Tag: HESA

  • Late 2024 Book Reviews | HESA

    Late 2024 Book Reviews | HESA

    Morning all. You know it’s getting towards XMAS when I start writing about the higher education books I’ve read recently. So, yes, those are Christmas bells ringing you can hear as you open this email and perusing my takes on the stuff I’ve read since Canada Day (I’ve already posted my January-June takes). Hopefully you can find a stocking stuffer or two in here for your own higher education nerd.

    To start with the non-higher ed stuff. On the fiction side, I’m not having a great year. I think my favourite in the past six months have been Reputations by Juan Gabriel Vasquez (I’m a huge Vazquez fan, his The Shape of The Ruins might be my favourite Latin American novel of all time). I’ll throw in a Japanese novel, too. Not Murakami’s new The City and Its Uncertain Walls (which was better than his previous novel Killing Commendatore, but not much), but rather Asako Yuzuki’s Butter; a Novel of Food and Murder.

    On the non-fiction side, conflict of interest rules forbid me from giving too much praise to Gerald Friesen’s The Honourable John Norquay: Indigenous Premier, Canadian Statesman, a timely book on Canada’s first Métis head of government, but you should read it anyway. My favourite from the past few months was The Soviet Sixties by Robert Hornsby, which is about that regime’s one decent decade and is quite excellent. I also enjoyed Wolfgang Münchau’sKaput: the End of the German Miracle, which suggests that the real historical anomaly was Germany’s accidental “good” decade of 2005-2015, not the train wreck of 2016-onwards (and the whole time all I could think about was everyone in Canada insisting that Canada could be just like Germany if only we did more apprenticeships…if you know anyone who still things like that, this book is a good antidote).

    As for my higher education books: you’ve probably noticed my increasing tendency to turn books I have read recently into podcasts (subscribe to our YouTube channel! Never miss an episode!). Our episode about Mary C. Wright’s Centers of Teaching and Learning: the New Landscape in Higher Education ended up being our most-watched of the fall. Joseph Wycoff’s Outsourcing Student Engagement: the History of Institutional Research and the Future of Higher Education is a kind of quirky book, but is an excellent history of the most specific of higher education occupations, and the weird way in which it pre-surrendered to academic bullying to keep itself from being perceived as an alternative source of authority on academia. And finally there was Global Mega-Science by David Baker and Justin Powell which is an intriguing theory about the way that the massification of education has been a massive cross-subsidy to science.

    In the same vein, there are another two books that I don’t feel I can tell you much about because I will be speaking to the authors on the podcast in the next few weeks. There was Maya Wind’s Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom, which lays out the case for sanctions on Israeli universities. And there was The Governance of European Higher Education by Michael Shattock, Aniko Horvath, and Jürgen Enders. It’s one of a series from Shattock (who has also authored tomes on governance in British universities and on international trends in university governance), and it’s an excellent precis of how European universities in their three broad forms (Anglophone, Germanic, and Napoleonic) have moved in the last 40 years or so. Stay tuned.

    Two other fairly ancient books I have covered in the blog already were The Blight on the Ivy by Dr & Mrs. (sic) Robert Gordon (a scream, but not always of the good kind) and The University, Society and Government, which was the report of the Commission on Relations Between Universities and Governments in 1970, which for the era presented an amazingly decentralist vision of Canada (I wonder, after decades of provincial indifference to postsecondary education regulation, what the authors would say now about the prospect for provincial leadership in science and research?)

    When in Paris, I picked up a couple of books on French higher education, including Autopsie de l’Université: un regard sur l’enseignement universitaire et son évolution by Stéphane Louryan, which portrays the university (not entirely coherently) as being poised between the modern evils of “managerialism” and “wokeism” and Reconstruire l’Université by Louis Vogel, which is a long kvetch about the state of French universities and (at a very high level of abstraction) why they should be more Anglo-Saxon. A trip to the Architecture Museum in Montreal netted me a very slender book of essays by and about Arthur Erickson (architect of record for both Simon Fraser and Lethbridge) called Arthur Erickson on Learning Systems, which is mostly a bunch of ideas around how university architecture can influence the organization of knowledge at universities. It’s mostly hopium and reads a lot like some of the stuff Buckminster Fuller was writing at the time, but at least it’s interesting hopium.      

