It should come as a surprise to no one (at least no one who has not been sheltering under a rock for the past couple of years) that Canadian universities are in for a serious bout of belt tightening. Not everywhere, and not all to the same extent. But the math is pretty simple: the international tuition fee gravy train has come to a halt and no provincial government seems willing to replace this income, either through higher block grants or by allowing institutions to make it up through domestic tuition fees, and so the inevitable result is expenditure reduction.

But if university budgets stop expanding, basically everything goes to hell: labour difficulties, claims of crisis, etc. It’s all an extraordinarily brittle machine—even the tiniest deviation in spending makes people scream “austerity” and think the world is going to pot. Over the past 25 years Canadian universities have operated on the principle that expenditures will always go up by about 2 percentage points above inflation. Salary expenditures, non-salary expenditures: makes no difference. Most universities are like balloons, expanding evenly in all directions. It is very different from almost any sector of the private economy, where enterprises grow and shrink every year according to the fortunes of the market. Apart from hospitals (which are pretty much fully funded by the public purse) there is no other sector of the economy that is quite as brittle as Canadian universities. And this is of course why, when government funding stopped increasing fifteen years ago, they turned to international students to feed the beast, instead of making the cuts required by merely accepting government transfer policies.

(If there is one thing that drives me nuts, it is people within the higher education system who tut-tut about their university having taken “too many risks” and becoming “too dependent” on international student revenue. Exactly none of these people have EVER EVER EVER advocated that their own institution should have forgone this income and started cutting jobs pretty much every year since 2009, which is what such a policy would have entailed. You should pay these people precisely zero attention.)

Anyways, if you hear panic from institutional leaders these days, it’s mainly because no one actually knows how to reduce expenditures without provoking chaos. But this is not actually true. It is just that over the past quarter century of ever-swelling budgets, the sector has forgotten how to roll with the punches. 

Very broadly speaking, modern Canadian universities have seen three waves of large cutbacks. The first, in the early 1970s, came from governments starting to pull back from ever-increasing funding for the not-ridiculous reason that the baby boom crested in universities in about 1971 and governments thought maybe it was time to reduce institutional grants as well. The second, in the early 1980s, was because public finances got absolutely hammered by the oil crisis that followed the revolution in Iran (in Alberta, where public finances did just fine during the oil crisis, the second wave of cuts did not occur until the oil crisis ended). And the third was in the rolling economic/fiscal crisis of the 1990s, which in terms of cuts to universities started in Alberta in 1993 and ended in Quebec in 1998 or so.

These were big cuts—often ten or twenty percent over a multi-year period (yes, Alberta has just gone through something similar but it did so from a position where the institutions were getting about 30-40% per student more than the rest of the country, so it’s not really comparable). And here’s the thing:  institutions weathered them, decade after decade. It wasn’t very pretty. And frankly most should have made better decisions. But they knew how to do it. It was like muscle-memory. Every decade, they did it.

And now we don’t. It’s been so long since we have had a major reduction in income that the muscle-memory has gone. Everyone who was in a position of any kind of responsibility in the 1990s has long since moved on. And so now, instead of having learned from the past, it seems like we are about to make similar mistakes all over again. Because of a memory hole.

Unless.

Now, hear me out. Those folks from the 1980s and 1990s? They may have left institutions but a good number of them are still around. They remember. They can explain what they did. They know what worked and what didn’t. And yeah, institutions are a bit more complex now than they were thirty years ago, but the lessons from those years are still broadly applicable. 

So, what I would suggest is this: Maybe we should spend the next few months listening to the past. Collectively, let’s talk to the folks who kept our institutions running through the hard times of the 80s and 90s. Let’s ask them what they think they did right and what they wish they had done differently. Let’s see what wisdom they have for us now. Perhaps they can save us all from repeating at least a few of the same mistakes.

And let’s do it together, as a kind of pan-Canadian project and share the learnings. No one institution got into this mess alone, and none are going to get out of it alone. 

Interested in collaborating? Let me know, I can put people together.