Program cuts, layoffs and campus closures are making headlines across the country. The proximate cause — last year’s federal government cap on international student visas. The ultimate one — that CAUT, union leaders and students have been sounding alarm bells about for decades — deliberate and chronic public underfunding for colleges and universities.
Never wanting to let a good crisis go to waste, myriad actors have come out of the woodwork to propose their grand solutions to this current moment. While public funding may be the headline, the fine print is worth investigating.
One such actor is none other than the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), recently releasing a report titled “Testing Times: Fending off a crisis in Canadian postsecondary education.” The first bullet point declares: “A strong postsecondary sector requires sufficient, stable financing.”
Meanwhile, Alberta’s recent “Mintz Report” has as its first point the assertion that “post-secondary education is a critical provincial investment.”
Even the insidious NOUS group, the Australian-born international consultancy firm responsible for corporate-style “academic restructuring” at several institutions, acknowledges the impact of “uncertain long-term government funding.”
Regardless of political stance — from unions to bankers to private consultants and pundits — it would seem everyone agrees the Canadian post-secondary sector has been chronically underfunded, is experiencing further defunding, and is headed toward the brink of crisis.
But that’s where the agreement ends.
Aside from offering valuable lessons in the importance of reading beyond the first paragraph and not trusting AI summaries, these reports are worth our engagement for what they reveal about the corporate consultancy mindsets that produce them. Such reports are not to be taken lightly as they are often effective, especially in cumulative fashion, at shifting government and public sentiment.
When it comes to the working solutions proffered, the profound divergence in perspectives cannot be overlooked. Like zombies rising in Night of the Living Dead, we’ve seen these reheated consultancy recommendations time and again. Banks and consultancy firms — like the now-ubiquitous NOUS group — position chronic underfunding as an opportunity to reform and repurpose universities, rather than as a rallying cry to garner support, break out of somnambulance, and get to the upstream cause of many of the problems.
Sometimes a gift horse is a Trojan horse
The RBC report ventures into the familiar terrain of solutions offered up by consultancy firms like NOUS, McKinsey and others, which is to use the financial crisis as shock doctrine to compel fundamental changes just as our drowning institutions reach for the Faustian lifeline. It all becomes reminiscent of an International Monetary Fund emergency funding and restructuring agreement.
And make no mistake, RBC’s report seeks fundamental change. The Mintz report, too, frames post-secondary education only as job training, ignoring its broader mandate of fostering critical inquiry and engaged citizenship.
Sadly, their collective imagination is strained as they struggle to see beyond economic frames, eliding the scientific, cultural and community contributions achieved by the post-secondary sector.
Where do these frames fall short? A deeper dive into the RBC report is revealing.
Funding for some, government interference for all
From the proliferation of recommendations around performance-based funding — tying public funds to commercial, private-sector type indicators rather than educational ones — to explicitly aligning funding with training needs for industry, RBC recommends putting governments rather than educators in the driver’s seat, with private interests calling the shots from the back seat.
Industry ought to shoulder its share of the responsibility and burden of risk for training and retraining. Industry must do its part by providing its employees with training opportunities and programs. The push for a greater micro-credentialed model currently in vogue unfairly offloads the cost and risk of such retraining onto students and workers. For its part, the post-secondary sector ought to ensure their graduates have learned a variety of skills that keep them flexible and prepared for future and lifelong learning.
RBC also misguidedly, if not impractically, suggests a new funding arrangement be explored “between the federal government and Canada’s U15 — our leading research universities.” This overlooks the fact that each of Canada’s post-secondary institutions make valuable contributions to Canada as well as to the local communities in which they reside. The consequences of diverting funds would be damaging to non-U15 campuses and incongruent with the report’s previous point on the importance of “education quality and access, especially in rural communities where workforce shortages are already acute.”
If investments in areas of national interest are required, it would be far more effective to provide the funding councils with the means to properly target such areas, and to let the funds be awarded to the most skilled researchers, regardless of where they happen to work.
The future doesn’t need critical thought
The report observes, “College and university programs and services need to be more aligned with the world of work and the opportunities available to graduates.”
The rationale for using current labour-market realities to direct future post-secondary education opportunities seems shaky at best. A case in point is Alberta’s optimistic investment in petroleum engineers 10 to 15 years ago versus the reality of the job market those graduates faced; another is software engineers now being replaced in droves by AI. Moreover, as highlighted by the federal government’s 2017 Expert Panel on Youth Employment, the nature of work has changed. We are shifting away from manufacturing to service and knowledge economies with a greater emphasis on problem-solving, communication, interpersonal and critical thinking skills.
It is precisely in these areas where post-secondary education excels and students benefit most, gaining highly portable skills that may be applied in many different and ever-changing contexts.
More curiously, the RBC report states, “Competency-based programs have taken off in the U.S. but are rare in Canada. These programs award credentials based on demonstrated mastery, not the amount of time enrolled in a program.” It’s a straw argument — presenting no evidence of programs that award credentials simply based on “amount of time enrolled.” Credentialed academic programs feature a wide variety of assessment strategies and techniques developed by experts in their respective fields.
Dealing with those pesky unions
Welcome to the most problematic (and unfortunately all too predictable) observations: “Internally, risk-averse institutional cultures, fragmented governance environments and restrictive collective agreements often layered with tenure, can impede leaders’ ability to take decisive action.”
It is difficult to know where to begin when faced with a statement that betrays such a lack of understanding of, or respect for, how universities function, including the importance of collegial governance and deliberation, collective labour, and the vital nature of tenure to academic freedom. 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. Indeed, and unique to the Canadian context, it is in our collective agreements, for the most part, where academic freedom is recognized, codified and protected.
Funding better iron lungs
The former Director of the National Cancer Institute, Dr. Samuel Broder, MD, once said: “If it was up to the NIH to cure polio through a centrally directed program instead of independent investigator driven discovery, you’d have the best iron lung in the world, but not a polio vaccine.”
Far too many private consultants and governments are pushing for the diversion of money away from this kind of basic, investigator-led research, towards projects with defined commercial outcomes.
The RBC report is no exception, stating: “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.”
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, the very research to which we owe so many innovations. 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.
The Trojan Horse and the golden goose
Though some political parties, consultancy firms and banks may be champing at the bit in their bid to overhaul universities, it is incumbent on us to continue to value and uphold universities for their core missions, which go far beyond serving as entrepreneurial training centres for industry and engaging in corporate R&D. Rather, universities must continue to be valued for their vital role in developing critical and creative graduates prepared for meaningful work, democratic engagement, and the intellectual preparation to take on the challenges of the future. In fact, it has become all too apparent that our fragile democracies require no less.
Let’s not settle for an impoverished version of the university. Of course, universities are economic engines, but they are also so much more, serving to improve our lives, position our communities as hubs for international talent, and help us address current and future global challenges.
Canada must not allow them to atrophy; victims of a slow demise due to program cuts, campus closures and layoffs.
To best serve society, universities must remain autonomous, supported, diverse and complex institutions equally capable of fostering groundbreaking scientific research, transmitting and critiquing knowledge, and supplying teachers for our schools and medical personnel for our hospitals.
As the report rightly notes from the outset: “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.”
Agreed. So, let’s not myopically trample our golden goose, but rather commit to its robust renewal.
Marc Spooner is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Regina and Representative-at-large on the CAUT Executive.
