University Affairs

Over the past two years or so, I’ve been stewing quietly about a particular issue in Canadian education. Much of the recent media coverage about PSE in Canada is concerned with tuition costs and accessibility, faculty performance and salaries, government spending on education, and the various failings of the system. But alongside this, a campaign has been unfolding that promises to undermine efforts at understanding how Canadian education works and does not work, what happens to students throughout and after their studies, and where PSE funding should be directed for best effect. It’s a campaign, not of mis-information, but against information itself.

Some of you may have seen that one of my previous posts for this blog was a complaint about the lack of statistics on doctoral education in Canada. I’d been trying to write an essay on the path to the tenure track in Canada, and was having a hard time locating the numbers I needed (incidentally, the essay I wrote is here).

Most of the feedback I’ve received on that post has reinforced my sense that Canada lacks “the numbers” on post-secondary education. Then last week on his Margin Notes blog, Léo Charbonneau reported that Statistics Canada would be cutting yet another source of data about Canadian PSE — this time, the University and College Academic Staff System (UCASS) — in addition to ending the Education Matters publication.

When I say “yet another”, I’m referring to the fact that since 2009, research on post-secondary education in Canada has been undermined by a systematic elimination of resources. This list includes: the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation (CMSF), which was allowed to expire — with its mandate — in 2010; the Canadian Council on Learning (CCL), which had its funding cut in 2010; the Youth in Transition Survey (YITS), cut in 2010; the Statistics Canada long form, from the Census, also cut in 2010; and of course the Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED), which apparently ended in 2009. These are only the cuts of which I’m aware. Who knows what else may have been “discontinued”, de-funded, and dismantled (other recent examples: Library and Archives Canada, and the First Nations Statistical Institute).

What kind of logic lies behind cuts like these? The expiry of the CMSF, for example, could have been considered predictable “benign neglect” since the organization’s mandate was only for 10 years, and it was a project created by the previous Liberal government. But there’s nothing predictable (or rational) behind eliminating something like the YITS, which was, as far as I know, the only longitudinal survey of secondary and post-secondary students in Canada. The YITS information would have been incredibly valuable for policy-makers, advocacy groups and researchers of higher education in Canada — particularly at a time when accessibility issues are key, when the public is pressing to know more about the “value” of PSE, and when universities still seem ill-equipped to explain the connection between higher ed “pathways” and careers.

The fact is that numbers can be spun, but life becomes so much easier if and when there are no numbers to have to spin — in other words, “what you don’t know can’t hurt you”, or so seems to be the current modus operandi of the federal government. Perhaps this is just one more way in which the much-invoked “knowledge economy” does not include or value all knowledge.

I wouldn’t argue that the data we’d been producing were ideal. For example, as I discussed in my earlier post, the SED was fairly limited and provided too much focus on some information (such as numbers of international students, and mobility of PhD graduates) with no data available for other areas (faculty job offers; attrition rates). Still, I think these research sources were better than nothing–which is what we’ll soon have if things continue along the current lines.

When we have no knowledge — even strictly quantitative knowledge — about what is happening in education, then how do we make policy decisions that reflect anything other than a political preference? Removing the mechanisms that create new knowledge is a political act in and of itself. If “knowledge is power” then the systematic lack of attention to some kinds of knowledge is also a means of exercising power. As Jo VanEvery pointed out in her blog, the Conservative government isn’t stupid. But for me that’s the frightening part — if all this is deliberate, part of a strategy, then to what end?

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There has been so much going on in Canadian post-secondary education over the past few months, that while my blog posts have focused on other things, it’s time to do a bit of a round-up of the major “happenings” in what is called – in the Twittersphere – #CdnPSE.

Top of the news is the ongoing Quebec students’ anti-tuition “strike”, which began in February (protests began earlier, in 2011). The students have joined a global movement of sorts, since similar protests have happened in Europe and in South America; and their activities are beginning to receive international media attention (the Twitter hashtag for the ongoing events is #ggi). The strike was prompted by the province’s announcement in late 2010 that tuition would rise by $325 per year over the next 5 years (a 75% increase). Quebec currently has the least expensive tuition in Canada, and students have been fully willing to hit the streets in defence of this lower-cost education. University leaders and politicians continue to make the argument that PSE quality cannot be maintained without raising tuition, and that low tuition merely subsidizes education of the upper-middle and wealthier classes, rather than providing accessibility for the underprivileged.

