Hi all. Tomorrow will feature my annual interview with Rob Kelchen about the year in US higher education, and Friday is the final Fifteen of the year, so that makes today the final regular blog of the year. And that means time to sum up and look forward.
To sum up: the events of the past few months leave me pretty pessimistic. And looking forward: there are grounds for optimism, but they are slim.
The crux of the problem is this: people are losing faith in higher education. There are some startling new surveys out from both the United States and Australia showing catastrophic falls in the percentage of people who say university is “worth it”. I would be surprised if things were much different in Canada, though precisely because Canada has better non-university options, I expect the slide would be less severe here.
Now, I will be the first to get stroppy about the wording of survey questions about higher education. Wording matters. People might not think that higher education is “worth it” for someone else’s kid, but nowhere in the developed world do application and participation rates don’t suggest that there has been a material change in people’s views on whether it is worth it for themselves or their kids. People want higher education for themselves and their loved ones. Period.
That said, survey results don’t change like this if there isn’t some underlying shift going on. People are upset about something related to higher education, it’s just that pollsters’ questions are too crude to pick it up. So, what is it? Well, here’s my take: what I think people are saying is that they are frustrated with higher education. It takes too long to get a degree. It costs too much (and housing is so expensive!). It is not a guaranteed ticket to success or even of real social mobility. Etc.
None of these complaints are new of course, or in the case where they are new, it is hardly the fault of universities. But that’s not the point. The point is that the external environment has changed and in this new environment, university doesn’t seem like quite such a bargain any more. Less “it’s not worth it”, but that “it’s not what it used to be”.
And who can blame anyone for thinking that? Very fewthings are as good as they used to be. Climate change is scary. Vladimir Putin is scarier. The democratic promise of the early internet has morphed into Nerd Reich dystopia. Our public services are stretched because we keep expanding the welfare state without giving the state the means to pay for it. Property owners have been allowed to rent-seek their way into eating all the productivity and wage gains of the last thirty years. Technological change seems to be threatening jobs everywhere (I say “seems” because I don’t see the evidence, but we’re talking vibes here). People are stretched, tired, and they are deeply resentful of all the institutions that they feel are letting them down, and higher education is definitely one of them. Ironic? Yes, given that it’s institutions above all that have been battered by politicians who just assume they can abuse them without penalty because they have always been there and always will. Fair? Absolutely not. But it’s the hand higher education has been dealt, and the sector has to deal with it.
So, higher education needs to change with the times. Degrees probably need to become shorter. The fields that are not directly linked to professions – mainly arts and sciences – need to do a better job of inculcating at least some technical skills, which means at a minimum figuring out how technical skills are being deployed in the labour market (a big ask since most Arts Deans would be hard pressed to even name the five biggest employers of their graduates). Across the board, greater tech literacy is needed; so too is greater experimentation with pedagogy and assessment. All the things it should do if it wanted to let the citizens of the country know that it takes their fears about the future seriously. It’s not really all that complicated.
The problem is that change terrifies Canadian universities. It’s not that administrators don’t know that change is required, or don’t know how to achieve it. I was at one major institution a couple of weeks ago – one which historically has had a great deal of trouble adapting to change – and talking to senior leadership it was clear to me that everyone knew exactly what needed to happen. They just didn’t know how to get buy-in from the staff union.
And this is really the issue. Academic unions in Canada have a veto over real program change in a way they have in few other places on earth, because previous generations of administrators bargained away management’s rights to initiate change. And we’ve seen on many occasions that if there’s one thing you can count on unions to do in a moment of crisis, it’s to dig in against not just job losses but any hint of changes in working practices – it’s what unions are meant to do.
So, what has happened is that the system, at a moment when the external environment is changing quickly and institutions need to experiment to survive, universities are stuck with the fact that they have given a veto to the most conservative element in what is possibly the most conservative industry in the world. That’s not the only challenge right now, but it is certainly the biggest.
