With the opening of universities, colleges, and schools across the country comes the annual deluge of editorial opinion and punditry on all things educational. In the last week of August, The Globe and Mail came out once again for higher tuition fees and a system of student loans with income-contingent repayment through the income tax. The unfortunate victims of similar schemes in New Zealand and Australia find themselves paying 10 per cent of their incomes (in New Zealand after the $13,000 mark), and for most of their working lives.

Meanwhile, every Canadian province is participating in schemes to impose performance indicators on colleges and universities. By the middle of this September, as last September, many an editor will extoll the glories of graduation rates, and the value of employer and student evaluations of teaching (with exit surveys later on), and of course, the costs-per-unit of everything from Latin instruction to earthworm dissection. The idea is that competition between universities and colleges on these and other fronts will produce new efficiencies and will raise "quality."

And our newspaper editors aren't alone. After two decades of hard fighting, we're losing ground on public funding of post-secondary education. At the very moment funding is declining, universities are asked to submit to the forces of the marketplace (more "client control," less commitment to the general/community interest).

On the general proposition that "she who pays the piper calls the tune," one might expect that government would stop trying to control universities. After all, government is paying less and less. And surely "client control" implies that government would begin to bow out of university management.

Instead, we have in Manitoba the example of a government seeking to move to new levels of micro-management of university affairs. In Alberta, the measurement mania is several years old now, and it's beginning to bite as performance indicators help to decide the funding levels of universities and colleges.

All of this suggests we are losing ground to wave upon wave of "conservative" thinking on the finance and function of all public institutions, and educational institutions in particular. Our strategy in the 1980s was to fight in the streets. British Columbia's experience in 1983 showed that this can work fairly quickly and well to stem (but not to reverse) the tide. We became more active than ever in lobbying as the 1980s turned into the 1990s. I shiver at the thought of what would have happened to appropriations for the granting councils without the lobbying work of our partners and ourselves in the Post-Secondary Education Coalition.

Despite all this effort, the newspaper editors and our governments continue to think that markets and performance indicators and competition will "raise quality." They rarely talk about accessibility and openness and fairness. They don't have to. The ideological winds are blowing in another direction. Few in public life speak or dare to speak of raising taxes for education, even if opinion polls consistently show that Canadians are willing to pay for accessible and good schools and universities.

We clearly need a new strategy, not to replace the old ones, but to join them. How can we turn the current neo-conservative ideas on their heads? Is there a set of ideas and values that characterize the Canadian university as it could and should be? What strategies might we adopt to communicate effectively these ideas and values to Canadians and their governments?

In another editorial, I'll suggest some ways of putting a set of ideas and values, some of them extensions of past practice (and I don't hesitate for a moment to say that much of what we've done is valuable), some of them new and risky, at the centre of national discourse.

There's much here to interest Canadians worried about their society. It's time to move beyond the mere defence of what we in the universities do. It's time to move from the defensive and to the assertive. Just time.