Back to Alberta.  I know, some of you may be sick of me talking about Alberta, but a) it’s the most interesting policy scene in Canada right now and b) this is how the rest of the country feels when I talk about Ontario, so fair’s fair. 

Back, specifically, to the University of Calgary, which has – in response to significant government cutbacks and government complaints about the province’s universities being unresponsive to changing economic priorities, more or less decided to junk its existing strategic plan in favour of a new one.  And what’s interesting about it is both how different it is from the previous plan and also how different it is from the University of Alberta’s.

To start: a little over three years ago, Calgary adopted a five-year plan called Eyes High 2017-2022 (succeeding an earlier document with a similar title).  The strategy was ambitious (be among the top five universities in Canada by 2022), but not particularly original.  The three themes were “research”, “learning” and “community”, and as far as specific initiatives went, it did not get a whole lot more interesting that things like “focussing on work-integrated learning” and “interdisciplinary partnerships.”  Which, you know, fine: not all strategic plans need to be super-innovative, and sometimes you need a document which is mostly stay-the-course plus a little bit of mojo (extra research intensity).  And in 2017, when it was not yet obvious that the money was about to run out, that might have been appropriate.

But then the Kenney government arrived, and delivered the biggest cut in government funding anyone’s seen since maybe the Depression (AB government business plan figures are a bit opaque, but this seems like a bigger cut than the one Ralph Klein delivered in 1993, so).  The University of Alberta reaction, which I detailed a bit back here, seems to be to try to work out how to do the same with less; that is, the big changes are about how to reduce costs and maybe – as a secondary benefit – work out how related units might work together a bit better.  Calgary, on the other hand, has chosen to take the route of a more fundamental re-think.

Technically, these new strategic directions – outlined here in a set of documents called Unstoppable: Growth Through Focus (best short view: this slide deck) is an update to, not a replacement for, Eyes High.  One of its three priorities – community– remains more or less the same (though its now about integration rather than engagement and in practice it’s about economic partnerships), but the other two are more or less completely transformed.  “Learning” has now been transformed (mostly) into a focus on industry/community partnerships to create stackable micro-credentials (which, you know, fine, but if anyone thinks micro-credentials are going to be a quick solution to anything they need to dial back expectations, because it takes years, if not decades, for new credentials to be understood by the labour market). 

And what’s taken the place of “research”?  Well, this is the interesting one.  Check out slides 25-32 of that deck.  In some ways it’s reminiscent of the trend I described yesterday, making research more focused on domains than disciplines (though here the domain idea is described as “transdisciplinarity”).  In principle, it’s kind of cool that an institution would be thinking about getting people out of their disciplinary silos and organizing around big societal organizations.  The problem is that this seems to be going hand in hand with some kind of an attempt to rearrange and, in all likelihood, reduce the number of departments at the institution (while leaving faculties untouched – in contrast to what the University of Alberta is attempting).   And not only is it unclear how you turn a transdisciplinary research approach into a new set of managerial structures (it’s not simply a matter of folding departments together). Since most disciplines are capable of forming transdisciplinary partnerships with dozens of configurations of other disciplines, it’s really unlikely that many disciplines are going to easily relinquish the privileges that go along with controlling a departmental apparatus.  A lot of professors will not see the benefits of transdisciplinarity as making up for a concrete loss of status.  This part of the plan seems tricky enough to pull off if the university were in a time of plenty and there was some money available to grease the wheels – but that’s a long way from where the institution is at the moment.

The last new thing in this plan is that it announces that the University will have four “areas of focus”: that is some signature thematic areas that a university would be “known for”, like Medicine at McMaster, or Agriculture at Guelph.  It’s always a bit tricky to adopt these kinds of priorities–even when done properly, lots of people feel left out.  Still, Calgary had decided that adopting some of four of these – life sciences, energy transformation, city building, and “exploring digital worlds” – makes it seem like a more focused and mission-oriented institution, and from a PR point of view that’s almost surely correct.  The question of course is working out what, if anything, this means in practice.

Anyways, the contrast with the University of Alberta is interesting: from my (admittedly far-away) perch, this one feels much more outwardly-focused, more concerned with impact and community relations.  That is almost certainly a good thing.  The challenge, of course, is getting significant internal buy-in on what look like some significant changes of style – not all of which seem especially well-defined just yet – while at the same time undergoing a big budget crunch (never easy).  These are two very different strategies – and it might take several years to work out which one is more successful.