The Association of Universities and Colleges Canada (AUCC) signed a copyright licensing agreement with Access Copyright. There has been much criticism of the new arrangement, which contains an increase from under $4 to about $26 per full-time student per year, wrapping into the fee what was formerly an extra charge per copied page for coursepack copying. Canadian copyright expert Michael Geist has argued that the deal is over-priced and irrationally restrictive.

York University, after announcing that a partnership was in the works with the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) (a think-tank funded by Jim Balsillie of RIM), had to scrap these plans when its faculty rejected the arrangement citing concerns about academic freedom. The arrangement with CIGI would have created 10 research chairs in international law (as well as graduate student positions), but the Osgoode Hall faculty council voted it down by 34 to 7. York, along with Wilfred Laurier University and the University of Waterloo, had been threatened with censure by the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) for its proposed venture with CIGI.

Back in the summer of 2011, Brazil announced it would fund 75,000 scholarshipsfor students to study overseas (in STEM fields only), known as “Science Without Borders.” Canada has acted quickly to secure part of this bountiful student-market for itself. On April 24 a large delegation of Canadian university presidents travelled to Brazil on a trip designed to cultivate lucrative ties between the two nations, and ultimately to recruit more Brazilian students. Brazil is seen as a country with a burgeoning middle class (it’s part of the so-called BRIC nations), unlike other countries long described as “developed” but now presenting sapped markets for international post-secondary students and other economic partnerships.

A recent international comparative study has revealed that Canada’s tenure-track and tenured professors are apparently the best paid in the world. Some people think this is a good thing, since salaries are absurdly low in many other countries where PSE systems have been marketized and academic labour has been destabilized. But others see it as a sign that faculty are over-paid and under-productive, and some have tried to pit faculty salaries against student tuition (and critiqued pensions in the same way) which seems like a kind of “generational warfare” approach. Interestingly, that same argument is being used to position Quebec’s striking students as “entitled” for demanding that their tuition be kept low as it was for previous generations.

More Canadian PSE tidbits…

• On April 4, the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and technology released its report on PSE accessibility in Canada.
• Ontario students had their own sit-in on April 5 at Minister Glen Murray’s office, protesting another 5% tuition increase for the upcoming academic year.
• The Ontario “Sunshine list” of public sector salaries over $100,000 was released, providing more fodder for critiques of university employees’ salaries.
• Canadian student visa rules were loosened so that international graduate students can now work in their chosen fields before graduation, potentially earning extra funding for themselves and developing Canadian careers.
• Concordia University was dinged $2 million as a penalty for over-generous severance packages dished out to former senior administrators.
• McMaster University has been chided by the Hamilton Spectator for an ongoing lack of “accountability, transparency and disclosure”, particularly about the details of former university president Peter George’s contract.

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What I’m writing about today concerns no specific policy initiative or teaching strategy. It’s about pedagogy, and the ways in which psychology and social norms come to play significant roles in the way we behave and interpret the behaviours of others – in the classroom and in other academic settings.

The specific example I’m addressing is a recent upsurge in online discussion about introverts and extroverts. The most obvious trigger for this was publicity around the book Quiet: The Power of Introverts by Susan Cain (whose TED talk is available here).

I admit I find much of the discussion about “pros and cons” of these types frustrating; it feels like working within a binary schema that leads to a self-fuelling debate, since each “side” makes arguments that (often justifiably) annoy the others, who respond in their turn. And I don’t think Cain’s perspective gives us answers about how to address this underlying issue of “types”; it tends to draw on a discourse of introverts as oppressed and rejected by mainstream society, a perspective that isn’t helpful because it alienates extroverts and generalizes about everyone else.

Another recent article by William Pannapacker has tossed new fuel onto the fire for academics specifically. Pannapacker has angered many people with his argument that teaching style can be biased against introverted people – but then again, I know I could readily identify with what he seemed to be describing, particularly in terms of the ways that academic competitiveness requires confidence and social skills as well as focused, solitary bookishness. But I think that’s where Pannapacker makes an excellent point: he describes academe not as an environment that necessarily privileges either introverts or extroverts, but one in which we are required to vacillate competently between the two poles.

At this point I should probably reveal my own “type” – I’m an introvert, and on the Myers-Briggs test I always get the same result (INFJ). This result is apparently so undesirable that I’ve had people tell me, “I was that type but I reformed myself, and so can you!” So I was fascinated when I got into a lengthy Twitter discussion about this issue, with several others who were closer to the opposite end of the “spectrum.”

