Every day it seems we are faced with more threats to the integrity of a post-secondary education system that so many of us have given so much to build and maintain over the years, and which has done so much to benefit the society we all live in.
Notoriously divisive and wasteful “program prioritization” exercises keep popping up, like zombies in a bad horror film, accompanied by the equally ghoulish menace of perpetual austerity, increased casualization and precarity among the faculty complement, intrusions of corporate managerialism at the hands of an ever-increasing legion of administrators, erosion of academic freedom and tenure rights, declines in government funding, and major granting agencies’ new aversion to anything but market-oriented, targeted research. It’s truly a wonder we are still able to perform the work of researching and teaching in the public interest as well as we do.
Such attacks take their toll, however, and that’s a shame, because universities and colleges are meant to occupy a unique place in our society. They are not like private sector enterprises, which must always focus on turning a profit and so can ill afford to take chances with unproven innovations. Nor are they like government agencies, vulnerable to the dictates of political masters whose time horizon rarely extends beyond the next election cycle.
Our bottom line is rather the expansion of knowledge, in service of the public good, and our timeframe has no limit. As a result we do research no one else can perform. Bolstered by academic freedom and answerable to fellow experts alone, we fearlessly test orthodoxies, push boundaries and follow hunches. If some don’t work out, valuable lessons are still learned in the process. If an experiment reveals problems with a new drug, or mining technique, or crop variant, we can raise safety concerns — without hesitation and worry about the effect on stock prices. We pursue new directions in the myriad fields of human expression and experience, without limiting ourselves exclusively to those with mass-market appeal.
Students benefit immeasurably from time spent in such a protected formational setting, with its unique opportunities to take chances and make mistakes under the guidance of experts and peers. It allows them to identify directions they want to take in life, and to learn best practices appropriate to the professional fields they will someday inhabit. It empowers them to make positive contributions to those fields, rather than simply conforming to and complying with “the way it’s always been done.”
These are benefits we stand to lose if we allow our universities and colleges to lose their special status by becoming no different from profit-oriented, private sector enterprises. Yet, unfortunately, that too often seems to be the road our governments and administrators want to send us down. Citing fiscal positions and parroting corporate jargon, they pressure us to do more with less, to lower overhead (including faculty salaries, if not administrative ones), to increase productivity and maximize returns, all the while endeavouring to maintain “customer satisfaction.” This could be fine if we were in fact retail outlets, selling a product to consumers with discretionary income to spend, and competing with others in a free-market economy. But we are not.
We are guardians of a vital public resource, which is still largely funded with public monies. We serve not “customers” but students, who look to us not for cheap delivery of a pre-packaged educational “product” but for guidance, and mentorship, as they embark upon a crucial period of life-defining transitions. And despite all the catastrophist rhetoric coming out of many university and college head offices, our best governmental and business leaders actually understand this. They know we have a defining role to play in the development of new talent and new ideas which may take time to germinate. They value the fact that there are places set apart from the immediate demands of the market and political spheres, where basic research and curiosity-driven knowledge development can thrive over the long term. That is why they continue to fund such a wide range of university and college programs, and to value the opinions of the faculty who make them work.
Sometimes, indeed quite frequently, our research does lead to profitable outcomes. And there is nothing wrong with transparent, ethical collaborations that bring such research to market. Nor is there anything wrong with borrowing practices from the business world from time to time, if they can help us do our work better and more economically. But such collaborations, and such borrowings, must respect the core mission of our sector — research and education in the public interest — and they must be determined by those who understand that mission best: academic faculty members, trained for years to be leading experts in their fields, and passionately devoted to their profession.
Our workplace is different, and that difference is worth protecting at all costs.