Ross H. Paul. Montreal, QC & Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011; 352 pp; ISBN: 978-0-77353-887-0, cloth $49.95 CAD.

Reviewed by Michael Stevenson

This book deals with important questions of conflict and change in universities and the success or failure of a university president’s response to such pressures. It is written by an authority who has been the academic vice-president at two universities before serving as president at two others. It relies on in-depth interviews with 11 other Canadian university presidents who “have really made a difference,” and on an analysis of the most recent presidential appointments at 47 of this country’s longer established universities.

Published by one of our leading academic publishers, its importance will extend beyond its intrinsic merits by virtue of its funding and adoption by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada for use in professional development seminars for new university presidents. So, this is a book that will interest those who aspire to lead our institutions, those entrusted with the search for new presidents, and those who seek to understand or assess the leaders they get.

I have known the author during my own 20 years in positions of university leadership. I have admired his breadth and length of service, and especially his ability to write two scholarly books out of that experience. I have also known and admired most of the 11 university presidents on whom he relies as informants. So, any criticism in what follows may be attributed to ego sensitivity or professional jealousy.

Paul’s account of the changes and underlying tensions in Canadian university life touches all the obvious but vitally important issues: the pressure for growth and accessibility coupled to declining real per capita grant funding for enrolment; the anonymity, bureaucratization and managerialism that size, complexity and unsustainable financing entail; and the increasingly instrumental interests of government and business in the university’s contribution to labour supply and the pressures of external and internal stakeholders for transparency and accountability in the uses of public money. Add to these: the tensions around academic freedom produced by the increasing social diversity of the academic community and by the increasing corporatization of the university; the undermining of collegial relations and the souring of labour relations in such an environment; the never-ending demand for and cost of new technologies; the demands for institutional differentiation, internal structural adjustment and retrenchment; and the pressures to increase tuition fees, research overheads and external fundraising and the increasingly competitive environment for such funding.

While Paul leaves little out, his readers will likely long for more detailed treatment and analysis of many of these issues. His account of contentious matters is bland and sketchy, without any wider political context, historical depth or illustration. There is little here of the blood and guts promised in the military metaphor of the title.

Surprisingly, for example, on labour relations there is no reference to Rae Days, which must have figured in Paul’s long experience in Ontario, or to highly interventionist management of academic labour relations in other provinces, or to any of the serious academic strikes in recent Canadian experience. On the fiscal pressures and retrenchment which have been such a depressing part of that experience across this country, he gives no details of the momentous impact of the Harris cuts in Ontario (apart from passing reference to Education Minister John Snobelin’s enthusiasm for management by crisis), or of related developments elsewhere.

Elliptical references to events at Memorial and Concordia universities hardly do justice to the pressures on institutional autonomy and academic freedom, and Paul shows no interest in related questions about the commercialization of research.

The author cites with approval various positions in favour of the increase and deregulation of tuition fees, but gives little or no attention to the contending arguments, and no account of the battles that have been fought whenever implementation of such recommendations has been allowed.

On perhaps the most contentious, big-picture issue, he reiterates the consensus among Canada’s dominant universities, agreeing that our university systems are too homogeneous and need to be much more clearly differentiated. He approves even of the (in)famous Maclean’s interview with the “gang of three” calling for a greater differentiation of enrolment and funding in a few graduate- and research-intensive universities, as opposed to the great majority which should be reduced to undergraduate teaching institutions. He indicates the special problems posed by this prescription for the so-called “comprehensive universities,” but gives no space to the counter-arguments from such institutions.

And while avoiding the practical difficulties in the way of the major institutional adjustments called for under the banner of differentiation, he attempts to make the dominant discourse more palatable by insisting that differentiation need not be tiering, and that he at least envisages significant new government funding for undergraduate teaching as a pre-requisite of differentiation.

Writing from South Africa, I am reminded of the apartheid regime’s claims that it was funding the “bantustans” to be independent states like any other.

On the question of what makes for success or failure in presidential leadership, Paul is similarly wide-ranging in his survey of literature and issues, but disappointing in his failure to delve into the heart of contentious matters. There is, for example, much of interest in his biographical appendix on the impressive careers of the 11 successful university presidents, but his summary characterization of their supposedly very different leadership styles is casual and unhelpful in indicating why these individuals epitomize success.

Paul relies far more on the abstracted empiricism of Berquist and Pawlak’s categorization of academic cultures, arguing that successful presidents depend on an understanding of the local institutional culture, and adopt a leadership style appropriate to that culture, whether collegial, managerial, developmental, advocacy, virtual or tangible.

This linguistic obfuscation and conceptual confusion of institutional culture and leadership is buttressed by the frequent assertion of “institutional fit” as the key to success or failure. What this proposition means, despite a tautological validity, is not clear; in part because it is not explored in Paul’s biographies of success, and in part because there is no real attention paid to the perhaps 20 per cent of recent presidential appointments in Canada which have been failures (resulting in early resignations or not extending beyond a single term).

Once released from the straight-jacket of his organizational sociology (and despite his indication from that perspective that collegial cultures are a thing of the past, surviving only in smaller, undergraduate institutions) Paul offers sound advice on the importance of collegial governance. This advice includes: open communication and a sense of humour in articulating presidential authority and in reinforcing a climate of debate and dissent; an emphasis on values, principles and scholarly standards as the grounding of strategic planning and institutional policy; team building, team work and the deflection of credit to others; respectful and accessible relations with unions and associations; and the engagement and animation of senates and the careful management of board relationships as essential to the delicate balancing of bicameral systems.

On these and other matters of the day-to-day experience of a university president, Paul offers useful guidance. More broadly, he has done us all a great service by mapping the issues that need to be addressed in thinking of the leadership and direction of our universities. If on many issues he has laid out the case for more research and argument, rather than giving us a settled recipe for successful leadership and future directions, that is surely contribution enough.

His book will serve as a foundation for the ongoing education of university leadership, and as a sig-
nificant capstone to a distinguished career.

---------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Stevenson is President Emeritus of Simon Fraser University. He became the 8th president of SFU in 2000, and stepped down after completing 10 years in office at the end of August 2010. For a decade prior to his appointment as SFU president, he served as dean of arts, and as vice-president academic and provost at York University.