I feel like a John Ibbitson coupon clipper. Over the past two years I've been collecting the Globe and Mail columnist's articles on education, and fittingly, they are very instructive. Occasionally insightful and always bombastic, they are the basis for lively discussions about the direction of schools and universities in Ontario. They are also filled with glaring contradictions that must leave readers scratching their heads about what's going on inside Ibbitson's.
On Apr. 26, 1999, when he was still working for the National Post, Ibbitson wrote a column exposing and denouncing the plans for public education outlined in a report by the Ontario Jobs and Investment Board, headed by a key advisor to Premier Mike Harris. The board proposed turning universities into blunt instruments of provincial economic policy. Ibbitson was not impressed.
"The autonomous liberal-arts university is in its last days," he wrote. "Welcome the provincially-controlled, market-sensitive, advanced polytechnic that will replace it." Such a scheme would "sacrifice our humanities programs on the altar of economic advantage (and) surrender our civilization to our economy."
Couldn't have said it better myself, I thought, and I pasted Mr. Ibbitson's column on my bulletin board.
On Feb. 28, 2000, he again castigated the Ontario government for spending virtually all of its new funding for higher education on market-oriented programs such as business, computer science and engineering. On the heels of the restructuring of elementary and secondary schooling these policies fully exposed the Tories' narrow educational vision. "Rather than expanding the mind, education will now train it," lamented Ibbitson.
But by the end of the year, as if bitten belatedly by the millennium bug, the author was singing a different tune.
On Dec.14, in an article on the York University teaching assistants strike, he jumped on the anti-liberal education bandwagon by condemning York's research centres in the humanities and social sciences and by mocking students who were interested in "feminist research," "practical ethics," and "work society" and so on. "If it is humanly possible to graduate with a university degree and still be unable to find a job," he inaccurately concluded, "these are the sorts of courses that will do it." He now recommended that York get with the Tory program by emphasizing business, engineering and health sciences.
On Jan. 9, 2001, Ibbitson's conversion to the Common Sense Revolution appeared complete. Educational changes which he had previously found ghastly were now essential. "Vital reforms in primary and secondary education by
the Mike Harris government have been frustrated by the teachers unions. Attempts to force the province's 18 public universities to reorient their teaching to the imperatives of the job market have led to strikes at York, McMaster University, University of Toronto, and York again." He enthused over private education, and praised the government for resolving "to expose the public universities to the disciplines of the market."
What does this turnabout mean? One could conclude, sympathetically, that Ibbitson is demonstrating remarkable mental agility by clinging to totally incongruous ideas at the same time — or that he doesn't remember what he wrote a year ago — or that he is suffering from the pressure of producing copy for deadline. All I know is that he's giving me a headache and I'm no longer tacking his columns to my bulletin board.
Paul Axelrod
Social Science, York University