As “extremes” on an imagined scale, it’s clear that extroverts experience classroom discrimination as well, in very different ways. This is why I think the extremes are the real issue – they’re “pathologized,” made into a kind of illness to be cured (not just a problem to be corrected). A certain desired or imagined norm is being reflected through the ways in which deviance is disciplined (to use that lovely Foucauldian language).

So when we talk about introverts/extroverts, we’re always talking about something other than what is expected (or desired) – it’s an exception to an unwritten rule.

We can uncover the assumed norm by looking at what’s considered “abnormal”. Don’t like participating in games and social activities? Perhaps your “withdrawal” is part of a mental health problem; there’s “help” for that (SSRIs and anxiety medications). Are you “acting up” in class, talking over everyone, practically jumping to your feet with questions? That could be a behavioural issue – maybe you’re narcissistic, perhaps you need some Ritalin, or we could shift you into a “special education” class until you can learn to sit down and be quiet. The point is that there’s a meridian of normalcy, and everything else is just a certain number of degrees closer to – or further from – that desired state of behaviour.

In the end, it’s only logical that we need a degree of social success to get by in life, since we share with other people a social world. As an introvert I can say that learning (teaching myself) how to be around people has been a long and difficult process with which there was no sympathy and little explicit help available. I did experience my personality type as something “wrong” with me, something that had to be corrected. Only now that I’ve met many others like me do I feel as if the way I “just am” is something that isn’t just “my problem.” But there are very extroverted people who feel the same way.

The classroom is a space where ideal behaviour is shaped and modelled; this goes for graduate school as well as kindergarten. Teaching does play a significant role is this, since teachers are assumed to model all kinds of behaviours (hence the cultural obsession with teachers and their “quality” – it is moral and political, not just academic).

For those of us teaching: what can we do, and can we work within this arrangement to ensure that those whose behaviour doesn’t fall within “normal” parameters are accepted, reassured and guided without being “policed”?

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So much interesting Canadian PSE news has been popping up in my RSS feeds lately that I had a hard time deciding what to write about this week.

I think, perhaps because of all the other education-related news, that very little attention has been paid to the Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology report entitled “Opening the Door: Reducing Barriers to Post-Secondary Education in Canada.” The first Senate report on PSE since 1997, it “looks at both the financial and non-financial factors” involved in PSE accessibility.

There is a lot that’s interesting about this report, which addressed the federal government’s involvement in postsecondary education, and “how PSE can be made more accessible using the tools available to this level of government.” This included strategies for Aboriginal education and improving enrollment of other under-represented groups.

But there were only two news items that I could find relating to the report. One was from APTN on April 9, and addressed the proposals on Aboriginal education. The other came from PostMedia on April 4. The PostMedia article, “Tuition fees not major factor in post-secondary enrolment, report finds”, mainly emphasized only one of the report’s conclusions, that “while much of the public debate on access to PSE revolves around the cost of tuition, [...] the major barrier to accessing PSE is failure to complete Secondary education.”

Given the context of rising tuition, massive student protests and diminishing government funds, the political implications of these arguments about accessibility show why they were chosen as a focus for a news story: “the report runs counter to a common refrain among students that tuition fees are too exorbitant” (my emphasis). But there were 22 recommendations made in the report, and this focus on tuition was clearly geared to contribute to a particular side of a particular debate.

As presented in the Senate Committee report, the primary argument for accessibility is an economic one based on the idea of “human capital” development. Canada’s government must begin to take an interest in national coordination of education, because otherwise national competitiveness will suffer. It’s this argument that leads to the most comprehensive recommendation, #22 (a), the formation of a pan-Canadian education strategy including the “creation of an independent Canada Education and Training Transfer to ensure that there is dedicated funding for postsecondary education and training” (currently PSE funding comes from the Canada Social Transfer).

If a dedicated federal transfer were created for PSE, then the federal government would want to be able to monitor how such funding is used, especially given the accountability issues of the past. Sure enough, “encouragement” for tracking PSE dollars would be built in to the recommended system: “based on success in enhancing the accountability of a dedicated PSE Transfer account, the Federal government [should] consider increasing the Transfer funding using the 1994 levels as a target” (my emphasis).

While in Canada education is under provincial jurisdiction, this kind of arrangement could bring more clout to the federal government. If we consider what’s happening at the Tri-Councils right now, then the long-desired accountability seems to fit plausibly into a larger context of increasing government control over economic development through control over PSE.

