The Perfect Storm

   [This blog was written before the one that follows it, and is intended for a non-academic audience. As in the case of the one that follows, it was written with the hope that it might be made public in some fashion. And, like the one that follows, it is unlikely to see any publication either than here.]

   The higher education crisis in Alberta has become the perfect storm. A provincial government trying to prove how tough it can be to the province’s right-wing voters constitutes one element of that storm. A public that does not seem to understand what universities are or should be is another. The abandonment by universities of an academic model in favor of a corporate business model is yet another.

   In regard to the ruling government and the public, both seem to think universities are inefficient and its members over-privileged. At worst, both seem to want universities that are mere job employment centres, where all courses and programs are directed at current job opportunities and current applied research needs. Even if the task of universities was this narrow, no institutions of higher education could flexibly adapt on-the-fly to perceived needs. If they tried, education would be a disjointed shambles of incoherent programs and incompetent instruction by under-qualified staff. In reality, universities have a larger task, much of it beyond employment training -- to educate students to think critically, to create good citizens, and to improve the quality of our lives, not just add to the cash in our billfolds.

   University professors are privileged, as every one of them would admit. They are privileged to participate in the excitement of teaching and conducting research. But to get to that opportunity, they must go through tough competition. Fewer than half who begin graduate studies finish with a PhD. In most fields, fewer than half of them will ever get full-time university employment. Those adjuncts who scramble for a living by teaching sessional courses here and there, seldom make an income above the poverty line. In the U. S., one source claims that adjuncts now teach 76% of undergraduate courses. Those few academics who get a tenured position seldom have a job before they are thirty-one years old. Post-doctoral positions and adjunct teaching are the long residencies for academics. Even if they get a tenured position, they start at a modest salary (at the very age when many have young families). After tenure, good teaching and good research are absolute requirements to improve one’s salary. Only senior professors ever acquire a good income, and this usually occurs late in their careers. Few business or professional people in the “real” world have to face competition like this throughout their careers. On the other hand, most business and professional people receive higher remuneration for their work earlier on and throughout their careers. Almost all academics could prosper more financially by choosing another career path. Yet, they choose the academic life for its not remunerative benefits, especially the satisfaction of accomplishment. And, contrary to popular opinion, almost all university professors work more than a forty-hour week, year round.

   Worst of all, over the past thirty odd years, universities have themselves made an enormous error by embracing a corporate model of operation. On the one hand, this model encourages top-down management. Universities were born, and long existed, on the premise that higher education was a matter of students and professors, and that administrators and all others in the process were there to support the student-teacher process. Top-down management destroys this essential relationship. The corporate model further promotes the idea that students are customers and consumers while professors are only there to guarantee that the customers get what they want rather than what they need. The final stage of such a corporate model is to make universities into competitive institutions, ones where administrators spend their time “marketing” and “branding” the institution rather than fostering the academic and intellectual needs of the university.

   The prognosis is not good for the future, at least not until a sea-change occurs in North American culture. As it is, the perfect storm is overwhelming us.