If you’ve been in any senior university administrator’s offices in the last few weeks, there’s a good chance you’ll have seen a paperback with vaguely constructivist art cover entitled University Governance in Canada: Navigating Complexity by the scholarly quartet of Julia Eastman, Glen Jones, Claude Trottier and Olivier Bégin-Caouette.  Within administrative circles, it’s getting a lot of buzz and praise for being an accurate portrait of the state of Canadian higher education in the early 2020s.  On balance, I think it’s highly deserving of the praise it is receiving despite– or perhaps because of – the fact that the book, like its subject, is a bit messy.  Allow me to explain.

The heart of this book is a set of six case studies that took place about eight years ago at six large institutions across the country: UBC, Alberta, Toronto, Montreal, UQAM and Dalhousie (essentially: a regionally balanced group of U-15 universities with a highly idiosyncratic UQAM for contrast).  At the same time, this is also meant to be a book about “Canada”, which is an altogether different matter.  The first hundred or so pages are about as good an introduction to the history and structure of Canadian higher education as you are going to get, and chapter six provides a general (maybe too general) update to developments in governance across Canada since 2015.  In effect, there are two books here – two very good books, let me stress – struggling with each other from a narrative point of view and it occasionally enjoinders a bit of whiplash. 

The individual case studies themselves are well done. They cover the ground thoroughly and the authors leave the interviewees to speak for themselves with respect to key questions.  My favourite in this respect was an interviewee at UBC who described differences in outlook on university governance thusly:

I felt that when I was a faculty member, I was in a big swimming pool. Everyone else is swimming around and bumping into each other.  They are going in different directions but we are basically under the water.  And when I became a head, I would suddenly have my body in the pool but I could see all around the edge of the swimming pool.  And it struck me that outside there are all kinds of things that I had never noticed before.  I had some vague idea, I knew there is the president, but UBC is a giant place so I had this image of cabanas, palm trees, lots of buildings out there, all the central administration was above the level of the regular swimming pool…as a head you are kind of halfway in between, I think as a Dean you maybe have your toes in the pool and then it goes on from there.  There is a lifeguard somewhere…

Delicious.  Anyways, if there is a criticism with respect to the case studies, it’s that they define governance in a narrower manner than is necessary: external governance is defined mostly in terms of relations with government than with less formal sources of authority such as rankers, bond rating agencies, etc. Internal governance is probably too focused on Boards and Senates, rather than more informal mechanisms of governance including – increasingly – unionization and faculty bargaining.   And the way in which the case studies are integrated into the surrounding chapters feels a bit clunky, as if it were two separate books, one based on primary sources and one on secondary ones.

Now, to be clear: a four-author book is bound to be uneven in terms of consistency of voice, but with fewer authors, it would have had less expertise to draw on.  Trying to extrapolate national lessons from a limited group of institutions which is geographically balanced but biased in terms of mission is going to be hit-and-miss. But this country is so diverse, even a sample twice this size wouldn’t necessarily solve this problem, and there’s only so much work one set of scholars can do.  Tacking a set of journalistic “updates” on to a set of council-funded case-studies is bound to lead to some unevenness in terms of both tone and subject coverage, and while sometimes this seems to head into some pretty weird tangents (I was left a bit bemused by the six-page foray into the development of the University of Toronto’s mental health policy, for instance) other times it leads to some top-class summary reportage (the amendment of the governing legislation at Université de Montréal).  So, when I say the book is sometimes messy, it’s not necessarily a criticism: rather, it’s more an acknowledgement of the challenging nature of the subject. 

And, let me emphasize: while the case study chapters are good, the chapters based on secondary research are great.  As a survey of history and practice in Canadian higher education, it is probably rivalled only by David M. Cameron’s More Than an Academic Question, which is over 30 years old.  And even if the integration of the primary material is a little less than ideal, the mere presence of both types of data side by side gives the book a depth that probably no other book on Canadian higher education has ever achieved.  Add to that an excellent chapter on international comparisons in governance, which does a great job of placing the national experience(s) in governance in global context, and what you have is a book which really explains Canadian higher education with a degree of nuance that I don’t think any other book has ever quite managed.

And that’s before I get to the book’s conclusions.  In a final chapter which draws broad conclusions and offers advice to various university stakeholders, the authors draw some very measured lessons from their survey and provide some very helpful suggestions to different actors in the governance process.  Typically, books of this sort tend to end with appeals against “academic capitalism”, “managerialism” and so forth, but the authors avoid all that, stick to the evidence, and point out how many of the bad tendencies that have afflicted higher education in the anglosphere only exist in highly attenuated form in Canada. 

Tl:dr: Buy this book.  It’s an imperfect summary of how Canadian higher education works, but it may be the least imperfect summary of this crazy sector in this complicated country ever.  Two thumbs up.