Another implication from this report, relating to centralization of control, is that of standardization. The idea that the federal government and CMEC should work to provide more information for students, including about “the costs and benefits of obtaining a post-secondary diploma or degree”, seems to entail an increased expectation for universities’ self-monitoring and perhaps a movement towards some kind of national system of assessment. Indeed, one part of Recommendation 22 is “a standardized data collection and reporting mechanism for monitoring and evaluating progress toward the participation targets.” Also suggested is a national credit recognition program so that students could see their PSE credits recognized across provinces.

I do wonder why this report seems to have been “buried” in the media; I think it demands more attention given the scope and depth of the recommendations (the report runs to 114 pages with appendices) and their possible consequences for Canadian PSE. Perhaps nothing will come of it – after all, the Canadian Council on Learning made similar points in their final report, which were dismissed by some as the self-serving suggestions of an organization trying to justify its own existence. Are we seeing a re-hash of what the CCL had produced, now made more acceptable through the stamp of a Senate committee? Or are the policy points just too difficult to be dealt with at the national level? Time, perhaps – 180 days from the report, in fact – will tell.

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By now, many of you may have seen or heard about the (infamous) Washington Post column of March 23 in which author David C. Levy argued that most professors should teach more because currently, they don’t put in enough work hours.

Those of you working in universities already know that there’s a significant leap in logic required to get from “professors are not efficient enough” (they don’t provide us “value for money”) to “professors should teach more”.

“What about the other work academics do?” might be the first question that occurs. Indeed, partway through Levy’s article research work falls off the agenda, becoming part of the spare (wasted!) hours that academics spend not teaching. Administration or “service” work doesn’t count. And as for the hours spent preparing classes, this is an argument swiftly dismissed by Levy, who maintains that “the notion that faculty in teaching institutions work a 40-hour week is a myth”. I’d argue that Levy’s “30-week academic year” is the myth we should be dismissing.

The “big picture” for this column is illustrated early on in Levy’s argument: he’s framing the “inefficiency” of professors against the rising costs of education, particularly to students and families through high tuition fees, which have led to increased debt burdens. This high cost is positioned alongside the individual economic necessity of having a post-secondary credential, as expressed by the highest levels of political authority (President Obama) through policy programs and endorsements.

The response to this column was immediate and generally very negative, on Twitter and also in many of the comments on the blog (and in quite a few longer written responses; here, and here, including one by Paul Krugman of the New York Times). There was even one post arguing that managerial logic of efficiency simply wasn’t being applied in the right way by Levy in his opinion piece.

For some time now I’ve been paying attention to the way universities and academic work are depicted in the media. During my undergraduate degree I became interested in discourse analysis and the political economy of media, and the politics and policies affecting education. Looking at the media coverage of education debates has been a natural extension of those interests (in fact, I’ll be presenting on this subject at this year’s Canadian Communication Association conference). Over time I’ve written multiple blog posts and essays about media coverage of universities, and media analysis is also a part of my dissertation.

I think that’s why I find myself disappointed but unsurprised by the kind of shallow parody provided by Levy’s column, mostly because I follow the higher education news and I see a lot of pretty frustrating stuff being passed off as serious/informed analysis. I understand if that sounds high-handed, but I think most professors, for example, could provide better commentary and/or analysis than David C. Levy – and would probably be responsible enough to do so (as several of them have done already).

But most people working in PSE aren’t really contributing to the larger discussion in a visible way. When the arguments are informing public conversation and political debate, we need to pay attention to, and provide a response for, what’s being said. I think the often shallow and ideologically polarized (and polarizing) media coverage about higher education shows us that facts will not be enough to make our argument heard; there are so many contextual factors working against us that we need more.

As one retort not only to the Levy article but to all the simplistic and reductionist coverage of PSE issues, Lee Skallerup Bessette proposed a “DayofHigherEd” for today, Monday April 2nd, 2012. All academics – including those off the tenure track – are encouraged to blog, tweet, comment and generally communicate to “outside” audiences about the work they do during an academic day (Twitter hashtag: #DayOfHigherEd).

As part of my contribution on Twitter today, I’ve set up a series of timed tweets of my past blog posts relating to relevant PSE issues. We need to relate the misconception that “most professors don’t work hard enough” (and other stereotypes) to larger issues in PSE, and I think “Day of Higher Ed” could be a great way for us to start opening up that discussion.

