Thirty years ago last week, the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (now Universities Canada) published a wholly remarkable document entitled The Report of the Commission of Inquiry on Canadian University Education (I can’t find an online edition but here’s a contemporary account from Maclean’s).  Since the Commission was just one man – Stuart Smith – its public moniker was usually “The Smith Commission”.  It was a remarkable document in so many ways so there’s more than enough reason to go down the memory lane to examine it.

Firstly, it was remarkable the document was commissioned at all.  I mean, Universities Canada?  Commissioning a report by a high-profile academic/politician that had the potential to be critical of its own members?   Unimaginable today.  Remarkable second in its scope, which covered i) Teaching and Learning, ii) Curricular Design, iii) Continuing and Distance Education, iv) Accessibility (particularly but not exclusively for “The Less Affluent”), v) Student Attrition, vi) K-12/University links, vii) inter-institutional co-operation, viii) tenure, ix) the Future Supply of Faculty, and x) Quality Control and Performance Indicators.  Again, unimaginable today.  All covered, on a national scale, by one dude and a couple of research assistants.  Each of those would pretty much have to be a separate report. 

The early 1990s were simpler times. As long as the establishment thought you were smart, you could write just about any old thing. The scope of the tables is impressive, thought the details are slim.   I probably put more data analysis in a week’s blogs than this report did over the nine months or so it was in existence.  But then there just wasn’t a lot of data back then.  So, it was driven by opinions.

Now, that said, I think Smith’s instincts were pretty good on most matters.  The system, as he said, was fundamentally healthy, though it would be better if governments put in more money.  And like any good institutionally-sponsored survey of higher education, it made a number of recommendations about ways government could contribute more through doing or spending (more operating grants, faster student visa processing, the creation of a dedicated fund for evidence-based pilot projects based on the American Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE), suggesting that a consortia of provincial educational television stations could collaborate on making more educational VHS tapes, etc).  But at the same time, he acted as a critical friend to universities, pointing a myriad of ways in which they could and should improve, sometimes in painfully specific ways, for instance:

• Hard caps on class size.
• Much heavier weight on teaching ability in tenure decisions.
• Minimum weekly teaching hours for faculty (if taken literally, it would mean about a 3:3 load) and widespread publication of faculty teaching hours.
• Large, fixed proportions of budgets to be spent on faculty teaching development.
• Much greater use of published graduate surveys of work experiences to determine the utility of teaching and curriculum.
• Much greater use of performance indicators, not so much to direct funding, but to explain to the public things like class sizes, use of sessionals, and graduate students to teach classes, faculty advising hours, times to degree completion, rates of progression into graduate school, and more.
• Requiring all graduating students to take a writing test and to publicize the aggregated results for each institution (an idea most recently taken up by the Government of Ontario as part of its Performance-Based Funding Plan).

Universities Canada and its members reacted predictably.  A couple of months later, it published the report of a task force made up of nine Presidents (plus, oddly, Michele Beauchamp Fortin, who 12 years later would become President of Télé-Université but at the time was head of programming at Radio-Canada).  It endorsed all the bits which would give universities more money, but everything else was buried under waffle.  “One-size-fits-all” class size caps were unhelpful, they said, which at one level is true (ideal class sizes vary for a number of reasons), but given the steady increase in class sizes for the last three decades, one can’t help thinking that whatever the problems with the proposal they can’t have been worse that what actually occurred.  Performance indicators were promised serious consideration, but with so many hedges and caveats that it was clear that they were dead on arrival.  If there is one thing to which Canadian universities don’t take kindly, it is suggestions that they collectively look in the mirror in the cause of self-improvement (though they often separately and independently implement said self-improvement a decade or so afterwards – and then get upset that no one gives them credit for their belated attention to the issue in question).

If you can get your hands on a copy to read, I urge you to do so.  It’s fascinating both in terms of seeing how much higher education has changed in thirty years, and how much it hasn’t.  The Smith Commission probably marked the last time a national body released a report with a serious plea for universities to prioritize teaching as opposed to research.  The report is worth reading for no other reason than to think about how much better Canadian higher education would have been if institutions had taken its critiques seriously, rather than snubbed them because…well why did they exactly?  Because they did not want critical self-assessment?  (Answering this question would be a great PhD project in the history of education),

A path not taken.  But worth remembering, nonetheless.