    Four the better books I read were Follow the Money: Funding Research in a Large Academic Health Center by Henry Bourne and Eric Vermillion; The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India by Ajantha Subramanian: Burton Clark’s 1970 book, The Distinctive College: Antioch, Reed and Swarthmore; and David Staley’s Alternative Universities: Speculative Design for Innovation in Higher Education. The first is a detailed look at how the University of California, San Francisco actually works financially (and in general a useful handbook to understand the way America funds research, in the same vein as Paula Stephan’s How Economics Shapes Science. Subramanian’s book is good on how educational attainment “merit-washes” family wealth (and should be read by anyone who is under the deeply mistaken impression that meritocracy is a particular symptom of neo-liberal late capitalism). Clark’s book is an interesting examination of the “sagas” of Antioch, Reed and Swarthmore Colleges and it’s worth reading not just because they are interesting case studies in an of themselves, but for its excellent understanding of how university cultures develop over time. Staley’s book is bog-standard futurism (a bunch of ideas for future institutional forms that are not even vaguely examined in terms of the likelihood that they would ever find public or private funding), but it’s interesting and thought-provoking bog-standard futurism.

    I also consumed HBCU: The Power of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, by Marybeth Gasman and Levon Esters, which managed to turn an interesting subject into something that really was kind of boring, and also Linda Tuhiwa Smith’s Decolonizing Methodology: Research and Indigenous Peoples, which I think should be more widely read not because it is a page-turner or anything, but rather to debunk certain ideas about what “decolonization” in academia means (it’s half about putting research at the service of indigenous peoples, which should be utterly incontestable, but the other half has an awful lot of French post-structuralism in it).

    A couple of other single-college histories to mention are The University of Winnipeg: A History of the Founding Colleges by A.G. Bedford and Higher Education on the Brink: Re-imagining Strategic Enrolment Management in Colleges and Universities. I know, the latter doesn’t sound like it’s an institutional story, but it’s really just the author’s experience running Pittsburgh Technical College, written in universalist language. The former is pretty stultifying, with almost as much space given up to intra-mural sports as it is with actual intellectual, and its account of the Crowe Affair, (one of the huge academic freedom cases of the 1950s is, shall we say, highly tendentious, but, well, if you want to understand about how the politics of institutional federalism and the merger of the Methodist and Presbyterian churches affected higher education in Winnipeg  (which I recognize is a fairly specific demographic) then this is your book.

    Finally, I read a load of books for a series of blogs on the history of Quebec universities I’ll be publishing early next year. There was l’Université en réseau. Les 25 ans de l’Universiteé du Quebec by LuciaFeretti (obviously this one’s a little old by now but hey! Open access!); La naissance de l’UQAM: Témoignanges, acteurs et contextes (also open access, I really like Presses de l’université du Québec) by Denise Bertrand, Robert Comeauand Pierre-Yves Paradis. Histoire de l’Université de Sherbrooke 1954-2004 by Denis Goulet tells the story of one of Canada’s more under-rated (and misunderstood) institutions. I also started (but haven’t yet completed) Jean Hamelin’s Histoire de l’Université Laval: les péripéties d’une idée, which frankly feels pretty dated, and the brand-spanking new Concordia at 50: A Collective History, edited by Monika Kin Gangon and Brandon Webb, which is more of a community history than an institutional one, an approach which has its pluses and minuses.

    But the very best higher education book I read this year was L’université de Montréal: une histoire urbaine et internationale by Daniel Poitras and Micheline Cambron. I know institutional histories aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but this book is genius. It’s not an institutional history so much as it is the political history of one of Canada’s most important community institutions as well as an intellectual history of the city of Montreal as well as a history of an evolving community of scholars (it might be the most “international” history of any Canadian institution ever written). It’s massive, beautifully illustrated, and will make you re-think what institutional histories can be.

