Have universities lost their way?

Robinson was involved in administration at the University of Regina for many years, serving as dean of arts, associate vicepresident academic, and university secretary. Since the early 19th century, “Critics, reformers and governments have claimed that the studies carried out in universities are outdated, irrelevant or in a word useless, and that they need to serve national needs more effectively and more directly to become in other words more useful,” notes Stefan Collini, a professor of intellectual history and English literature at Cambridge University, in a recent book What Are Universities For.

This has continued to the present day.

We are deluged with constant reminders that universities have to be relevant and serve the needs of economic growth. Universities are also criticized for employing academics who are seen to be, in the words of Collini, “little better than middle class welfare scroungers indulging their hobbies at public expense.”

First and foremost, there is utter confusion about the role of the university as a teaching institution and its role in understanding and extending scientific and cultural knowledge to future generations — broadly defined as research. Some see universities as glorified high schools, and judge their effectiveness on how satisfied students are in obtaining immediate employment upon graduation.

There is little understanding of the need to prepare students to be flexible and to have the background knowledge required to grapple with the needs of a world that will change beyond recognition in 20 years time.

Just consider where we were 20 years ago. The Internet was just coming into its own. Wikipedia, Facebook and Twitter were unknown. Who would have thought that terrorism arising from religious conviction, rather than communism would be such a major preoccupation for western governments today?

Students must have a secure grasp of the past so that we do not endlessly repeat yesterday’s mistakes. For example, I would suggest that a lack of understanding of our economic history which led to the 1930s debacle is responsible in part for our failure to manage the current economic crisis.

What then is the appropriate role for universities in this day and age?

There is an enormous responsibility on universities to increase through critical analysis our understanding of the past, so that we may creatively confront the future. In the sciences, pure knowledge-based research, which at the time appeared to have no practical usefulness, has proved time and time again to be the springboard for spectacular technological advances.

Useless becomes useful! What is required in our universities is an environment in which creativity and critical thinking flourish, not an environment subject to the whims of the latest government fad.

However, universities have been at fault in several ways. First in the desire to cater to the so-called “customer” — the student.

To ensure glowing student reviews on teaching performance, some university administrators and some faculty members have succumbed to the temptation to be far too tolerant of indifferent student performance. The result is that some students perform inadequately after graduation, to the despair of their employers.

University administrations have oversold the economic value of a degree, and in the scramble to increase enrolment, many students have been enticed into university programs for which they are totally unsuited. They and society would have been far better served had they trained in appropriate community college technology programs where there are considerable needs for their graduates, resulting in substantial financial rewards.

Meanwhile, the cost of university administration has ballooned. It used to be the case, more than 20 years ago, that a typical presidential salary was established by taking the top rung of the professorial salary and adding somewhere between $30,000 and $60,000.

Nowadays many presidential base salaries are in the region of $400,000 to more than $500,000 — a factor of three or four times the top rung of the professorial salary. Vice-presidential and other administrative salaries and positions have expanded in their wake. This issue has to be resolved before presidents have any credibility in demanding academic cutbacks to meet legitimate financial goals.

In his epic work The Idea of a University, Cardinal Newman said in quaint 19th century prose that a university education aims to give “a man a clear concise view of his own opinions and judgments, of truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them and a force in urging them. It prepares him to fill any post with credit and to master any subject with facility.”

Would that our universities do this without fear or favour. If they do they will not lose their way.