A couple of days ago I discussed the choice Canadian institutions had between pursuing an international student market and serving local communities. I am sure this remark will have been denounced as a false choice by many – and to be fair, it isn’t a perfect binary – so I thought I would expand on that thought.
The notion of institutions “serving” their communities is, in some ways, a comparatively recent one. The medieval universities “served” their communities by attracting students and scholars who generated commerce. The Humboldtian research universities of the 19th century did not so much serve their communities as churned out specialists and scholars to make a stronger nation. It was only in America, following the Morrill Act of 1862 and the Hatch Act of 1887, where there arose a type of institution – the Land-Grant Universities – with a mandate to i) provide access to the toiling classes, ii) to provide instruction in Agricultural and Mechanical Arts and iii) to do research for the benefit of local farmers. That is, they were designed to produce practical education for the people and practical research for communities. This was revolutionary.
Now even in the US, acceptance of the Land Grant model was not universal. The University of Vermont, for instance, more or less explicitly used its land grant money not for practical arts but to beef up its classics departments so it could finish off Middlebury once and for all (this did not go quite as planned). And as Stephen M. Gavazzi and E. Gordon Gee note in their new book Land-Grant Universities of the Future: Higher Education for the Public Good, the “service” part of these institutions was probably too often compartmentalized within agriculture faculties. Still, these institutions became very popular and this popularity set off the process whereby the United States became the first country in the world to achieve mass higher education.
In Canada, the Land-Grant model didn’t catch on much in Eastern Canada, where the major universities had mostly already been founded, but it did have an effect out west. The University of Saskatchewan was particularly suffused with a Morrill/Hatch ethos. It still does, to my mind: it’s almost impossible to go more than a couple of hours on campus there before someone pulls out the line about it not just being the University of Saskatchewanbut the University for Saskatchewan. What’s interesting about it is not just that folks there genuinely believe it, it’s how rarely the phrase gets used elsewhere. The University of Toronto does not regularly describe itself as the University for Toronto; neither does Manitoba, Victoria, Montreal, etc. (the Université du Québec probably does, but that’s a somewhat special case).
As higher education massified here in Canada, universities had to start genuflecting to the people who paid the bills – that is, taxpayers – and so began the practice of trying to “show value to the community”. Every couple of decades, they make a big show of doing it: the Council of Ontario Universities currently has a whole campaign running on this theme right now. It’s smart politics: public support for any kind of spending depends on people seeing value in the investment. But there’s a peculiar way that universities tend to talk about their relationships with communities. Given their druthers, they will talk about three things:
- how much money they bring into the community (which, you know, fine, but that line of argument has a lot in common with the ones used to justify new sports stadiums),
- how great they are at acting as a ladder for young people to get a start in life (great, but it’s about individuals, not communities), and
- how the research they are doing one day is going to make lives way better (true, usually, but as a very dispersed benefit rather than one specific to the community in which the institution is located).
All of those are things which benefit communities. That’s good, obviously, but it’s not quite the same as institutions being of service to communities. It’s the difference between declaring “we benefit you!” and asking: “how can we be of service”?
Resistance to universities adopting a service stance runs deep in academia. Four years ago, University of Alberta President David Turpin tried to nudge his institution in this direction by giving an audacious installation speech in which he called on Canadian universities to “mobilize our excellence in research and teaching to help municipal, provincial, national and international communities address these challenges” before proceeding to list a very specific set of nine issues where the institution was putting its expertise at the disposal of local governments. But the problem, as I noted at the time, was that without changing tenure and promotion requirements to explicitly valorize this kind of activity, no individual faculty member was likely to volunteer their services for this kind of activity. Not to put too fine a point on it, there was every chance that they would get screwed by their Deans/Department Chairs/colleagues on tenure committees for prioritizing service over publications.
My read on what’s happened at Alberta is that this has played out mostly as I warned. This is one of those cases where the super-organism known as “academia” simply crushes institutions which try to alter priorities, by in this case favouring peer-reviewed publications in specialized journals over actual service to the community. Institutions must build-in incredibly strong incentives for its staff to go against their dominant disciplinary models and put public service first, even occasionally. It’s not impossible to do, but there is a lot of resistance, as I think the Alberta case shows.
Working with communities is incredibly important. Ultimately, community support what drives public support for funding. Bringing money into the community is good, but that’s community service in the same way that being an anchor tenant at the mall is. Being a place where young people can come and get a foot on the ladder to success is great, but what about those who don’t go or perhaps feel left behind? The Gavazzi and Gee book has some useful meditations about what it takes to become a “servant university”, one which genuinely serves its community. I think a lot of Canadian universities would do well to reflect on their ideas. The current obsession with maximizing revenues through international students may make short-term sense given the slow erosion of public funding. But if this causes institutions to neglect community partnerships still further, all it will do is accelerate the erosion. “Global universities” are all well and good, but publicly funded universities are funded by local taxpayers. Universities favour one over the other at their peril.
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