    It’s absolutely the book of the year. Honorable mention to the novel How I Won a Nobel Prize by Julius Taranto.

    Happy holiday reading.

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  • Money and Vibes | HESA

    Money and Vibes | HESA

    As I mentioned yesterday, I recently spent some time at the International Association of Universities’ (IAU) annual meeting in Tokyo earlier this month. It’s tough to organize a meaningful international meeting about what you might call the “hard” issues in university management (resources, budget allocations, management styles) because these vary so much from one part of the world to another, and so the program tends to be taken up with more universalist themes like “values.” 

    The interesting thing about values was the divide in the room(s) about how insecure everyone felt about them. The white folks in the room spoke a lot about “challenging times,” which was mostly code for “holy crap, not Trump again, won’t we ever get out of this authoritarian populist nightmare?” But interestingly, the Africans in particular were not really interested in this discussion. They deal with strong-arming governments nearly all the time, and so there was a slight edge of “wake up, times are always challenging” to some of their interventions. 

    I’ll spare you the blow-by-blow, but something occurred to me as I listened to the various sessions: “vibes” are really the way that universities keep score of their successes, collectively at any rate. Sure, it’s nice that governments give them money—and they are bloody expensive to run—but what really matters is whether they are loved and respected. 

    For an empiricist like me, this is really annoying. I can measure investments and can compare them from one university or one country to another. But vibes? Very difficult to measure. Hard even to come up with a definition that makes sense across countries: in Canada we do measure how much the public “trusts” universities, but in other countries the vibes are much more directly about their ability to accept new students, or whether they are helping the country advance economically.

    But what the hell? Let’s give it a try!

    Below is a 2×2 (it’s not social science unless there is a 2×2!) that shows change in both total financial resources and vibes over the past five years in various countries. Data for the money axis is from my own records and analysis (you can see some of it back here from the talk I gave in Helsinki a couple of months ago), while data on the vibes axis is totally made up, based on my own observations. I’d be happy to discuss a better way to operationalize and measure this axis, but for the moment let’s just say this attempt to visualize how universities are faring is illustrative rather than in any way definitive and move on to the exercise itself

    (If you’d like to argue for a specific source of information for various countries, or just argue my choice of placement of a particular country on the vibes scale, get in touch!)

    What you can see plainly from Figure 1 is that higher education systems occupy one of three quadrants. There’s the one where both money and vibes are changing for the better (Turkey, India), one where money is going up but vibes are going down (the USA), and places where both money and vibes are headed in the wrong direction (the UK). 

    What we don’t see, really, are any countries in the top left quadrant where vibes are going up but money is going down. And I think what that tells you is that good vibes are not absolutely required in order for universities to receive new money, but they make it a whole heck of a lot easier. Which is of course why university Presidents are so concerned with public opinion.

    Anyways, this is all pretty theoretical. But I think it points to the possibility that perhaps measuring public sentiment about universities in consistent ways across countries might yield some interesting insights into the determinants of public funding. And in any event, if vibes are the way that universities measure their own success, shouldn’t we try to measure that in the same way we measure institutional finances?

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  • From Jazz to Symphony | HESA

    From Jazz to Symphony | HESA

    I spent all last week in Asia, at events put on by the International Association of Universities (IAU) in Tokyo and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Jakarta. As usual, these meetings were interesting for me not so much because I can discover secrets of “how they do things better elsewhere” (they don’t, by and large, we’re all screwed for roughly the same reasons, which is that the public does not want to pay for the kind of institutions that academics want to work in), but simply because they help me get a wider take on the direction that global academia is heading.

    And here’s the thing: having sat through five days of meetings, I am more convinced than ever that universities are, globally, caught in a conflict of their basic institutional logics. And also, that for some reason, no one wants to talk about this openly even though it is self-evidently a pretty big deal. Let me explain.

