Home thoughts from abroad

Reading Week this year found me in England, instead of Italy.  (Sigh!)  I had some miscellaneous bits of research to undertake, three meetings to attend, and a lecture to deliver at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.  It was also a chance to catch up with some old friends, including two former M.A. students now resident in Britain.  And the overall news was very mixed.  The withdrawal of the government from funding teaching in the humanities and social sciences has led to a tripling of tuition fees, now set at £9000 or about $15,000.

Defying the pundits, the number of applications from students wishing to attend university seems not to have declined significantly under the new system, but those applications are increasingly targeted, based at least on part on the institutional “league tables” published for each discipline.  In one way these rankings are good, in that they don’t pretend that all programs at any one institution are of equal merit, which is the case with most university ranking schemes.  The latter view is of course nonsense, since so much depends on the individual faculty members who have been hired, and that in turn depends on who happens to be available in a given year when an entry-level job opens up.  But I digress!  Although it is still much too early to assess the long-term impact of the British government’s decision, universities are already announcing the projected closures of some programs, where applications have fallen off, and are no longer admitting new students.  At East Anglia, for example, the Music program is among those being phased out; not due to any lack of quality, I hasten to add, but simply because it is not attracting sufficient students to keep it financially viable.  Any academic unit needs to have a certain “critical mass” of faculty members in order to offer a program of studies, and that in turn requires a certain level of continuing student enrollment, sufficient to generate the funds required for salaries and operating costs.

I shall predict with some confidence that we are heading in the same direction here.  Although no politician or university president in Ontario seems to be willing to admit it openly, the financial model for funding universities in this province is utterly broken.  The current model depends on achieving infinite growth, which is of course impossible, and that explains why all universities north of the border are looking long and hard at American models for engaging alumni and other donors, in an effort to find a third significant source of income.  Perhaps that will happen, but I am not holding my breath in the expectation that we can suddenly generate billion-dollar endowments, and of course endowments are earning peanuts these days in any case.  But I do think that some future provincial government might also look outside the province’s frontiers, and withdraw from funding certain subjects … perhaps those outside the so-called STEM disciplines.  And in that I am far from being alone.

But I may be alone in thinking that such a move would not necessarily be a disaster.  Yes, there would almost certainly be some initial turbulence, as we are seeing now in England, and some programs would almost certainly be closed.  But those programs and disciplines which weathered the storm would emerge much stronger, for the simple matter that they would be financially sustainable.  What holds us back most at the moment is the continual financial uncertainty, generated by not knowing from year to year how much funding the government will provide, and to what degree tuition fees will be regulated.  Universities in Ontario have two primary sources of income, which together generate about 95% of their operating budgets … but have control of neither.  If we knew that the government would be providing nothing by way of per capita grants, and at the same were allowed to set tuition fees at a level sufficient to cover our costs, we could do some long-term planning about faculty and staff numbers, and academic programs, without the necessity of having to grow our student body a few percentage points each and every year forever, which is what is happening now.  Of course, the alternative is for governments to spend substantially more money on post-secondary education … and while I would support that idea wholeheartedly, I shall confidently wager that it won’t happen anytime soon.  Governments simply can’t afford it; and even if the economy rebounds sometime soon, providing them with surplus tax revenue, it will inevitably be directed to health care, because that is what garners votes.

Am I discouraged?  Not a bit!  Universities have always struggled to survive, and probably always will.  And in undertaking that perilous journey, much greatness has been achieved.   But these are certainly interesting times!  Many of us will be watching very attentively the “summit” on post-secondary education being held this week in Québec, as that may provide some clues about what lies ahead on this side of he Atlantic.