Yesterday I discussed and advocated for visioning exercises, particularly if your institution is about to undergo some radical changes. It is a lot easier to navigate a storm if you know where you’re going in the first place. Everyone in a university needs to be able to answer the question Why does this institution exist? What’s your raison d’être?
To some of you, I expect that this question sounds stupid. Obviously, the answer is some kind of mix of “teaching, research, community service” (occasionally with words like “citizenship,” “civilization” and the like thrown in the mix). Indeed if you read any of the many, many books about the purpose of The University(and oh my God thereare way too many of these) those are the answers you will find. But in the real world, no one asks what “the” university is for. They ask what “this” university is for. This specific institution, the one you work at, the one the community pays taxes to support and students pay tuition to attend: what is *it* for?
This question is uncomfortable to many insideinstitutions, because faculty members’ identities are all (to some degree) split between the part that thinks about their employer and the part that thinks about their discipline. The former might have some thoughts about things that do or could make a particularly institution special, or of particular relevance to a particular community; the latter identity believes that the purpose of every university is to be a mall within which the local branch of the International Association of physicists,/ sociologists/ kinesiologists/ historians/ whatever can set up a franchise to do whatever it is they do.
There is a lot of truth in that second point of view. Every university is the same, to some extent. But there are huge risks associated with “plain vanilla.”
First of all—and this is something almost no one inside universities seems to grasp—for better or for worse, governments and business and the public think that institutions have both a purpose and agency. How do you think it would look if a president, in a fit of honesty, were to say “don’t look at me, I’m just a holding company for a set of disciplines who have no particular interest in this city, and I can’t change it because the professions’ notions of academic freedom prevent institutions from genuinely pursuing a collective project”? If agency is impossible and undesirable anyway, what’s the point of university independence? Why not smush all universities into a single provincial system, make everyone public servants, and have provincial governments run universities directly?
Second of all: how many communities want their universities to be plain vanilla? How do you gain support from a community if you tell them you want to be just like everyone else?
(Actually, that second question isn’t actually as clear cut as I make it out to be because there are some small communities whose main motivation for a university is just to keep their young people around for a few extra years and “just like every other university” is actually an aspirational statement, but that’s a minority case.)
So, again, it’s not what “the university is for?” but “what is this university for?” What, specifically, is it meant to achieve? Who, specifically, is it meant to serve, and who? In what ways, specifically, is it different from other institutions and, specifically, in what ways is it better? There are lots of universities in Canada who can answer this question pretty well. Waterloo, for instance. Guelph. Saskatchewan. Memorial. St. FX. Sometimes the answer is about geography. Sometimes it’s about teaching in a particular way or being outstanding in a specific field or set of fields. But whatever it is, it is a purpose beyond being plain vanilla.
Now, if you don’t have a specific raison d’être, it’s not the end of the world. It’s never too late to develop one. And once you know what it is, you can start to have an intelligent conversation about what the future should look like, how an institution can best fulfill that mandate 10 or 15 years from now. And from that, you can work backwards to figure out how to best get through difficult times. If your thing is student employability, then you don’t cut career services and co-op. If your thing is life sciences, then don’t impose across-the-board cuts that weaken your life sciences departments. If your thing is research, double-down on attracting and funding graduate students. And so on, and so on.
(And of course, if you’re just plain vanilla, you’ll probably just lay down across-the-board cut of some type, because you have nothing in particular you need to preserve or build upon. That way lies enshittification, if you ask me. But I’ll talk more about that on Monday.)
The coming carnage is going to cause a lot of institutions to falter. The ones that know where they are going and can navigate the storm with purpose are the ones that will reach calm waters the fastest. Just having a strong clear vision isn’t going to make the next couple of years any easier. But it might make the four or five years after that a lot better.
(And again, if y’all are in need of some clear thinking about how to come up with a good long-term vision, quickly, you know where to find us).
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Canada’s whole university system is built around plain vanilla public universities: universities which have all the traditional academic disciplines and professional training and take low tens of thousands of students. This is important because Canada is so spread out and lacks effective intercity and interregional public transit. For a lot of Canadians, if their local university does not offer a field, their options are ‘spend a lot of money and lose all face-to-face social connections by moving somewhere else’ and ‘don’t study that.’
It makes sense for universities in say Greater New York City to specialize and differentiate because there are so many in a small space. Somewhere like the University of Saskatchewan would be advised to make different choices.
One place with a specific sense of purpose is Monsters University, from the Pixar movie of the same name. The only important faculty is the Scare School. Everything else is, at best, a support service. I can’t attach a clip here, but you could just do a search for “Professor Brandywine” on Youtube to see the dispirited manner in which other faculties view themselves.
My point is that choosing something as an institution’s “specific raison d’être” means rejecting everything else. If an institution’s reason to be is science, it’s likely to marginalise and even cut arts. If its reason to be is sports, employment outcomes or even diversity, then it might marginalise academics altogether.
More generally, if an institution’s reason to be doesn’t align with the reason to be of *the* university, not just *this* university, then perhaps those doing the visioning aren’t really imagining a university at all. That is why all universities not only are, but ought to be, quite similar.
My hope is that the coming carnage causes us all to double-down on the academic mission — on the life of the mind — which characterises universities as such. My fear is that it just leads to doubling down on whatever platitudes get chosen as strategy, mission, etc. in a probably futile search for distinction. And that way lies a national future as a more ignorant people.
Haha! “…every university is to be a mall within which the local branch of the International Association of physicists,/ sociologists/ kinesiologists/ historians/ whatever can set up a franchise to do whatever it is they do.”
I love your eloquent, pointed jabs, even when I (as a liberal arts prof) find myself at the receiving end.
It sounds a little like a multiple choice question in disguise:
Which department can we do without?
– physics
– sociology
– kinesiology
– history
– all of the above
It’s also a little like the oft repeated statement “we cannot be everything (academic) to all (academically interested) people.”
On the face of it, this sounds like a plain truth. However, the difficulty with this statement is that virtually all (90%?) of the most highly respected top 500 international universities, and certainly all of the highly respected Canadian universities, are everything academic to all academically interested people. If they would not be, they would not play in their current leagues. There are select Canadian institutions that are highly specialized on particular aspects of academic training (not academic education), and none of them makes it into the top 1000 in any international ranking.
And I daresay, even in the fields on which they specialize, they are not competitive.
It’s all fine to skip your left defender or midfielder if you like to play in your casual city league. It’s a no-starter if you want to play in the premier league (nor could you survive in any of the regional leagues, for that matter).