Conservative populist parties have a real hate on for universities, for two reasons. The one that has received the most attention is that university faculty tend to be liberal and support liberal causes such as diversity, equity, and inclusion and what disparagingly is called wokeness. The second, which I think is more fundamental, is that the university is the traditional home of rigorous evidence-based free inquiry.

American Exceptionalism

The incoming Trump Administration threatens to adopt policies that will gravely weaken American universities, such as a sharp increase in the rate and breadth of the tax on university endowments that the previous Trump Administration enacted. The American higher educational system, especially elite private and major public universities, has played a major role in making the US a global scientific and cultural powerhouse. (Personal disclosure: I received my post-secondary education at a “small college near Boston.”)  Weakening those institutions will go a long way to destroying American exceptionalism. Putin must be awaiting this with keen anticipation. This will be a topic of future posts as these policies are introduced and debated.

Finding Efficiencies

My concern in this post, however, is with the higher education policies of Doug Ford’s conservative populist government of Ontario. The most harmful policies have been the freeze on tuition fees for students from Ontario at 2017 levels, and the near freeze on operating grants. Ontario universities have stayed afloat by increasing their enrolment of, and fees charged to, foreign students. The federal government’s recent decision to reduce the number of foreign students makes this survival strategy untenable, and Ontario’s universities are running deficits and facing a crisis.

In response, the Ford Government’s standard line is that higher education must “find efficiencies” as a pre-condition for receiving any additional funding. I find this discourse objectionable because it shows a complete lack of understanding of and interest in the nature of the institution. It is based on a specious analogy with manufacturing, which is a major focus of the Ford Government. Talking about efficiencies in manufacturing means taking a basic operation, such as stamping metal into car panels, and re-arranging the production process to reduce the per unit cost. University education, however, is a complicated and labour-intensive process with several outputs, the most important ones being teaching and research.

I’ve recently heard several spokespersons for the university sector in media interviews accepting the Ford Government’s premise about finding efficiencies, so they say “of course it’s important to find efficiencies” or “we’ve definitely found efficiencies and expect to find more.” They are failing to bring to the discussion their understanding of the real world of higher education, which is much deeper than the politicians’. And they are not attempting to engage in evidence-based discussion, which itself is a betrayal of the essential character of the university.

The work of the university is based to a great degree on contact and discussion among the people who co-create education: faculty, students, and staff. Slowly starving the university of resources necessarily reduces that contact and discussion. First, class sizes increase, so that more instruction is delivered in large lectures than in small seminars, with fewer opportunities for interaction between faculty and students and among students.

Second, the university shifts instruction from expensive research-stream faculty to less expensive teaching-stream faculty and cheap part-time instructors. (As an example based on the department I chaired, research-stream faculty spend equal time on research and teaching, teach four one-semester courses, and are paid $200,000; teaching-stream faculty teach seven one-semester courses, do whatever research they can find time for, and are paid $100,000; and part-time instructors are paid $10,000 per one-semester course.) By reducing the ranks of research-stream faculty, the university is failing to deliver on its key mission of creating new knowledge. The creation of new knowledge enlivens instruction and leads to innovation that is useful to society as a whole. In a year when University of Toronto professor Geoffrey Hinton won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on artificial intelligence, university leaders have a high-profile, local example to make the point about the importance of research.

Finally, starving universities of funding reduces the quality of support for students, such as counselling for those with special needs, mental health counselling, and academic counselling (writing labs and software workshops).

Hallway Health Care and Education

Governments and voters seem to understand the point that starving the medical system of funding reduces the quality of health care. It is evident in the increasing number of patients being treated in the corridors of emergency wards, the growing unavailability of primary care physicians, and lengthening of wait times for visits to specialists and surgery.

Higher education represents investment in human capital that has an impact on the quality of the workforce, not in the distant future but next year. Starving the higher educational system means that graduates of our universities are less capable and that our society is less innovative. When ministers and government spokespeople talk sternly but misguidedly about “finding efficiencies,” university leaders should be responding by explaining the essential contribution that higher education makes to our society, and how it should be enhanced and not destroyed.