Morning all. Back to the grind.
One of the surprising things I discovered over the break was that the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) seems to think that the sector is in good enough shape that it can afford to apply purity tests to external support. See specifically the article in the last CAUT Bulletin by the University of Regina’s Marc Spooner entitled Not All Calls for Public Funding are Good.
Spooner’s ire is directed at the Royal Bank and it’s recently released document Testing Times: Fending off a crisis in Canadian postsecondary education. Now, full disclosure: HESA has been in a couple partnerships with RBC (RBC is the title sponsor of the Re: University conference later this month), so take what follows with whatever-sized grain of salt you desire. My purpose here though is not to summarize or evangelize the document; rather it is to point out the folly of dismissing people who support higher education over what, to anyone outside the CAUT bubble, would likely seem like pretty minor differences.
Spooner (a CAUT Executive Committee member) and RBC actually agree on what I think are the most important points: that post-secondary education needs stronger and more stable funding. They are also in accord that, in the words of the report: “the postsecondary system has long been an important part of the Canadian identity. It has driven discoveries, delivered accessible, quality education and provided economic anchor institutions in communities across the country, underpinning progress and prosperity.”
Still, Spooner takes issue with RBC on four points. Two lesser areas of disagreements are performance-based funding (PBF), and the alignment of academic programs with the labour market. These are legitimate points of disagreement, I guess. I mean, I find the faculty union position on PBF to be largely disingenuous and deliberately ignorant of some of the more interesting uses of PBF in places like Europe, but whatever. I doubt CAUT would actually oppose PBF as long as it brought in extra funds. And as for alignment of academic programs with the labour market, the public debate on this issue is usually carried on in terms so vague as to be essentially meaningless. I mean, faculty unions tend not to argue in favour of programs being actively dissociated from the labour market, so what are we actually arguing about here? These are matters of degrees, really.
No, the real disagreement comes over two very specific passages plucked from the RBC report, one about research, and the other about governance. The offending passage on research reads: “For many institutions (and departments within them) advancing innovations, and ensuring they go beyond the ideation phase, will require a reorientation — from exploring topics to advancing goals — and an openness to taking on research contracts with industry partners who have defined milestones and clear deliverables in mind.”
To which Spooner replies: “Universities should be neither fettered nor reoriented as another branch of corporate research and development. Collaborations should be facilitated where beneficial, certainly, but not at the expense of curiosity-driven and public interest research….to do so is to champion nothing short of an anemic vision of what post-secondary education can — and already does — contribute to our communities and society.”
This argument would make sense if there was a single optimal ratio of basic-to-applied research which held true across all institutions and all fields of study. But – and I really shouldn’t have to say this – there isn’t. Some of best universities in the world (Stanford, MIT, Imperial University of London, to name but a few) do quite a lot of both types of research and no one thinks they are “anemic” universities. Everyone agrees that a healthy university system needs both kinds of research; yelling “no pasaran” about what is essentially an arbitrary line between basic and applied research is cutting off your nose to spite your face.
And then there is the issue of governance. The offending paragraph states “Internally, risk-averse institutional cultures, fragmented governance environments and restrictive collective agreements often layered with tenure, can impede leaders’ ability to take decisive action.” To which Spooner responds “Post-secondary institutions are not meant to emulate corporate structures. Our campuses are not in search of an autocratic great leader but rather are invested in shared governance and democracy. Collegial governance structures and organized labour in Canada have been the longstanding bulwarks defending the aspirational ideals of the academy.”
(Just an aside here: though both sides take pains to avoid using the term “universities” here, it’s clear as day that’s what both of them mean: neither of them is genuinely making their respective arguments with respect to colleges.)
One can I suppose take legitimate issue with the way RBC characterized both tenure and leadership. But Spooner’s response focuses on the wording rather than the point behind it, which is that universities have trouble making bold and timely decisions. This may not be Spooner’s intent, but his response very much comes off as “it’s illegitimate to care about speedy decision-making, because slow decision-making is the essence of the aspirational ideals of the academy”. If we were interested in making progress as a sector, we would be trying to find ways find ways to make decision-making both speedy and collegial. But that’s not the argument being made here.
(An aside worth pondering: are the “aspirational ideals of the academy” the correct basis for public policy in higher education? Spooner pretty clearly thinks so, but I have a feeling if you asked Canadians about the correct purpose of universities, fulfilling academics’ ideals might not be at the top of the list. Just saying.)
Anyways, here’s the thing: it is perfectly legitimate for faculty unions to have disagreements about performance-funding, labour market-orientation, research and governance with people who want to see better public funding for universities. Where this becomes dangerous is when these disagreements get blown up into matters of principle so monumental that you reject the idea of alliances with people who basically hold the same ideas as you with respect to public funding. And that is very clearly what is going on here: RBC gets accused of being interested in favour of the “Shock Doctrine”, of pushing for “an impoverished version of the university”, of “myopically trampling the golden goose”, of having strained imagination…you get the idea. All of which leads to the article’s implicit message that RBC’s interest in and support of sector funding should not be accepted as a Good Thing.
Let me just remind everyone of one very serious fact in Canadian post-secondary right now: governments are in no rush to fund the sector. In the past eighteen years, we’ve gone from a world where provincial expenditures on PSE have dropped from 5.3% of total spending to 3.3% of total spending.
Figure 1: Budgeted Provincial PSE Expenditures as a Percentage of Total Provincial Expenditures, Canada and Selected Provinces 2006-07 to 2025-26
Most of the sector’s problems, fundamentally, are due to this phenomenon of declining support either directly or as a first/second derivative. The sector will not get healthier until this trend reverses. For the past eighteen years, the sector has acted under the belief that that things might change if – to use the worst seven words in the English language – “we could just tell our story better”. But this is a fantasy; universities and colleges telling their own stories just sounds self-interested. The only way things will change is if others start telling the sector’s stories because they are convinced of the sector’s value.
Whether you buy RBCs take on universities or not, it is the only major business out there that has been making the case for PSE loudly and consistently. I know in theory there are a whole lot of other corporations which care about higher education (take a look at the membership of the Business Higher Education Roundtable for instance), but none are putting time and money into defending the sector the way RBC is.
Postsecondary education in Canada desperately needs a big tent. Insisting that willing allies pass purity tests on things like performance-based funding or the “correct” balance between applied and basic research, let alone insisting on a system of decision-making that is slow by design, is deeply self-defeating. A small-tent attitude, in contrast, just means an endless future of funding cuts.
The choice is ours.
