August 29, 1997

Whatsoever things are true and the brave new world of institutional measurement

It's the beginning of a new term -- the first for many new academic colleagues -- and I'm reflecting on what matters here, and on how we communicate that at the University of Alberta. I look across my desk to a bookshelf which is every year more crammed with comment on the contemporary university. Some of this is chilling; some of it, like parts of Bill Readings's The University in Ruins or Benjamin Barber's An Aristocracy of Everyone, lit by flashes of urgent and commanding analysis. Today I add the current Harper's Magazine to the shelf. School bells are ringing south of the border, too, and Harper's prints a pair of essays under the title, "The Uses of a Liberal Education." The two pieces are nicely counterpointed: one argues that the contemporary university is passionless, trivialized, corrupted by the dominant culture of consumerism; the other describes the radical power of knowledge, the ways in which learning changes lives, changes the world.

I don't think the contemporary university is passionless, certainly not this one. I see evidence to the contrary every day in the work of colleagues and students. It is our commitment to the transfiguring power of knowledge which brings us here and gives value to our teaching, research and scholarship. But in the last few years, university relations with government and the private sector have become much more complicated and pressured, and our communications have become dry, pointed at the bottom line. he provincial government appears to want to know us as a set of numbers largely unrelated to the human, intellectual, and scientific realities of our most important work. The federal government is providing new (and urgently necessary) research infrastructure money, but under terms so tightly controlled, so focused on the wealth-creating potential of applied science, that it may distort the shape of the university and the governance of university research. In various ways, we are under increasing pressure to show a profit, find corporate partners, perform research agendas established elsewhere.

What in these circumstances shall we wish to be at the millennium? How shall we wish to be seen? As U of A Inc.? As a set of spin-off companies listed on the Alberta Stock Exchange? As a net exporter of educational services? As a university whose research was distinguished chiefly by the number of dollars supporting it? I don't think so.

"This process of training, by which the intellect ... is disciplined for its own sake ... is called Liberal Education," wrote John Henry Cardinal Newman, in The Idea of a University. "And to set forth the right standard, and to train according to it, and to help forward all students toward it according to their various capacities, this I conceive to be the business of a University." That was a long time ago, yet, under vastly increased pressure to focus elsewhere, the university's core business is still the education of individuals and the creation of a broad intellectual culture across the whole range of human, natural, and applied sciences.

And our communications? I think it's time to move beyond the bottom line, the bar graph and the slogan. It's time to turn to language, to discussion, dialogue, debate. We must expand the idea of accountability to what is not countable: the quality of the experience our students have, their personal growth, the lives they lead thereafter and the social transfiguration they produce. We can't put a number on the influence the University has now and has had in the past on its students -- and yet that is the University's most important contribution. This spring, I met in Toronto with alumni of the Faculty of Arts. Among the 60 or 70 alumni were leaders in Canadian business, communications, and culture, including, for instance, the publisher of The Globe and Mail, the head at various stages of CBC Radio, CBC TV, the CBC's International Service; one of Canada's most successful novelists; one of our best known journalists, the pioneering editor of Chatelaine. That can't go in our government key performance indicator report, which has no category for genius and no place to register the transfiguring power of knowledge.

It's time for us to talk about general education, about education and democracy, about access to higher education. It's time to talk about the critical function of the University, about the responsibility we have, as "critical explorers," to raise pointed critical questions about social values, practices, and assumptions, including our own, to maintain this outstanding University as a lively centre of advanced social and scientific thought. At the beginning of this term, it makes sense to remember the intellectual courage of the motto of the University of Alberta -- Quecumque Vera -- which conveys both the excitement of the many ways in which we search for truth and the immeasurable importance of what we do here.

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