The growing estrangement between universities and society

Hi, I’m new here. Perhaps I should introduce myself.

Can we divide the world into people who never went to university, people who arrived at university and never left, and people who went for a while? I’m in the last group. I’m aware that many of you are in the second group. Yes, I feel imposter syndrome writing for you.

I graduated from Western University in 1989 with a bachelor’s in political science. It took a while, because first I had to flunk second year chemistry, a task I performed with some enthusiasm. Later, it bugged me when people called what I was studying political “science.” I thought: I’ve seen science, and this isn’t it. I never stopped thinking about university, but only after 2000 did higher education as a policy file enter my portfolio of journalistic interests. In 2000 Jean Chrétien ran his third campaign as the leader of the federal Liberal party. He had two main opponents: Stockwell Day, the youthful leader of the opposition Canadian Alliance; and Paul Martin, the charming leader of every Liberal who didn’t like Chrétien. Chrétien called the election early, to take both men by surprise. He held many of his campaign events on university campuses. It was a classic contrast play. Stockwell Day is the past, he was saying in effect. He doesn’t own a library card. I’m the future. I am surrounded by people in lab coats. In the end, Chrétien won an increased majority in the House of Commons. It might have been his greatest political triumph.

But it was more than talk and tactics. Chrétien had already been investing heavily in university research before the election, and he followed through after, with rapid growth in budgets for granting councils, scholarships and research chairs. Much of Canada’s research effort today can trace its roots to programs that were introduced during the Chrétien era.

In 2003 I began working for Maclean’s, which had a popular university rankings issue and devoted resources year-round to covering higher education. Universities weren’t my beat, but Maclean’s was happy to publish anything I wrote about the sector.

It was an exciting time to be writing about universities. At first.

Chrétien was far from the only politician with his eye on higher ed. There was widespread support in Canadian society for a strong university sector. All kinds of governments hitched their wagons to this vision. In 2005 Indira Samarasekera agreed to become president of the University of Alberta because Ralph Klein told her he had a long-term plan for investment in Alberta universities. In 2007 the British Columbia government’s Campus2020 plan set out to make B.C. “the best-educated, most literate jurisdiction on the continent” by 2020. Quebec’s finance minister wanted to make Montreal “a global crossroads for photonics.”

In 2001 Tom Courchene, the great Queen’s University economist, delivered a kind of manifesto for the era when he published A State of Minds: Toward a Human Capital Future for Canadians. The book asked: “What happens when the world changes in ways that make Canada’s physical capital, natural resources, and geography – once the ultimate competitive advantages – less important than knowledge, information, technological know-how and human capital? What happens to Canadians?”

The surprise answer is, we’re not likely to find out anytime soon. Canada is probably further from that goal today than in 2001. And we’re moving in the wrong direction.

The momentum faded so slowly it took years to notice. Alberta cut its university budgets deeply in 2013. They haven’t really recovered. In 2007 Stephen Harper created a Science, Technology and Innovation Council, with deputy ministers, university presidents, CEOs and a secretariat to produce biennial State of the Nation reports comparing Canada’s science and technology performance against other countries. Increasingly, the reports said Canada was falling behind. So in 2016 Justin Trudeau shut the STIC Council down. No more bad news!

The bad news for university budgets keeps getting worse. Government grants are frozen or declining. Tuition fees for domestic students are often cut or capped, in a gesture of misguided populism. Some universities respond by letting enrolment skyrocket, especially enrolment by international students, who can pay higher fees. Not a perfect solution. And lately, no kind of solution at all, because policymakers have begun to curtail that option too.

But the bad news is not only budgetary. It’s cultural. The notion that the future of Canada lies in, or through, its universities is an increasingly hard sell. Ask parents about their university-age children and you’re likely to hear them talk about four undergraduate years as a questionable indulgence. The kid will probably need vocational training afterward, a lot of parents say mournfully, to teach them something useful. People have only the vaguest idea what happens in universities, but they’re pretty sure they don’t like it.

When I wrote about the budget crunch at Queen’s last year, a lot of the comments from readers were celebratory. Let it rot, some said. They see nothing useful going on in universities – and they’re pretty sure universities don’t see anything useful going on in Canada.

I’m talking about something similar to what Larry Summers, the former Harvard president, meant when he spoke in February on Yascha Mounk’s podcast The Good Fight about an “enormous estrangement between universities and the broader society.” The Ivy League universities, Dr. Summers said, “have thumbed their nose at what is by far their largest donor” —the U.S. federal government.

Now, it’s great for academics to have a cultural critique about the broader society. It’s hard to imagine a university worth the name that could find no home for that spirit of critique. But monolithic disdain, endorsed by taboo, isn’t a critique. And disdain can be reciprocated, by families and by governments that might otherwise be expected to send children, funding and esteem to institutions of higher education. In the U.S., four Ivy League universities have lost their presidents to resignation in the last year. In Canada, the inevitably wrenching debates over pro-Palestinian encampments might have been easier to weather if Canadians had a stronger pre-existing sense that useful things are happening on campuses besides the theatre of confrontation.

How far can this mutual estrangement between what we used to call Town and Gown go? In July Michelle Rempel Garner, the Conservative MP for Calgary Nose Hill, wrote an astonishing post on her popular Substack newsletter, with the headline, “Major screw-ups at universities should raise questions about their research funding eligibility.” I don’t endorse her argument, but given the company she keeps – a large parliamentary caucus that seems likely to grow in a year or so – it’s probably worth some attention and concern.

“Some Canadian universities have demonstrated management paralysis when faced with no-brainer decisions, and seem incapable of managing basic, foreseeable risk,” Ms. Rempel Garner writes. Exhibit A is the encampments, which she didn’t like, but she has a long list of other grievances. The easiest way to “force” universities “to do better” is to “review the eligibility requirements for the receipt of federal research funds to ensure strong university governance.”

Perhaps, like me, you’re inclined to point out flaws in this plan. Chief among them is the fact that the grants for research go to different people than the ones who decide how to handle a protest. If someday a protest goes poorly at the University of Calgary, for instance, I’m not sure a penalty should properly be lodged against somebody researching childhood cancer at the Alberta Children’s Hospital Research Institute.

In fact, I would say the proposed remedy is terribly misplaced. But my opinion probably matters less these days to Ms. Rempel Garner than that of Pierre Poilievre, her party’s leader. And in 2022, while he was running for the leadership, Poilievre promised to make federal research funding conditional on universities pledging to uphold Charter free speech guarantees.

A government that decided to make it harder for universities to obtain funding would, these days, have plenty of company. The enormous estrangement Dr. Summers described might yet have room to grow. Governments make decisions in the context of public opinion, which means any large institution is always in a battle for the esteem of the population. And for Canadian universities, that battle has already been going the wrong way. For years.