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It’s a Sunday morning, and I’m sipping a fresh cup of coffee while engaging in a conversation about higher education and institutional change (which also happens to be the central concern of my dissertation). On this particular morning I’m chatting with professor Adeline Koh of Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, and Rosemary G. Feal of the University of Buffalo, who currently serves as the executive director of the Modern Language Association in the U.S.

We’re not having a weekend breakfast meeting, and none of us had to travel to get together — that’s the fun of social media. Drs. Feal and Koh are in the U.S. (in two different states) while I’m sitting at my desk in Canada, watching my cats rolling around in a sunbeam. We’re not even using video or real-time text chat — in fact we’re exchanging semi-synchronous messages on Twitter. At the same time, another conversational thread has begun as academics react to a Washington Post column about professors’ productivity.

I’m not trying to make a utopian point about the joy of technology; we’ve all heard that story by now, as well as (hopefully) the many important critiques of it. What I want to emphasize is that for academics, writers, researchers and teachers, ongoing dialogue is an important part of “working” that often isn’t recognized as such, and this kind of dialogue is facilitated rather well by Twitter — which is one of the reasons I use it so much. There’s often a fine line between “work life” and “social life” in academe, and Twitter’s become both the virtual water-cooler and the town square, an intense hub of activity and commentary that’s buzzing merrily all the time. And there are ways in which participating in this can help with academic work in the “real” world.

For example, take your standard academic conference. It’s a fairly alienating event if you don’t know anyone else going at the same time as you, and it’s especially difficult if (like me) you’re an introvert, and interacting with strangers can be exhausting. Many academic conferences are vaguely alienating or even overwhelming; when there are several thousand attendees, people often huddle and socialize with colleagues they already know, and it can feel invasive to try to enter the “bubble.”

Over time I’ve realized that Twitter has provided me a way to do some groundwork before going to a conference, so that by the time I get there I already know a few people, which in turn makes me feel more confident about talking to total strangers. Using hashtags for particular subject areas, institutions, issues, or events, as well as starting online “conversations” with other academics about common areas of interest, has led to new in-person connections that form a part of my “real” social and support network.

As a PhD candidate I’m not yet really a part of the academic — or any other — profession. But what’s clear to me is that “social capital” still matters (perhaps now more than ever), and social media is a way of creating it. Often “networking” is presented as an activity separate from other things, for example, as something that only happens when you’re at “networking events” and/or when you’re searching for a job. Not only does this make it less appealing to people like me, who would rather stay home and read a book (job searches make me extremely anxious). It also makes it a chore, something you have to do, not something that “just happens” and can be enjoyable. Professional networking is also compartmentalized as a form of distasteful “self-promotion”, another (ironic) taboo in academic circles.

What I’ve learned about “networking” from mentors and from experience with social media, is that it’s something you’re engaging in constantly, every time you have an interaction with someone else; it begins before an event and continues after. On Twitter this becomes even more interesting, because you can end up communicating with people to whom you never would have had “access” otherwise — faculty at other universities and in other disciplines; grad students all over the world; members of government and non-governmental agencies and organizations; politicians; teachers; journalists; and all others who happen to be circling around the same issues of concern. I’ve seen definite “networks” emerging through interactions with all these people (with some fantastic unplanned results).

One irony here in that the more instrumental your approach, the less effective it will be. And the intangible results are just as important as the tangible ones. I’ve found myself feeling more confident over time, and more likely to approach “new” people. Sharing and debating ideas helps me think differently about what I’m researching. I also get to look forward to meeting “Twitter friends” — like Drs. Koh and Feal — in person at events, instead of dreading the awkwardness of being the Academic Wallflower.

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This weekend I was working on an essay about graduate education and decided to look up a few key statistics to add to my argument, hoping I could strengthen my point using numbers as well as words.

Little did I know what I was in for. While I’ve searched for statistics many times (not always with success), I thought I’d be able to find what I was looking for this time around. But the numbers I wanted turned out to be frustratingly elusive. I was looking for three things: the attrition rate (on average) from Canadian PhD programs; the proportion of PhD graduates who land tenure-track jobs (either immediately or within, say, five years); and the proportion of Canadian university teaching staff who have non-permanent (contract) and/or part-time positions.

