Let me start with three comments/conversations I’ve seen and had in the past little while.

1.  A national columnist told me that what’s happening to higher education in the last decade or so could be ascribed to the late Chrétien changes in political party financing.  Specifically, he said, political parties are built to please donors, and the Chrétien rules had shifted the nature of the donor class.  The old one was made up of rich folks, who cared a lot about institutions (including those of higher education).  Nowadays, it is boatloads of smaller donors, who frankly care a lot less about institutions.  This is true of all parties.
2. A friend in the political consulting business said to me (and I’m paraphrasing this a bit here): “There are big picture “macro” qualifying issues – the dollar, foreign affairs – that parties have to get right in order to be taken seriously and then there are very kitchen-table “micro” issues that you can use to persuade people to vote for you…the “how does this affect me” kind of issues like Harper’s hockey tax credit.  Issues that involve institutions – schools, colleges, universities, hospitals (at least outside a pandemic) – kind of sit between the two and can’t get traction until they become either macro or micro issues.  And since it’s a lot easier to make something a micro issue than a macro issue, to the extent higher education makes it into the election-time discourse, it’s as something that resonates as a bread-and-butter financial issue, like sticker tuition prices.
3. Brendan Cantwell, professor of higher education at Michigan State, recently tweeted that “the right in the US thinks universities are important. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be doing all this (ie. attacking DEI, tenure, etc). Democrats generally think students are important but not universities.”  Interesting thought.  In Canada, what is true of Democrats is also true of Liberals and New Democrats in the sense that both like dumping money on students but are much less enthusiastic about giving money to institutions.  However, our Conservatives aren’t Republicans in the sense that they don’t particularly feel the need to “capture” them to promote a particular point of view, even if some of the rhetoric around “viewpoint diversity” occasionally seems to trend in this direction.  Rather, they just don’t think of higher education as being all that important in the first place (though they can sometimes be roused to enthusiasm re: community colleges)

Those are all interesting observations on their own but let’s think about the implications of the three comments together. 

• Higher education institutions do not have a natural political home in Canada.  Students do, but universities and colleges don’t.
• To the extent you can have a political party care about institutions, the easiest way to do it is through students.  You can make it a “micro” or kitchen table issue by talking how this or that set of policies makes sense for you, or your family.  It’s easy enough to see how this lends itself to a strategy of price cuts rather than service enhancement (though, I would argue, the coming youth bulge probably represents the best opportunity to reframe quality issues as kitchen-table issues we’re going to get in the next two decades).
• Now evidently that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to get money out of governments for institutions or more broadly, non-student causes (i.e., research): the response to the Naylor report, or the general policy of the Chrétien-Martin years shows it’s possible.  But how?
• The post-Naylor boost arguably came because the timing was right: the mid-term of a majority government, when the “political” lens is perhaps at its weakest and the public servants have the greatest degree of control to get necessary but unsexy work done.  But under minority governments, when the political lens is *always* on, and in the current system, that’s bad for institutions.
• Let me make that last point a little more clearly: in a world of minority governments where parties are genuflecting to small donors 24/7, higher education is deeply challenged, but students are not.  Arguably, the interests of the two are to some degree in opposition to one another.
• The Chrétien-Martin years were before the change in donor laws, so it happened under a different political financial regime, and it is not entirely clear if lessons from that era are still applicable.  But I would argue that very briefly – maybe for the only time in Canadian history – higher education made it to the level of a “macro” issue, rather than a kitchen-table one.  Because of the dotcom boom, “innovation” made it to the top table as an issue and governments looked silly if they weren’t trying all out to make Canada less resource-dependent.

In other words, institutions have two choices.  First, they can wait for brief moments when the political system allows politicians to ignore the short-term interests of donors and hit them hard.  Or, second, they can exert themselves to try to make institutions like universities and colleges “macro” issues the way they once briefly were.

But in either case, I am not sure that the same old talking points are going to get the sector to where it wants to go.  Fundamentally, the university sector hasn’t updated its shtick since the Chrétien-Martin era.  Those same-old, same-old arguments don’t convince the public servants the way they used to.  That kind of rules out the first option.  And they clearly aren’t breaking through to the public well enough to move the file from the micro- or meso-level to the “macro” level where governments might need to exert themselves in order to show that they are competent.

What institutions – universities in particular – want is a world where they get lots of money and minimal government oversight.  But the trade-off is – indeed, has always been, right back to the origin of the research university two centuries ago – that institutions need to offer something that government and/or society (read: small-dollar political donors) either really wants or believes it needs.  To the extent that the solution lies in changing narrative, I argue that perhaps we need to spend less time “trying to tell our story better” (is there any combination of words more likely to inspire complacency in higher education?) and more time crafting and selling a future vision of society where higher education is more relevant.  So compelling, in fact, that citizens want to hold governments to account if that future does not look like it is coming to pass.

I have some thoughts about how to do that, but they will have to wait for another day.