as Wits was concerned.  Compared to Jonathan Jansen’s As By Fire (which I reviewed back here) it is less inspirational and leadership-focused than it is a sober (and very good) eyewitness-to-history piece. 

I took away two very specific points from this book, one specific to the South African crisis of 2016-7 and one more general.  The first is that one of the things that differentiates #feesmustfall from a lot of other student uprisings is that it was institutions rather than the government that were the target of students’ political anger.   They were hardly unaware that it was systemic government underfunding which was causing institutions to raise tuition fees in order to keep the lights on; but for a variety of reasons – mainly a reluctance to show overt opposition to the African National Congress, which as the agent of Liberation still commands respect even if the actual individuals running it don’t – it was politically easier to scapegoat the institutions and the vice-chancellors, and this distinguishes it from nearly every other major student uprising of the last few decades.   The second interesting point is how difficult it can be to negotiate with student leaders who have whipped up passions beyond a certain point.   There is a natural tendency to deal with elected student leaders as responsible stakeholders who are capable of negotiating on behalf of their constituents.  However, the more student leaders start rousing a crowd – as they did for in Quebec’s “Maple Spring”– the less they resemble leaders of organizations and the more they resemble leaders of social movements.  And the problem with social movements is that they are usually highly suspicious of leaders who try to negotiate with authorities.  That means that at moments of the greatest tension, student leaders are effectively powerless to defuse tensions, even if they are actually so inclined.  That’s a useful lesson to recall when responding to campus unrest.

The final book on my recent list is The Good University by Raewyn Connell, an Australian academic.  It is, in many ways, a stereotypical book about the evils of modern academic life.  If you enjoy Christopher Newfield or Stefan Collini, you’ll definitely like this book.  But unlike Newfield and Collini, who are resolutely US- and UK-centric in their outlooks, Connell takes a more global view about what’s happening in academia and so if you’re just looking for a general survey of issues in higher education around the world, this might be the single best recent volume out these.

That said, it does portray academia from what I think is a largely untenable angle – one that privileges the status and working conditions of academics over pretty much everything else, and portrays almost everything institutions have done to cope with wider access and more intensive research agendas as bad.  There’s half an attempt to be even-minded about this, because the last chapter does talk about alternatives to the current institutional regime.  The problem is that all these alternatives are pretty feeble: Warsaw’s wartime “Flying University”, “Free Universities” from California and elsewhere, the Bolivarian University of Venezuela, etc.  None of these are actually financially sustainable or indeed anywhere near respectable as creators of scientific knowledge and there is no attempt to really grapple with what would be lost if we moved from the current system to a system of “good” universities.  So, while the book is a useful (if opinionated) guide to the present, it’s not a particularly useful guide to the future.

Have a good weekend – and for all my right-thinking, TFC-supporting followers: All for One. See you in Seattle.