While those numbers probably won’t tell a happy story, I was surprised to have so much trouble finding them. I didn’t even make it to the attrition statistic yet, because the other two took up so much time; from what I observed, attrition is not a focus in spite of the Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED) pointing out that higher enrollment has not translated into increased numbers of PhD graduates. That’s one example of how the main focus seems to be on enrollment and graduation — what went “right” — as opposed to attrition, which is considered “failure.”

The second example, that of PhDs who find tenure-track work, should have been a cinch given the heightened concern with this issue among graduate students and faculty. I had trouble believing that no-one had produced a study about this, but sure enough, there was nothing straightforward available. How this crucial research could be missing in action is something of a mystery (this was the closest thing I found so far).

Lastly, the proportion of non-tenured faculty is an important number to track in a context where academic hiring trends have been shifting for some time, and these directly affect PhD students and graduates. After a frustrating search through graduate survey results and through research reports produced by a number of different organizations, I finally turned up one Statistics Canada article that compared employment in the teaching profession between 1999 and 2005, based on data from the Labour Force Survey. There seemed to be nothing that was more recent and comprehensive, and almost all the numbers I found relating to academic hiring were focused on full-time faculty (or on one institution only).

During this process I noticed that the graduate student surveys seemed to provide a very thin snapshot — rather a grainy black-and-white photocopy — of results. Asking whether students are “satisfied” with their PhD program experiences (as the Canadian Graduate and Professional Student Survey does) seems like a rather limited way of discovering what’s going on in graduate education, considering the issues involved. The SED seems to have ended with a data set from 2007-2008; its results have been used alongside the Canadian Graduates Survey (CGS) to produce a picture of PhD career outcomes, but once again this is a surprisingly foggy image. Graduates planning to work in the “education services industry” are classified into one large group — no mention of full time, part time, university or college, permanent or contract.

This is not to say that I wouldn’t like access to qualitative research on these issues, too. I think well-designed surveys produce information that is a good start, but we also need to develop qualitative investigations to find the stories behind those numbers. For example, the SED shows up the trend that mainly young, single men in the life sciences and other STEM areas tend to be those who leave Canada after the PhD for further training and job opportunities in other countries. This tells us about the effects of gender, life circumstances, and area of research on the career paths of PhD graduates. Also worth noting is the significant amount of attention given (in the survey results) to migration of PhD graduates; this relates to the concern for building national “human capital.”

It’s disturbing to me that even given the expansion PhD enrollments, and the emphasis placed on graduate education and its role in the economy, so little information seems to be available about what is happening to PhD students and graduates. There’s also a larger point to my complaint about having a hard time finding these numbers. Statistics are a political issue. Though they can be superficial, they’re still better than nothing and they can highlight important trends. This is why it’s disturbing that the current Canadian government does not seem to place much faith in research (funding has been cut from other important surveys as well). I think we have to ask, if this is happening in education research, where else is it happening?

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This week in my tutorial group, which is for a first-year undergraduate course, something rather interesting happened. While of course, class is interesting in some way every week, this time around some of the students were feeling frustrated because a class had been cancelled the week before, and our discussion segued into a bigger conversation about the way the university runs itself and how that affects their experiences within and outside the classroom.

One really striking problem they raised was that of credit transfer. I had heard about the significant problems with Ontario’s system but I hadn’t seen the effects “up close”; hearing personal stories was informative to say the least. For example, in some cases students had been told by college staff that their work would earn them a certain amount of university credit, only to find out later that no such arrangement was in place. This brought to mind the presentation at OISE’s panel on Ontario PSE last month, where credit transfer was described by Christine Arnold as a game of “Snakes and Ladders” — no wonder.

Students’ attempts to find help with their various problems were also met with mixed reactions from faculty and teaching assistants at the various institutions they’d attended. One student who was struggling with family problems went to her TA for help, only to be told she should think about dropping out if she was having so much trouble. Sometimes professors would not accommodate when there were genuine family emergencies, and thus students lost valuable credits. I also heard from one student who was told, “if you don’t like it, pay for it somewhere else.” Consumer culture indeed!

From the perspective of the “teacher”, the issue of trust here is very important but it’s one that is addressed only in hallway and office talk between and among faculty and graduate students. We know there are always some students who simply don’t show up to class, then provide what looks like pretty spurious evidence of their inability to attend. Recently a student told me he’d just been too “busy” to do the required class work. Whether or not the reasons provided are valid is something I’m expected to negotiate for myself, as the TA or course director, since only on rare occasions do I see a doctor’s note or other formal documentation. And I think this makes a game out of truth, it can contribute to tension in the relationship between teachers and students. It also makes it harder for those who are having real difficulty because their truths look less credible.

