In many ways, the development of Canada’s universities over the past century has been nothing short of a miracle. It is not simply a matter of quantity ”” the expan- sion of existing and new institutions to serve the much larger proportion of the Canadian population that needed advanced education if Canada was to develop as a modern economy. More importantly, it is a matter of quality. In this context, Canada’s universities have in fact matured into major and independent centres of both research and teach- ing, centres that in many cases can and do successfully com- pete on a global scale, a necessary condition for Canada to be able to prosper in an economy in which knowledge is an increasingly important factor of production.
Some Canadians continue, however, to worry about their universities, which they see in some sense as victims of their own success. Having responded ”” perhaps all too quickly and all too well ”” to the demands of the marketplace, these institutions are now filled with students more focused on the vocational and financial prospects of their graduation than with the larger, more civilizing mission of higher education. I believe this this concern is legitimate. Indeed, I am convinced this is the case, not only for many students, but also for many faculty whose desire and apparent capacity to understand much about higher education outside of their own particular specialties seems very limited indeed.
This phenomenon is not, after all, difficult to under- stand. We should not fool ourselves about the modern university. One of its social functions is that it acts as a kind of social mobility ladder, a place through which men and women have to go to reach society’s better paying jobs, sometimes irrespective of the learning that actually took place within the university itself. In this context, in which both university people and the broader community not only allow but also encourage an understanding of the university as a kind of vocational sieve, we should not be surprised that students understand the enterprise appropriately. They are clever, they are interesting, and they respond to the real rather than the rhetorical framework that we have ”” conscious- ly or unconsciously ”” set up.
I also have other worries. I believe, for example, that we must learn to define the university not as a community of scholars in which the faculty are simply the more sophisti- cated learners, but as a community of scholarship. I make this distinction because both the faculty and the stu- dents are so dependent, in terms of both people and materiel, on the enormous infrastructure that is required to enable them to do their best work. The staff assistants, the maintenance people, the technicians, the library and other learning resources, the heat and the air condi- tioning, the laboratories ”” all are cen- tral to our future. This infrastructure and, more importantly, these people, are not normally either appreciated or celebrated, but they must be if we are going to realize those new and widened understandings that are the objectives of the entire undertaking.
It is, of course, crucial to remind ourselves about the objec- tives of the entire undertaking. In my mind, I have held on to three ideas as informing my understand- ing of universities. First, I am com- mitted to the notion that the purpose of a university is to change human beings. If, therefore, we can- not say that every staff member, every faculty member and every stu- dent is a changed human being because they have experienced the university, then the university has failed in some significant way. Second, this change is not just any change but a change that makes every faculty member, student and support person intellectually and morally more autonomous than they previously were. Third, it should be the objective of universities that their members ”” faculty, students and staff ”” not think of themselves simply as faculty and/or staff and/or as future workers, but rather as citi- zens. It is, after all, as changed citi- zens that we will serve the social purposes for which our university institutions are established and sus- tained in the first place.
What will sustain the universities over time will be the knowledge and the belief that they are engaged in changing human beings, changed in the direction of greater intellectual and moral autonomy and changed in the name of their present and future function of citizens capable of protect- ing and nurturing the democratic civil society in which we, as Canadians, are all privileged to live.
We are, however, right to continue to worry. We should worry about the relative collapse of public, (i.e. govern- ment) support for the core funding of the university. In recent years, we have had massive new government (primari- ly federal) support programs for Canada’s universities. Every federal budget in recent years has brought hun- dreds of millions of dollars for university institutions. Each of these programs is, however, care- fully targeted to particular and very current govern- ment priorities rather than to the longer-term require- ments, not only of the uni- versities in particular, but also of civil and civilized society more generally.
If, however, Canada is really to launch itself into a secure and reward- ing future, Canadians and Canadian universities will have to find ways to get over our exclusive focus on science, medicine and engineering in order to make room for the arts, the humani- ties and the social sciences. To achieve a more balanced outcome, universities cannot rely on government alone. Thus, I would suggest that if the uni- versity’s core values and appropriate independence are to be sustained, the partnership that supports higher edu- cation will have to change in the direc- tion of greater participation both by the private sector and students and by their families.
We should also worry that all too often the university can be an environ- ment that turns skepticism into cynicism. Skepticism, a questioning attitude toward almost everything, is exactly what should be encouraged; cynicism, the sense that no one can be trusted, that no progress can take place, is often what results. But this attitude ”” how- ever justified in any one particular case ”” is a kind of long-term self-indulgence that universities can ill afford.
We should also worry about the cult of relevance, which is that the only reason for doing something is because it seems to be immediately useful to something else. In other words, we should worry that we far too easily and far too frequently trans- late utility into market value. It is as if we actually knew or actually know, for example, what will be useful in the future. All of our experience, however, tells us that we did not and we do not. Finally, we should worry about something that might be called the herd instinct, an all-too-human instinct to follow the crowd. Within a university context, within an institu- tion dedicated to the expansion of understanding, this can be a truly fatal disease. The herd instinct leads, of course, to overgrazing and to our being less alive than we need to be to other ways of thinking about our work, other ways in which we might respond to new questions, other ways in which we might open up to each other’s tal- ents, and other ways in which to avoid the overspecialization that herd instincts inevitably engender.
Should we worry about Canada’s universities? Yes, we should worry, but not because of the failures of these institutions. We should worry because in the context of their very obvious success, Canadians will blind them- selves to the very real challenges that lie just ahead, challenges that must be faced if our universities are to become important nodes of those marvelous new networks that are, in the new knowledge economy, developing all around us.
