"Rewarding" the effects of cutbacks, competition and privatization

In February 1999, the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC) released "A Report on Public Expectations of Post-secondary Education in Canada." These "expectations" focus on six themes: quality; accessibility; mobility and portability; relevance and responsiveness; research and scholarship; and accountability. CMEC has established these goals as a representation of "public" expectations and it leaves each province and postsecondary institution to implement its own means to assess the extent of their achievement. It is doubtful, however, how broadly representative of public expectations the report actually is under closer scrutiny.

CMEC retains a rather restricted notion of "public." The report footnotes "the majority of those participating in the consultations had a direct interest in postsecondary education, [and] some broader public comment was received." Most clearly, though, students and instructors have played a minor role in formulation of these expectations. As for broad "public" comment, it has been limited to a rather select circle of elite decision-makers.

In the attempt to shift development priorities to a "knowledge-based" economy, CMEC has provided answers to two paradoxical questions:

1. How should postsecondary institutions respond to diversifying cultural demands while adapting to reduced government funding?
2. How should Canadians develop a national education strategy in light of provincial control of education?

In Canada, the last two decades are marked by an emerging dedication to the new mission in postsecondary institutions, especially universities. Underway are re-inscriptions of the meaning of teaching and research as well as the redistribution of value attached to each faculty, discipline, and practice. From the received view of the university ideal as "cultural transmission" and "social service" is now added "economic productivity."

In 1983, the Corporate-Higher Education Forum (CHEF) was created to harmonize the activities of the university with the market. An alliance of government, corporate and university leaders developed proposals for reforming postsecon-dary institutions. These elites recognized a competitive economic edge might be lost if universities did not join the world in the new mission.

CHEF understood the Canadian population as too self-satisfied about the quality of higher education and considered postsecondary employees as too entrenched to respond to top-down innovation. The Mulroney government implemented the Prosperity Initiative and sympathetic provincial governments responded in kind. These initiatives shook the public out of its complacency and mobilized support within the higher education community. CMEC shared CHEF's orientation.

The alliance for profit making has been actively working to develop academic and industrial linkages (e.g. U of A's Industry Liaison Office) and to introduce surveillance practices to monitor change from a distance. CMEC promotes, prescribes, and publishes assessments of these transformations. It recommends the use of performance indicators to evaluate and reinforce the effects of institutional cuts, competition and privatization.

First, CHEF called for funding cuts to destabilize the financing of universities and induce restructuring and privatization. Universities sought alternative sources to funds by increasing enrolments and hiking tuition fees, and courted the corporate sector in the form of partnerships, endowments and contracting out. Universities also sought increased savings through downsizing and mergers. Restructuring peaked in the 1990s.

Third, CHEF promoted a new synergy between the service university model and privatization. Large corporations were to provide universities with capital or operating grants in exchange for influence over the direction of research and exclusive licenses on patentable discoveries.

The new structures for funding and evaluating research consequently transformed the internal reorganization of universities and realigned them with other institutions. These networks of excellence have "reinvented themselves," attempting to create smoother school-to-work transitions and enhance postsecondary-corporate linkages. CMEC's February 1998 report promotes monitoring of the profit-generating and cost-saving responses to cutbacks, competition and privatization as a public expectation.

What the report has proposed is one answer to doing more with less and resolving federal-provincial squabbles. However, the implementation of CMEC's expectations owes more to the decisions of CHEF than to the Canadian public or to students and instructors, who are the objects- not agents-of this proposed monitoring.

Canada's universities are alone in their commitment to the third mission. Competitors for profitable knowledge have initiated a variety of strategies to link education and business. New political imperatives and economic compulsions are redefining the nature of the university. But there are alternatives.

In 1968 German philosopher, Jurgen Habermas, discussed democracy and higher education and identified two competing tendencies at work: "Either increasing productivity is the sole basis of reform that smoothly integrates the depoliticized university into the system of social labor and at the same time inconspicuously cuts its ties to the political, public realm. Or the university asserts itself within the democratic system."

While he sought the latter, he would be disappointed that the former is almost already here.