The corporatist university

Now that the dust has settled a bit at Acadia, I offer a reading of recent events, writing simply as someone who has spent 25 years on faculty.

Part of the recent troubles stemmed from justifiable expectations set in the resolution of the previous strike, and did indeed involve issues of money as well as of equity. Faculty addressed many of these in their solid determination to make Acadia an academic institution that retains first class scholars.

It might be fair to say, however, that while Acadia has turned an important corner, the recognition of the contributions of part time faculty has still some way to go.

Programme by programme, Acadia provides the best undergraduate education in the country. Its strength rests in the quality of its faculty, including those in part time appointments, its small class sizes, and the extensive degree to which professors do their own grading.

The recent strike goes back to what is referred to as regime change. Regime change here does not mean simply a change in who is in power. It is much more about what principles and values define the institution, who flourishes and who is frustrated within it. John Ralston Saul was one of the first to identify, in The Unconscious Civilization, a shift in the nature of the Canadian university, from its traditional qualities and integrities to what he takes as its contemporary corporatism.

Shift from academic ethos

The corporatism of the university does not principally have to do with interests in the private sector seeking to control research by spending with strings attached. This can be a problem, but is a relatively easy one to avoid or re-dress. Instead, it refers to a shift from an academic ethos at the heart of the (traditional) university to a management ethos. Its indicators are various.

One is an increased desire amongst boards of governors to employ their control of financial resources to re-shape rather than simply support the purposes of the university, as these are given by the academy. A second indicator is a proliferation of managers and support staffs, with swelling budgets.

A significant portion of the high tuition that prohibits young citizens from pursuing a university education is arguably due to management largess, somewhat detached from the priorities of teaching and research faculty.

The need for more support services and management, moreover, is not determined by those in the classroom, whose work it is said to support. It is determined instead in venues increasingly composed of management and support staff, reinforcing their own values.

If truth be told, the support staff most relied upon by faculty and students are department secretaries, residence and tech personnel, registrar and admission folks, psychological counseling, and a few traditional administrators.

Managerial rather than academic

Moreover, the corporatized university, to realize its management ethos, increasingly hires those trained in marketing and the provision of services. Such hires, as they often drawn from those with a managerial ethos rather than an academic one, are not particularly well situated or prepared to understand the core academic mission of the university, even as they have increasing confidence that they best represent it. The mantras of the corporatist university are that one should never resist change, that what counts is innovation and effective branding, well before academic continuity and substance.

In corporatism the traditional relationship between student and faculty is dislodged, replaced by the idea that a university is fundamentally a business serving paying customers. In parallel, the provision of all sorts of “services” to students, not essential to the academic mission of universities—developing students’ intellectual skills as well as serving as a source and repository of knowledge—comes to displace traditional spending on the academic core.

Corporatism is more entrenched at some universities than others, but it remains a central challenge for all academics. It is a competitive world out there, as all universities seek to attract and retain the best students. The commitment of Acadia faculty to turn back such a regime change, initiated in the early 1990s, best explains, to my mind, what animated our recent troubles. And it gives one hope that much better days may lie ahead.