Academic quality in jeopardy

Ontario universities threatened by chronic underfunding and the struggle to define quality

Ontario universities still lack the funds to recruit and support top faculty
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Ontario universities still lack the funds to recruit and support top faculty

That budget cuts in the University represent a major threat to academic quality is a truth so obvious it barely needs to be stated. Yet it has been stated, frequently during the past year, both on the Queen’s campus and at universities across Ontario. In my experience, furthermore, such declarations usually betray a high level of frustration. Is it not entirely reasonable, after all, to expect that when faced with an assertion so self-evidently true, governments and university administrations would respond by increasing the level of funding to programs and to institutions?

What is perfectly reasonable is, of course, sometimes impossible, and in our present situation at Queen’s, the obvious cause is a lack of resources.

Important though it is to address and mitigate the resulting threat to academic quality on our own campus, it is also crucial to take note of what is happening across this province.

With one or two notable exceptions—usually universities which have chosen to increase dramatically their undergraduate enrollment—most of the eighteen degree-granting institutions in Ontario find themselves at present having to deal with significant deficits and the subsequent expenditure reductions required to deliver a balanced budget. In many places—such as Trent University, recently in the news in this regard—programs have been discontinued and hitherto distinguished academic reputations are coming under real threat. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the quality of higher education in Ontario is in jeopardy, notwithstanding the significant and appreciated investments made by the government over the last several years. The fact remains that government operating grants per student remain very low compared to the other provinces ($6,052 in Ontario compared with a Canadian average of $8,500).

This makes us less nationally competitive than we should be in recruiting top faculty, for example. If we do compete successfully, the relative cost to our institutions is greater than those in other provinces, and gains made through hiring are offset by our declining ability to support those scholars in both the classroom and the laboratory.

Ironically in this context, the word “quality” has taken on a life of its own at the level of government discourse. Last year the province’s Postsecondary Education Quality Assessment Board hosted in Toronto a conference of the International Network of Quality Assurance Agencies in Higher Education, a gathering which gave us a window on our possible future: one in which quality assurance is not only institutionalized and bureaucratized, but also shifted from the universities’ control to the hands of the government. The recently established Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario is a third-party organization and is not yet overly intrusive but it is concerned with performance measures with the potential for system-wide application.

One risk of such institutionalization is that the very definition of quality can become peculiarly problematic; capitalized as part of a quality assurance regime, the word appears to hold an unambiguous and easily quantified meaning.

But what is quality? A moment’s serious thought reveals the complexity of the idea, yet in practice, we may have to face the possibility that quality is what the relevant government agency says it is.

It is appalling to consider this prospect, but important to do so nevertheless. Take note of the point made at the start of this commentary: that the maintenance of “quality,” as professors, department heads, deans and vice-principals (academic) would want to define it, is in very large measure dependent on government grants. Then consider that point in relation to the increasing appetite, on the part of governments and Quality Assurance agencies, to control the meaning of the word. Where higher education is seriously underfunded, the institutionalization of “quality” and the introduction of elaborate accountability regimes will almost certainly lead to an impoverishment of the word and its meaning, and from the point of view of the citizens of this province, it will mask the real decline in the quality of our institutions.

We have to keep saying that insufficient budgets produce programs of insufficient quality, and we must continue to do so despite the frustration.

Patrick Deane is Queen’s vice-principal (academic)

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