Illustrations de : George Peters
Graphics by: George Peters

And now, inside secrets of big-league column writing.

A couple of months ago I filed my first column for University Affairs, about “the growing estrangement between universities and society.” It was pretty glum. One point I made was that 20 years ago, elected politicians were eager to be photographed standing next to university administrators, because universities felt like the future. Now they really aren’t, because at some level that isn’t easy to define, universities feel like trouble. Not to everyone, but to enough people. Since politicians are – almost by definition – a lagging indicator of the broader society, I think this decline in universities’ social capital may be a problem for universities.

After I filed the column, my editor asked whether I had any ideas for solutions to the problem I’d described. I said I was pretty happy to let the column end on a down note. So we did. But I’ll tell you a secret: I actually wasn’t sure whether I could come up with any solutions.

I’m still not. But let’s start brainstorming together. Improving Canadian universities’ standing in public opinion isn’t the work of a single conversation. It’ll be a common thread of many of my columns over the next little while.

It’s not as though relations are thawing. Canada’s just been through three provincial election campaigns, in British Columbia, New Brunswick and Saskatchewan. As Alex Usher at Higher Education Strategy Associates pointed out, almost no political party in any province ran on promises to expand or improve postsecondary education. The NDP in Saskatchewan and the Conservative Party of BC had no university-related promises at all. Some parties tended to focus on reducing the cost to students of their time spent at university. In addition, the Saskatchewan Party wanted to pay graduates to stay in the province. These policies do reflect some understanding that postsecondary education has value, but they’re kind of … binary. Are you, Sir or Madam, in possession of a unit of post-secondary education? Then you should be rewarded – either before you receive the unit of higher education, to make obtaining it easier; or after you receive it, to make you likelier to stick around. Can the unit of higher education be improved? In the eyes of many different parties in three different provinces, apparently no more than some other binary marker, a bus ticket or a wristband, could be improved.

Maybe some people reading this will rather like this state of affairs. Benign neglect isn’t the worst possible outcome, after all. I’m reminded that in discussions of Canada-U.S. relations, it’s rarely long before somebody pipes up that things are never going well if the Americans are thinking about us at all. Similarly, maybe it’s best if governments don’t try to fix universities. The problem is, neglect rarely stays benign for long. I thought it was ominous that the Saskatchewan Party found room in its platform to congratulate itself for all the money it’s spent on university operating grants since it came to power in 2007. That’s the sort of thing you do if you want people to believe you had a choice about whether to spend that money. Once that thought occurs to them, how long will it be before they decide not to spend it?

On the whole, then, I think universities are safer if they’re in politicians’ field of view, and if the sight of them is at least occasionally pleasant.

How can universities help make their case? First, by reminding people that a lot of what universities do is to instill complex technical knowledge that you can’t get anywhere else and that doesn’t carry a lot of ideological baggage. Things like calculus, molar mass, the location of the pancreas, the jurisprudence regarding search and seizure. It’s a given that when universities are in the news, it will often be about campus protests that never seem to end, or social science positions that never seem to make sense to a lot of outside observers. A strong message coming out of universities should be that they can’t be reduced to those easy-to-caricature debates.

For all their flaws, universities can still produce engineers, doctors, chemists, physicists and geographers. This will be so obvious to many people reading this column that I must seem odd for pointing it out. But go back and read the paragraph about political parties in three provinces that couldn’t find a good word to say about universities while those parties’ leaders were fighting for their political lives. Clearly some of this stuff needs pointing out. As often as possible, send your students and their professors into the community to help solve local problems. And invite community leaders onto the campus, not to proselytize them, but simply to make your campus part of local politicians’ mental map. It’s the least you can do to keep campuses from feeling like gated communities that enclose mysterious rituals.

Another thing I heard from readers is that it might be time to revisit the substantial emphasis on research in determining budget priorities and career advancement. It’s easy to understand why research took on such importance after the 1990s. For nearly 20 years, successive federal governments saw research funding as its main contribution to the health of Canadian universities. For much of that time, that meant federal research grants were one of the few growing sources of university revenue.

When something works, you try to get more of it. So the main message coming from universities, especially the biggest ones in the country, was: research drives innovation which creates the jobs of tomorrow. Often that’s even true. But governments became increasingly leery of ever-growing research expenditures, especially when that money goes to granting councils which allocate funding based on peer review. Governments prefer to allocate money based on what makes the party in power look good. That’s not even an irrational consideration! But it’s largely incompatible with the concerns of peer review. So research grants have started to top out.

Meanwhile the other missions of a good university – teaching and community- building – have, in some institutions, received less attention. Now that research is less of a sure thing when it comes to luring government interest, maybe there’s more room to think holistically about everything a university can do for its people, its local community, and the world of knowledge. Every institution will reach different conclusions about how to weigh those considerations. But I don’t think it’s a bad idea to let your community know you’re having the conversation.

I know it’s against every large organization’s instincts these days to let people know it’s having complex conversations. I work in Ottawa, where every political party and most government departments operate under a cone of strategic silence, sending out only bits of carefully constructed “messaging” that usually seeks to avoid conversation. In fact, it’s been a theme of my political journalism that this “message control” is eroding government, because a government that obsesses over its message forgets how to listen, and because internal communications quickly sink to the level of this empty sloganeering. I think our governance problems are, to a significant extent, communication problems.

Which is why I think one thing universities can do, to re-establish their social relevance, is to insert themselves aggressively into debates over public policy and governance.

This is, I suspect, counter-intuitive. When politics gets weird, people are tempted to hide from politics. But lately I’m leaning towards the opposite conclusion. Governments have stopped performing basic functions – tracking the results obtained by different policies; generating new policy ideas; meeting colleagues across departmental, jurisdictional and partisan lines.

Universities could pick up that slack. Policy analysis, generation and debate could become a bigger part of what political-science departments and their associated institutions do. The goal would be to move away from a position of rote antagonism towards one of engagement. The message would be that these debates are worth having; that universities enjoy freedom that practitioners sometimes don’t; and that this freedom can be useful in helping governments and citizens perform their respective roles.

Universities have become easy targets for neglect, and sometimes for worse, because they’ve begun to seem remote from the concerns of the communities that surround them. So make them less remote. Get them back into discussions about how to make a better society.

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