Hi everyone. I missed you guys!
Welcome to Season 14 of Canada’s longest-running data-informed higher education rant. Time flies, doesn’t it? Last year’s experiment of replacing one blog a week with a podcast seems to have gone pretty well so we’ll be continuing that. Our Friday blogs on Artificial Intelligence will be shifting to bi-weekly so we can deliver more detailed analysis and coverage on that subject. On alternate Fridays, we will be providing you with a new feature, The Fifteen, providing you with short coverage of the most interesting developing stories in global higher education that don’t make it into the blog or the podcast.
Now: on with the show.
When we left off back in June, I was making the point that between stagnant public funding and what has clearly been a disastrous international recruitment cycle, 2024-5 was the going to be the start of a couple of very lean years for Canadian post-secondary institutions. And (this was the key part) absolutely no one is coming to save us. Not provinces, not the feds, not students. No one. We’re on our own, and the quicker everyone realizes this and starts getting down to real solutions, the better. And those solutions? They’re for the most part on the cost side, not the revenue side. The cultural shift within our institutions, which have literally spent the last thirty years assuming every problem was a revenue problem, will have to be profound.
And for most institutions, that’s the key question for these next twelve months or so: how do you build an academic culture which is built to tackle costs?
Obviously, there’s no simple answer to this question. But I think in the end it comes down to developing a strong culture of trust. For whatever reason, this is in short supply at a lot of institutions. My diagnosis is that this largely stems from the fact that institutions have over the past decade (at least) chosen to reserve serious discussions about priorities and how to fund them to a relatively small elite. This lack of communication has led some faculty members to default to the assumption that what communications they do receive are mendacious, not to be trusted (“they are hiding something!”). In some cases, of course, university administrations are hiding things (it’s going to be decades for anyone to get over Laurentian) but the assumption that opacity necessarily means mendacity is ridiculous if you apply it universally. And whenever admins get those vibes from faculty, they often (but not always) with justification roll their eyes and decide to hold information and decision-making even tighter because the local tinfoil hat brigade is just too irritating to deal with. And so the vicious circle goes around and around.
Getting out of vicious circles is never easy, but I would say that there are a few very deep conversations that most institutions need to have, fairly urgently:
- The Financial and Budget Literacy Conversation. Faculty need to understand how budgeting works (it varies from place to place) and what the financial drivers are at the institutional and faculty levels. Universities (and to a lesser extent colleges) are immensely complicated financial enterprises, and there’s no reason any employee should truly understand how the machine works. But if you’re going to have trust and shared visions, that’s kind of important. So institutions need to learn how to make their finance departments speak in clear, non-jargony terms to a lay audience.
- The “Shared Priorities” Conversation. Budget discussions—particularly in a context of scarcity—tend to be focused on protecting the status quo and in particular one’s own share of the status quo. This is, needless to say, a deeply unproductive conversation. The trick, rather, is to focus discussion on the kind of institution everyone wants to be a part of, and what kinds of things need to change in order to stay viable (this can often lead to uncomfortable discussions about investments in student services vs. investments in academics, but uncomfortable, in this context, is good).
- The Time Horizons Conversation. Another hard discussion to have has to do with time horizons. How much of the money you have now needs to be spent now, and how much needs to be tucked away for another day? How much needs to be invested in capital development for future growth? (And yes, although many of you don’t believe it, there are a lot of domestic students on the way.)
These conversations are all difficult. But ducking them is only going to make it harder to keep trust across the community. And without trust, there are a lot of institutions that are simply going to tear themselves apart as the budget squeeze becomes tighter.
Lean into the difficulty. Emerge stronger. That’s the key task for the year ahead.
Let’s go!
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I think you are 100% correct with this post, Alex, at least in terms of the way the discussions need to happen. I’ve been union-side for over a decade and led many scholarly societies and international projects and have simply never had a case where it was impossible to develop a consensus as to how we need to go, even when the way we decided we needed to go involved painful financial consequences. It just isn’t that hard if you’re honest about what you are facing and open to actual, potentially course-correcting, feedback. It takes time, but most faculty are if anything too willing to work with admin when they feel consulted.
