Is bloat a problem in our universities? It is sometimes suggested that universities’ workforces have grown exponentially and haphazardly, generating costs on a scale that creates financial risk. They have certainly grown, outpacing the communities of scholars that they once were, to become large, bureaucratic institutions with administrative and support personnel to match. They have also become heavily regulated by governments and have many employees to manage their newly regulated spheres and activities.
More controversial than their growth per se is the disposition of their workforces. Universities extoll teaching and research as their purposes and their reputations are built on them, but growth in their managerial and administrative personnel has exceeded increases in their academic ranks and they outnumber, often by multiples, their academic colleagues. Inevitably there are some inefficiencies and a proliferation of offices and titles, but it is the complexion of their workforces, not their size, that has become an issue.
Larger numbers committed to administration and regulation, with comparatively smaller numbers devoted to teaching and research, bring changes in culture to our universities. When you are paid to administer and regulate, you want to do just that and it can take you into contentious areas. Ordaining faculty hiring by race and gender is one example. Another comes from the University of Saskatchewan, whose administration announced on Sept. 24 that it is now compulsory for the university’s 1,000 faculty to undertake unconscious bias and anti-racism training. The consequence for not taking this training is exclusion from normal collegial processes relating to hiring, renewal, tenure, promotion and merit review — in other words being shut out from pre-existing rights to participate in collegial governance.
The university’s faculty union reportedly proposed this fundamental change in their members’ rights, and the university’s academic councils should repudiate this incursion, through collective bargaining, into their processes. Collegial matters are vested in the university’s colleges and departments where depriving faculty of their roles in them will have the greatest negative impact.
Setting aside questions about how unconscious bias and anti-racism training is done, it is presumptuous to insist that it is needed by all faculty. University professors have years of experience in collegial decision-making; their deliberations are shared and sometimes checked by colleagues around the table. They were hired on the understanding that their tenure came with a right to participate in collegial governance. To deny them that right if they believe they do not need a new mandatory program on bias and anti-racism is demeaning.
Changes in the makeup and disposition of their workforces make it important that we return to and re-emphasize the fundamental purposes of universities: teaching and research. They are not about pursuing social justice or advancing illiberal agendas. For every new activity or hire, the question should be asked: how does this advance teaching and research and the independence of the institution and its professoriate to carry them out? It is in answering this question that universities will regain the wide and non-partisan support they need to survive and thrive.
National Post
Peter MacKinnon has served as president of the University of Saskatchewan, Athabasca University and Dalhousie University.