Now, I don’t think your average poll-respondent understands the first thing about faculty/admin dynamics in higher education. They don’t see this dynamic at all. But what they do see very clearly is that universities are reluctant to change at a time when the majority of citizens are experiencing greater uncertainty, greater precarity and in many cases lower standards of living as well. And such people look at universities and think: how dare they refuse change?
(I will add: average professorial salaries of over $200K such as at UBC probably don’t help matters. Rich folk with 100% job security don’t want to change the way their institutions work? And they want public sympathy? Good luck with that.)
There’s no easy way out of this mess. The simple but probably catastrophic way of dealing with this would be to have provincial government legislate limitations to the scope of collective agreements and in particular around the requirement that universities declare state of financial exigency before layoffs can begin. A harder, but more promising path to follow would be to recognize that on many issues, there is a lot of daylight between the average faculty member and their unions. There are, I believe, a lot of faculty who despite fears about their own jobs understand perfectly well that change is necessary, not only to deal with cutbacks (though that is important) but also in order to be of better service to a changing society. Younger faculty especially. The trick is to find ways to find allies and champions for change from among this body of the faculty. Basically: give faculty but not unions a leading role in dreaming up with radical but positive changes.
If faculty don’t step up – or if they step up and the union objects (trust me, this happens) – then the turkeys will have voted for Christmas and we’ll all know who to blame. But I am pretty sure that, if given the tools and the trust to do so, they will in fact start to move institutions in the required directions. Giving them the tools and getting to the required levels of trust will no doubt be difficult (and made more so by the fact that faculty generally have not been asked to take on this role before). But the alternatives are worse.
And on that cheery note: happy holidays. See you all again when the blog returns on January 5th.
3 Responses
What you write veers dangerously close to advising universities to drive a wedge between faculty and their unions, which, honestly, would be pretty gross. However, I think what you’re getting at can be gotten to in a way more conciliatory to organized labour.
Faculty simultaneously hold two distinct roles, participants in collegial governance and participants in collective bargaining. Anyone who’s participated in collegial governance to the point of feeling viscerally invested in the institutional health of the university will understand that there’s a tension between the two roles and will accordingly temper their approach as participants in collective bargaining. In particular, if you have a sufficiently strong faculty culture of collegial governance and ownership over institutional health, you’ll have union leadership that will act accordingly. However, if faculty have no faith in collegial governance bodies and processes, they really have no choice but to double down on collective bargaining as their sole means of shaping the university, and this is how you can get all manner of dysfunction and sclerosis.
Boeckem’s background leading autonomous technology development adds credibility to this keynote. As digital twins and AI-driven mapping become more mainstream, strategic leadership will be just as critical as technical capability.
I’m coming to this late, and I apologize.
I suspect that you’re wrong about administrators “bargaining away power to make change.” My sense is that our salaries here at UBC are so high — if they are that high; I still don’t know if that’s an average only of full professors, who are a fraction of a fraction of instructors — because the administration would rather increase salaries than surrender power. They could propose ditching the merit system, for instance.
Secondly, I find the connection you make between high salaries and independence paradoxical. Usually high salaries imply respect, which in turn implies independence. Should the salaries of judges be taken as a reason to abolish the independence of the judiciary? What about the salaries of central bankers? Surely it’s the opposite, at least outside of a lunatic fringe of populists.
But finally, I think the really big paradox in this article is the connection you make between “it’s not what it used to be” and “higher education needs to change with the times.” The first is (small c) conservative, and the second is progressive or perhaps futurist. Maybe the clearest I can make this is by a reference to a classic work of Reformation history, which begins as follows:
“At the beginning of the sixteenth century everyone that mattered in the Western Church was crying out for reformation.
**********
If you asked people what they meant when they said that the Church was in need of reform, they would not have found it easy to agree.” (Owen Chadwick)
What was true for the Latin church seven hundred years ago appears to be true for what Robert Pirsig calls “the church of reason” now. Everyone believes in the need for change, but we can’t agree on what to change. A lot of us want to return to first principles, as did pretty much all of the reformers, especially Catholic reformers. This is change, I guess, but it might be better named “reformation.”