Ten Problems with Canadian Universities

The decisions of students, professors, and administrators have resulted in deep-seated flaws in the political, economic, and ideological structure of our schools.

All human institutions are flawed, and universities are no exception. Yet the nature and causes of these flaws can change radically from decade to decade, as social and technological shifts eliminate some problems while creating others. Racism may have been rampant at universities in the 1950s, but in 2011 one is far more likely to come across a LAN party than a Klan party on campus.

Over the last two decades, I’ve spent no little time reading and thinking about the problems that plague our houses of higher learning. I’ve concluded that these problems come from all the principal players in the drama of academic life – students, professors, and administrators. All are the result of free human decisions, but all are deeply embedded in the political, economic, and ideological structure of our schools. Here are 10 of them:

Underfunding:This is the easy one. The Ontario provincial government simply doesn’t spend enough on higher education, allowing some classes at the bigger schools to balloon to Roman Coliseum-like proportions, with the lions being replaced by mobs of TAs as professors lecture, Emperor-like (but sans toga), to the thronging masses of undergraduates. Underfunding also increases the number of part-time faculty members, who are less able to defend their jobs than tenured professors and thus fed to the lions of cutbacks when administrators see fit.

Student Disengagement: All professors have had this experience in larger lectures. You look at down at your notes, and then you look up at the last row or two of seats in the hall. They’re occupied by a series of students reading the newspaper, texting on their cellphones, or glued to the screens of their laptops as they surf the web or message their friends. They are the drifters, the disengaged, lost souls who aren’t interested in the content of your class, but took it because they “had to” or it “fit their schedule.” Commentators estimate that as many as 30 per cent of students are fully disengaged from their studies, coming to class only in the direst of circumstances. Yet all those bums in seats count when calculating government funding, so administrators say, “Keep ’em comin’!” Even if they have no idea why they’re there.

Tenure: Tenure is a great idea in theory, like freedom, equality, and an open bar. In simple terms, tenure is meant to protect brave warriors for truth against the winds of political change and the narrow-minded prejudices of university officials. Yet this story is largely a myth, for two reasons. First, because the very process of working one’s way through grad school, getting teaching experience, then being hired for a tenure-track job actually weeds out the very brave warriors for truth that tenure is supposed to protect, favouring prudent defenders of local hegemonies or extreme specialists who have little to say outside their narrow fields of study. Second, all insiders know that tenured professors often slow down their output of all forms of publication, controversial or not. We can’t blame professors for wanting tenure. We can blame many of them for not using it to further the public good.