Our universities are doing just fine — so long as we overlook the misalignment of degrees to labour markets, administrative bloat and budget shenanigans, the foreign student debacle, discriminatory hiring and, of course, the ideological monoculture that’s tolerated the heckler’s veto for decades, advanced a cadre of antisemitic profs and nurtured a subset of pro-Hamas students.
More general concerns about academia — such as widespread failures in the reproducibility of scientific results, large bodies of uncited research, gatekeeping in journals and plagiarism at the highest levels — rounds out the picture.
Chances are your barista might be one of the around 30 per cent of humanities grads that Statistics Canada said were working in jobs they were overqualified for in 2016. It’s no surprise that there’s an ongoing debate over whether BAs or vocational diplomas are better, and that tech-billionaire Peter Thiel has funded a scholarship to pay kids not to go to college. After all, who calls a sociology grad when their furnace is dead?
The smothering of free inquiry and expression is real, and likely concerning to even some of the 88 per cent of professors who self-identify as left-leaning. The federal government’s further politicization of post-secondary hasn’t helped. But the sheer degree of dysfunction suggests deeper, structural flaws in universities.
Some are general issues related to the public sector, where limited market pressure allows institutions to drift away from their “core business” — in this case, teaching and research — and add countless “nice-to haves” that have nothing to do with their mission.
Data suggests things have been getting worse for a long time, and it’s tempting to speculate that the slide started when boomer academics replaced the retiring post-war cohort. Before the year 2000, for example, wage expenditures largely rose in sync with increased enrolment. After that, three major areas diverged — administration, “student services” and IT.
While academic-related expenditures rose about 75 per cent from 1998 to 2018, administration wages more than doubled and student services increased even more. Observers point to some of the most egregious cases, like Stanford, which now has about one non-teaching employee for each student.
Expanding student services is driven by administrators who argue that they need a better “student experience” than the competition. For example, prospective students might choose the University of Toronto for its personalized tobacco cessation therapy, McGill for its animal therapy or art hive, or Western for its fitness classes and “over 9,000 lbs. of free weights.”
Meanwhile, as knowledge of, say, Shakespeare, is getting sketchy, you can bet some students in Canada are memorizing the United Nations’ 17 sustainable development goals. This reflects academia’s yen for affirmation from abroad. Just Google “Sustainability” and “University X.” Institutions large and small have it covered.
At U of T, the UN’s framework “plays a prominent and vitally important role,” with its website boasting that, beyond teaching and research, it has a “third mission” — “to advance sustainability within our institution and beyond.” The school prioritizes divesting fossil fuel investments in order to create a “climate-positive campus” (not to be confused with a positive campus climate).
It’s fair to ask why these developments have gone unchecked, given that there are governments and boards of governors responsible for post-secondary oversight. In the case of politicians, universities’ inner workings are largely terra incognita, and ministerial campus visits are typically of the feel-good ribbon-cutting variety — not hard talk with management.
Boards of governors are another matter. The boards tend to be very large: the University of British Columbia and Dalhousie have 19 members apiece, the University of Alberta has a healthy 27 and the University of Toronto has an eye-popping 50 members — enough for two hockey teams with a couple of spares. Non-staff board members are typically not paid, but sometimes reimbursed for expenses.
When questioned about these hefty boards, management generally replies that the “complex nature” of the universities, as “billion-dollar businesses,” requires it. Yet somehow Royal Bank manages with 13, and Imperial Oil with seven, directors.
Boards, somewhat inexplicably, also include (unionized) university staff and students. This makes for an awkward board dynamic where appointed members routinely disclose conflicts of interest, but staff and students consistently vote on matters that directly affect them without declaring any conflict. After all, what self-respecting student rep would vote for a tuition increase?
Board meetings at many universities are also open to the public. This effectively stifles meaningful debate, which might reconcile the conflicting interests of students, staff and management. Areas like pedagogy and staffing are typically run by intra-university committees and kept beyond board oversight, while management screens the flow of information to the board. This is a recipe for dysfunction.
The legacy model for post-secondary education — throwing billions of dollars a year at a bunch of really smart people and not holding them accountable — clearly can’t continue. Financial incentives are required to keep administrators focused on teaching and research excellence. The way they’ve handled our money up to now suggests the need for significantly more financial oversight and transparency, up to and including regular forensic audits.
There is intrinsic value to most scholarship, and Canadian universities still employ scores of conscientious teachers and researchers. Nevertheless, evaluating results from research expenditures based on clear performance metrics is perfectly reasonable, as is ensuring that universities are graduating students in fields that are in demand in the labour market.
While we’re at it, we might just figure out what organizational culture produced the monolithic ideological uniformity that’s crippling our universities. Failing that, you’ll be spending more time talking to your barista about Foucault.
National Post
John Weissenberger is a Calgary geologist. He has served on the boards of two major federal science granting agencies and a major Canadian university.