Yet clearly many students really do have trouble juggling university work with everything else in life, and they might not want to say so for fear of being perceived as inadequate.

The “student experiences” we should be thinking about are right in front of us all the time, not just what happens in our classes and tutorials but what students bring into the tutorials, their expectations and feelings about education that are totally unknown to us and influenced by things beyond our control. When a student has been put off from asking for help or for a deferral, they might assume that every professor or TA is that way, and thus keep their troubles to themselves and try to “cope” on their own.

We know that even when services are available in universities (such as writing clinics and counseling), students often don’t “access” them. One reason among many could be that there’s a disconnect where some students have tried to find help but found the information too confusing or the territory too intimidating and off-putting.

In our tutorial I mentioned the “assumed student” in postsecondary policy, who’s generally imagined as someone coming to university right from high school, who lives near the campus with parents or in residence, who has means of paying tuition up front and in full, and who is academically and socially prepared enough for a certain level of autonomy. I think it’s also assumed that students can easily learn the “system”, the way the university works, when from their perspective it may be a confusing tangled mass of contradictory information and obscure policy.

Ultimately I think the “silence” about personal struggles, within the PSE system and with life in general, really needs to end. A student cannot be expected to bring a note from their parent or employer explaining why they have to work 20 hours a week to cover tuition. But who is there to listen when they need to explain this? The 50 minutes each week that I spend with them really isn’t enough for that. But if everyone’s chipping in, if in every class we can try to provide a “safe space” for this kind of honesty, maybe it’s a step in the right direction.

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On Friday, Feb. 24, on the heels of much recent debate about post-secondary education policy in Ontario, TVO’s “The Agenda” aired a discussion about the “purpose of the university.”

I found myself frustrated at the set-up for the show, and by the discussion that came out of it; and I want to discuss that frustration because TV shows like this one are part of the ongoing public debate — often occurring in the media — about how universities work, what they should be doing, and for whom.

Firstly, the guests certainly didn’t represent a spectrum of viewpoints that seemed relevant to the issue in the Ontario context. Two of those included on the panel were in the United States, and all the panel members were administrators representing what looks like a narrow demographic slice — there was no-one under 50 years old. Notably in a debate about undergraduate and graduate education in the present and future, there were also no students or recent graduates invited to comment, and no faculty members, only administrators (including University of Toronto’s provost Cheryl Misak, Council of Ontario Universities president and CEO Bonnie Patterson, and McMaster University’s president, Patrick Deane).

Another problem with the panel was a lack of coherent policy perspective, which could have been provided by inviting one of the many strong PSE scholars who reside in Ontario (for example, one of those who spoke at the recent OISE conference on the subject). If U.S. viewpoints are present, why not ask a U.S. researcher of higher education to comment? This exclusion seems odd, given the number of people who could have spoken about the issue. Were any of them invited to participate?

This set-up is important because it helps to explain the discussion that followed, in which there was no mention of the contentious debate about teaching universities in Ontario, or of the Drummond Report, or of the still-unreleased (but leaked) “3x3” paper from the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities, all of which have been reported on recently by major media sources in Ontario.

Much of the discussion involved the key underlying theme of the value of university education and how this value could and should be best maximized and translated into benefits for individuals and for the larger society. As I’ve discussed elsewhere, this central issue is what drives much of the media coverage about universities. In this case it manifested as a focus on whether most students should have a general “liberal arts” education, or more “narrow” professional education that is designed to “train” them for specific kinds of work.

In spite of the economic themes that dominated, a real debate about debt was one of the gaping holes in this discussion of the “value” of university education (only one of the participants raised the issue and it was not taken up). There was little mention of workforce or demographic changes and their implications for young people; the increasing pressure on them in the form of tuition and loans; and the academic job market and its effects on graduate education (other than the provocative question of whether there are “too many PhDs”). This seems even more surprising if we consider the influence of financial factors in students’ decisions to pursue either professional/specialized or general education. Does nothing lie between those two extremes? How are students negotiating this situation?

“The Agenda” host Steve Paiken was definitely going for provocative points, raising the infamous Economist article that questions the value of PhDs, for example, and repeatedly returning to the theme of “value for money” as a concern for universities’ “stakeholders”. Swinging from the very general to the very specific, there was also a discussion of the metrics of university “outcomes”, with assurances that such instruments are under development (but with little question of whether this just reinforces deeper assumptions about education governance, economics, and the quantification of intangible externalities).