    Over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, at different paces in different parts of the world, universities went from being purely institutions of instruction to institutions that also engaged in advanced research. In the United States, where this process went the furthest, the fastest, it was shaped substantially by one man: Vannevar Bush, President of MIT and special scientific advisor to President Roosevelt during WWII. Bush was appropriately excited by the strides made by American science during the war, and wanted the party to continue after the war was over only with one difference: instead of giving scientists untold billions and placing them under military control as was the case for the Manhattan Project, Bush thought the correct path forward was for the government to give scientists untold billions and then leave them alone to make their own decisions about how the money should be spent. That’s not quite how things panned out, but there is no question that the system of curiosity-driven research that emerged gave an awful lot of power to individual researchers and left universities as mere intermediaries for funding. Or, as a colleague sometimes puts it, with respect to research missions, universities are simply holding companies for the research agendas of individual professors.

    And let’s face it, this worked well for many decades. The scientific output of universities working under this model has been amazing (see my interview with David Baker on global science from a few weeks ago). And it didn’t require universities to take on a particularly dirigiste role with respect to the faculty. In some ways, quite the opposite. It was during this period after all that a professor challenged then-Columbia President Eisenhower with the immortal words: “we faculty are not employees of the university…we are the university.” So as far as anyone could tell, the public could just dump money on scholars working in hubs and good things would happen.

    Somewhere over the past few decades, though, the mission of universities changed. Instead of being asked to provide research, they were asked to promote local economic growth, or provide solutions to “grand challenges” or sustainable development goals. And these were challenges that universities took on—gladly for the most part. “Look!” they said to themselves, “Society wants our knowledge/help/advice, we get to show how useful we are, and then people will love us and give us even more money.” And trust me, this is happening All. Over. The. World. Oh sure, the details vary a bit by place in terms of whether the push is more on institutions to push local economic growth or to help deliver social progress, and the extent to which this obligation is imposed on institutions and to what extent they embrace it on their own…but the trend is universal, unmistakable. 

    Except (how can I put this?) I am fairly sure that the lessons institutions learned with respect to growing research outputs do not translate well into these new missions. Research is something that can be done within academia; these new tasks require partnerships and relationships. Things which institutions are a lot more capable of delivering reliably than individual professors, whose commitment to particular endeavors may be more transitory, shaped as they often are by the availability of funding streams, changing research interests, the occasional switch of institutions, etc.

    It has taken universities awhile to work this out. The initial assumption that universities could take on all these missions could be met in much the same way that the research mission was: just assemble a lot of smart people in one place, and wonderfully imaginative solutions will naturally emerge. No central coordination necessary, and great universities could continue working as they had always done: like a great jazz band, where the anarchy is the point.

    But if these new missions actually imply a need for more durable structures to bring stability to partnerships and relationships, then a jazz band approach is probably not such a hot idea. If these missions require institutions to be able to act corporately, strategically, then jazz doesn’t cut it anymore. Neither does Big Band. You need something closer to a symphony orchestra. And boy, the implication of that change is significant. The locus of control and responsibility shifts upwards from professors to the larger institution. Professors, increasingly, would need to be treated as if they are second cello—that is, as parts of a larger musical enterprise—instead of as Thelonius Monk or John Coltrane. It would be a fundamental re-think of what it means to be an academic.

    There you have it: an old version of a university in which great things happen just because you put a bunch of smart people in close proximity to one another, and another which requires substantially more organization and (in a Weberian sense) bureaucracy. And it’s not that universities are being asked to choose—they aren’t. It’s worse than that: because these new missions are meant to be in addition to the older ones of teaching and research, universities are being asked to be both of these things at the same time. And that’s a recipe not only for unhappiness, but also for incoherence. Universities are simply becoming less effective as their missions multiply. 

    None of this has escaped the notice of governments. They were mostly quite enthusiastic about the idea of universities as community resources, places that in effect apply brain power on-demand to various types of social and economic problems and are getting frustrated that jazz-based universities can’t deliver. Despite promises to the contrary, old-style universities simply aren’t set up to deliver the promised results, leaving an expectations gap that is souring relations with that subset of governments that don’t view higher education as the enemy in the first place.

    And this, in turn, is contributing to a widespread recession in vibes around universities: simply put, they are not liked and admired the way they used to be. But more on that tomorrow.

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