Two-Tier University System

Like most of her columns, Margaret's latest attack on the Canadian university system is a mishmash of prediction, prescription, and wishful thinking. Her prescription is that Canada move to a two-tier university system consisting of a few elite research-centred institutions and a majority of teaching centred institutions. Her prediction is that Canada will continue to have a one-tier system but with fewer tenured research faculty and more of the teaching load covered by untenured sessional instructors without PhD’s. And her wish is that, in any event, university faculty will get their comeuppance.

Her prediction is based both on (1) the pressure provincial governments are placing on universities to increase enrollments while reducing costs and (2) the public perception -- which Margaret is helping to engender -- that university faculty are overpaid and under-worked and that much of their research (especially in the humanities and social sciences) is of little or no value. Since Canadian universities have already been evolving in this way for a number of years, Margaret's prediction that they will continue to do so is neither particularly controversial nor interesting.

Her prescription that Canada move to a two-tier system does require some comment, however. She presents two separate arguments for this conclusion, neither of which are compelling. First, she claims that the principle job of the university and college system is to efficiently deliver mass undergraduate education to 30 or 40 per cent of the population,” and that the current research model that most universities adhere does this very inefficiently. And second, she argues that the benefits of much of the “marginal” research done on the current system are “remarkably obscure.” These arguments reflect a remarkable ignorance of both the nature and value of universities.

Contra Margaret, universities are not primarily teaching institutions, but rather are centres for the development and interchange of ideas. This, of course, includes undergraduate teaching, but it also involves a whole lot more. The teaching-centred institutions in Margaret's proposed two-tiered system would be universities in name only. What she is really proposing is a vastly reduced university system and a vastly increased college system in which most post-secondary education would occur. Moreover, the value of a university is not ultimately measured by the impact of the research (or teaching) carried on their upon the broader society in which it is located. Centres of the free and unfettered development and exchange of ideas are valuable in their own right. Some of the ideas developed in such an institutions do, of course, have a positive societal impact; others range from downright stupid to even dangerous. But the mere fact of their being places in which such ideas can be freely developed, explored, and exchanged is what gives universities their value.

Canadians may ultimately decide upon a reduced university system. Or they may decide to allow the trend of offloading undergraduate teaching onto sessional instructors to continue. Hell, we even decide might to fund our universities to the extent that all undergraduate teaching is performed by tenured or tenure-stream faculty (with small class sizes and in properly equipped classrooms -- a guy can dream, can't he?) But however we decide, our decision ought to be an informed one. Margaret's not helping