A debate about “the university” in general definitely has its place, but for an Ontario audience it would have been more interesting and relevant to frame things in terms of the current issues being raised here and now. I felt the discussion really failed to link larger theoretical problems, like the one about liberal education that kept re-surfacing, with specific and significant changes being proposed to the Ontario system and being debated now by politicians and academics, students and journalists. With different participants and structure I think it would have been much easier for that kind of discussion to happen, since the connections are important and they’re there, waiting to be made.

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Last week on February 7, a conference was held at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto (OISE) on the subject of the new universities (or campuses) that have been proposed by the Ontario provincial government. The conference included speakers who discussed various issues relating to the creation of the new campuses, and there was also a particular focus on ideas put forth in the book written by Ian D. Clark, David Trick and Richard Van Loon, entitled Academic Reform: Policy Options for Improving the Quality and Cost-Effectiveness of Undergraduate Education in Ontario. Though unable to attend the conference in person, I was able to watch it live from home via OISE’s webcasting system; since I’ve been following this issue for a number of months, I thought I might share some comments.

As conference participants discussed, there are many possibilities for what new “teaching oriented universities” might look like. The question is, what’s the context of their creation and what actual forms and practices will emerge? What kinds of “campuses” will these be, and what logic will drive their governance? For example, will they be like the liberal arts colleges of the United States where prestigious faculty engage in teaching while also producing research? My guess is that the answer is “no”, because this would conflict with the need to save money by significantly increasing teaching assignments per professor, which — as it turns out — is the goal.

One thing I felt was a bit lacking at the conference was discussion of the fact that in the broader “academic economy” teaching is simply considered less prestigious than research, and that means a hierarchy of institutions is likely to emerge. In a differentiated system, universities will tend be different, but not “equal.” What will be the implications of this for the new universities, for the hiring of teaching staff (for example)? Will faculty hires see these institutions as less desirable stops on the road to a “real” university job at a research-oriented university? I believe one speaker, Tricia Seifert of OISE, did address this problem by suggesting (among other things) that we should do more during PhD education to privilege teaching and to build the prestige of pedagogical work in the academic profession.

A related point is that in Drs. Clark, Trick and Van Loon’s model, there seemed to be an assumption that teaching quality operates in a simplistically quantitative way (behaviourism never really goes away does it). A 4-4 teaching “load” (80% teaching, 10% research, 10% service) is not just about having the same number of students split up into smaller classes; juggling and planning for multiple classes is more work. As Rohan Maitzen pointed out on Twitter, teaching involves more than “just standing there” (many hours of preparation, for example).

To continue with the theme of prestige and the devaluing of teaching, what I noticed when I read the book excerpt is that the word “university” is going to be applied to the new institutions partly as a means of marketing them to squeamish students. The authors state explicitly that “every effort in Ontario to create a label that resides in between colleges and universities – such as “institute of technology,” “polytechnic university,” “university college” and the like – has failed to find acceptance and has led to requests for further changes.” Yet somehow “mission drift” — the tendency of universities to want to climb the ladder to a more research oriented status — must be prevented through government regulation and a strict mandate.

This is one reason why existing institutions may be disappointed if the think they will be sharing in the new expansion. What “new” means is not an extension of other campuses, nor a conversion of an institution of one kind into a different type (i.e. college into university); what’s desired is a “clean slate.” A likely goal is to save money by preventing the duplication of governance structures like unions and tenure, because these reduce “flexibility” and increase costs. This could lead to the 31% cost savings predicted by the authors, who nevertheless expect the new universities’ faculty salaries and benefits will remain competitive (my prediction is that salaries will be lower).

The purposes for building new teaching universities are not just pedagogical but also economic and political. Providing more access to postsecondary education is politically expedient and also matches the economic logic of the day, which is that building human capital for the knowledge economy can only occur through increased PSE acquisition. But as Harvey Weingarten pointed out at the OISE conference, campuses can’t be built unless there is government funding available for the purpose — and now we’re hearing that there isn’t any funding. I suspect that the release of the Drummond Report this week only confirms this, adding pressure to the process of imagining new teaching-intensive universities. It may now be even more difficult to ensure that pedagogical rather than just economic logic is what wins out.

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