The Canadian province of Ontario has some of Canada's, and the world's, most successful research universities, including the University of Toronto, Queen's University in Kingston, McMaster University, York University in Toronto, and the University of Western Ontario. But the provincial government has now been taken over by neoliberal yahoos, and this is their plan for destroying the universities: 60% of funding will be tied to "performance metrics" that don't measure performance in research or teaching, but probably do track the class status of the student body and the geographic location of the university in the province. Philosopher Rachel Barney (Toronto) has given an apt assessment on FB which she kindly gave permission to share:
Over the next three years up to 60% of Ontario govt funding to universities will be taken out of the traditional grant-per-student system and shifted into SMA's: Strategic Mandate Agreements, one for each institution. And those Agreements (which have been around for a while, but just as planning exercises with no real money or enforcement attached) will be organized around a list of ten 'performance metrics'.
Why is this terrible?
1. None of these 'metrics' actually measures how well we educate, because that would be hard. Instead they're a pig's breakfast of Stuff Govt Likes: unis will be assessed on things like our graduates' incomes (don't ask me how), partnerships with industry, experiential learning (a good in itself apparently, rather than something that could be done well or badly), and graduation rates (so don't flunk any more students, please -- and you'd better not admit any who might face financial or other obstacles and drop out).
2. So we are being incentivized to do a lot of really stupid stuff. And collecting all these garbage stats and formulating them in managerial-speak every year will obviously be a hugely expensive exercise, so that's yet more money pulled away from the classroom and set on fire. But that's far from the worst:
3. The real point of the metrics is to express, and to force us to express compliance with, an ideology -- with the implicit principle that the ONLY value of universities and colleges to Ontario is economic, consisting in our perceived short-term value to industry. That principle was not on the ballot last Fall, and of course most people voted against this government anyway, so we really have no reason to assume that it is endorsed by the ordinary folks of Ontario, and every reason to push back vigorously against it. But the very people who should be taking the lead in doing so, the people running our institutions, are enthusiastically on-side with this terrible plan. If anybody might have wanted to make an argument for the value of the humanities and liberal arts, knowledge as a public good, education as a part of citizenship etc. -- too bad, that's now all off the table, we don't do that here any more.
4. Doug Ford [BL note: the Ontario premier and college drop-out] has inflicted deep cuts on elementary schools, secondary schools, and libraries; but, so far, only smallish ones on colleges and universities. Why? Love of our distinctive contribution to the knowledge on which civilization...hahahaha sorry no I can't even finish my rhetorical question. No, it would be very naïve not to reckon that this new system is the battering ram being wheeled into place. This is, after all, a radical change: a plan to take *60%* away from the funding of our traditional system, which is transparent, evenhanded, student-based, and difficult to manipulate. That money will instead be placed in individualized envelopes with which, I think we will find, the provincial govt can do as it pleases. In the name of accountability, we will have moved to an opaque and unstable system with as yet unknowable scope for playing favourites, for imposing ideology, for reward and punishment disguised as business-as-usual. What do *you* expect Doug Ford to do with that opportunity?
And please don't kid yourself that provincial gov't funding is already so low (at U of T, down to about 22% of our operating funds) that our leaders won't feel compelled to bend their institutions into pretzels for it. They are doing so already.
I fear we will see more of this neoliberal foolishness in university systems subject to bureaucratic control. The irony is that it is precisely in places like the U.S. with elite private research universities where this is happening less: presumably because the private institutions wouldn't dream of adopting such an approach, which provides a good competitive model for the public institutions.
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