The main thing here by far is trust. Over the years, I’ve developed a couple of questions that I ask in senior administrator searches that always seem to stump people: “tell us about a time when somebody who reports to you convinced you that a course of action you’d decided on was wrong or unlikely to succeed?” and “tell us about a time you had to tell a superior they were wrong?”
What’s been amazing to me over all these years is how few candidates have been able to come up with an answer, especially to the first one. Since I’ve also tried the questions out on colleagues and union leaders and rarely seen anybody get stumped for more than a second or two, it tells me that admin side training is far more about control than consensus building. In a system with as strong governance and academic freedom protections as ours, thinking you can boss your way out of things is ultimately going to be fatal to the organisation.
Frankly, I don’t see the change coming in academic management culture: if anything the “circle the wagons” approach is getting worse. When Carr at Concordia says in a recent Globe article that “You could pick one of any number of topics and that would have made it a challenging year, but it’s the convergence of topics which has made things particularly tense… I don’t think anything could have fully prepared university leadership for what it’s facing today,” the problem is that he sees it as a “leadership” problem rather than a university problem.
But since they never came to us in good times, it’s going to be doubly hard to convince us of their sincerity in bad.
Well, for a start, let me out myself as a proud member of a local tin foil brigade (but you knew that already anyway, didn’t you?).
On the Cassandra calls of intensified food fights: Yes, this storm has been brewing for some time now. Miraculously, some institutions elsewhere are still treating it primarily as a revenue problem while keeping a fairly tight cost control, and they are actually very successful with it. I don’t think, though, that this can serve as a system wide cure.
However, back to the domestic situation: Most of us expect this to be headed into an all to familiar direction. Administrators will take yet another hard look at “expendable programs” – “expendable program” being defined as a program that
– neither generates significant revenue through large enrollment numbers and/or large service courses and/or large research revenue
– nor serves immediate basic societal needs.
On the other hand, among all the crumbling infrastructure and the increasing student-to-faculty ratios, there are also still examples of waste of university funding through initiatives that nobody really needs, except the group of administrators who benefit from dispersing the funds for God-knows-what-reason.
Furthermore, universities also have evolved into a state of mind where we have to be the model cure for every ailment of society. And there are good reasons for that: We educate the leaders of tomorrow. If we can serve as social role models, this should have a positive impact on society at large on a rather short time scale. On the other hand, some of this also comes at a significant administrative and financial overhead. Therefore, if we manage to cut all the waste (and in spite of my complaining, we are not talking astronomical amounts of money here), will we start to cut programs or will we start to cut some of our role model initiatives? This is a very difficult choice (members of my brigade and many administrators will chastise me for describing this as a choice at all), but if push comes to shove, my preference is to focus on our core mission of educating and training students and producing compelling academic work. After all, where is the “universal” in university without those small core academic programs?
Perhaps a silly question, given Laurentian, but what happens when an HE institution fails (not a no-name paper college but a significant institution)? Can they retrench to core services when it is often the extra services and courses that make them attractive? The threat of external administration is real but there is a limit to such drastic actions. Am just trying to think of the likely scenarios where various institutions have become so inured by their business plans that they simply lose the plot.
Another inspiring and correct message about austerity. Soon they won’t be able to afford those tinfoil hats.
My question is whether the assumptions or even world views of faculty and admins are close enough to have meaningful conversations, or whether we even speak the same language.
What makes every threat we face truly existential, in my mind, is a lack of a shared commitment to the life of the mind. My own institution has the vision of “Inspiring people, ideas and actions for a better world.” This sounds like a slogan, and therefore contemptible, but also sounds like something that could be done by any kind of institution. If what we study isn’t obviously of social benefit, at a global scale, are we simply to prepare our necks for the axe? Are we to change our readings of (say) Dostoyevsky to render it more race-conscious, because that ties our work (rather obtusely) to the goal of the institution? Should we abandon literature for Russian language, because it might help with trade? Is the institution willing to commit to the notion that a more learned world is by definition better? And if so, can we trust it about anything else?
Or to put it in more theological terms, are their gods our gods?