The Remaking of University: What Can We Do?

James L. TurkRyerson University

April 4, 2014

Role of the University

o Advancement of knowledgeo Preservation and dissemination of

knowledgeo Education of students

Made possible by:

o Academic freedomo Teachingo Researcho Intramuralo Extramural

o Collegial governance

Purpose of the University“The University of Toronto is dedicated to fostering an academic community in which the learning and scholarship of every member may flourish, with vigilant protection for individual human rights, and a resolute commitment to the principles of equal opportunity, equity and justice.

Purpose of the University“The University of Toronto is dedicated to fostering an academic community in which the learning and scholarship of every member may flourish, with vigilant protection for individual human rights, and a resolute commitment to the principles of equal opportunity, equity and justice.“Within the unique university context, the most crucial of all human rights are the rights of freedom of speech, academic freedom, and freedom of research. And we affirm that these rights are meaningless unless they entail the right to raise deeply disturbing questions and provocative challenges to the cherished beliefs of society at large and of the university itself.

Purpose of the University“The University of Toronto is dedicated to fostering an academic community in which the learning and scholarship of every member may flourish, with vigilant protection for individual human rights, and a resolute commitment to the principles of equal opportunity, equity and justice.

“It is this human right to radical, critical teaching and research with which the University has a duty above all to be concerned; for there is no one else, no other institution and no other office, in our modern liberal democracy, which is the custodian of this most precious and vulnerable right of the liberated human spirit.”http://www.utoronto.ca/about-uoft/mission-and-purpose.htm

“Within the unique university context, the most crucial of all human rights are the rights of freedom of speech, academic freedom, and freedom of research. And we affirm that these rights are meaningless unless they entail the right to raise deeply disturbing questions and provocative challenges to the cherished beliefs of society at large and of the university itself.

Customers

HR Policies

CEOs?

Thorsten Veblen, The Higher Learning in America.  New York: Sagamore Press, 1957 (originally published 1918)

“What is here said of the businesslike spirit of the latterday ‘educators’ is not to be taken as reflecting disparagingly on them or their endeavours. They respond to the call of the times as best they can…to substitute the pursuit of gain and expenditure in place of the pursuit of knowledge, as the focus of interest and the objective end in the modern intellectual life.” (p. 149)

ideological state apparatus is to focus research (both basic and applied) and to coordinate vocational-professional manpower training with labor and capital markets. This conflicts with the intellectuals’ own cultural or scientific intentions which rest on a traditional claim to autonomy, that is to collective self-management.

“…What radical scholars must therefore rediscover is not merely that intellectuals play a significant role in the reproduction of capitalism and the capitalist state, but that education has been and remains every bit as much a contested terrain as the shop floor, the party caucus and the halls of legislative assemblies.”

“The imperatives of the corporate ideal…are fundamentally mission directed. The role of an

Clyde Barrow, Universities and the Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of the American Higher Education, 1894-1928. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990

Bill Readings, The University in Ruins. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996

“…the modern university is a ruined institution. Those ruins must not be the object of a romantic nostalgia for a lost wholeness but the site of an attempt to transvalue the fact that the University no longer inhabits a continuous history of progress…Like the inhabitants of some Italian city, we can seek neither to rebuild the Renaissance city-state nor to destroy its remnants and install rationally planned tower-blocks; we can seek only to put its angularities and winding passages to new uses, learning from and enjoying the cognitive dissonances that enclosed piazzas and non-signifying campanile induce.”

Howard Woodhouse, Selling Out: Academic Freedom and the Corporate Market. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009

“Government underfunding continues to accompany growing corporatization. This pincer movement ensures that universities move ever faster to subordinate the pursuit of knowledge to the overriding market principle of monetary gain for stockholders. Universities compliant with this principle place at risk not only the freedom that makes the pursuit of knowledge possible but also the very process of understanding itself…Those of us who advance [this] must reaffirm the distinguishing features of the vocation of higher education that make possible the independent and critical search for

knowledge – academic freedom and university autonomy.”

University collaborations

#1

Big Oil Goes to CollegeAn Analysis of 10 Research Collaboration Contracts Between Leading Energy Companies and Major U.S. Universities

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/report/2010/10/14/8484/big-oil-goes-to-college/

University Corporate Partners Amount

Arizona State BP $5.2-million/2 years

UC, Berkeley BP $500-million/10 years

UC, Davis Chevron $25-million/5 years

Colorado Sch. of Mines Chevron $2.5-million/5years

Colorado; Colorado State; Colorado School of Mines

27 companies $6-million/5 years

Georgia Tech Chevron $12-million/5 years

Iowa State Chevron $22.5-million/5 years

Stanford ExxonMobil, GE, Toyota, Schlumberger

$225-million/3 years

Texas A&M Chevron $5.2-million/5 years

U Texas, Austin; Rice Baker Hughes, BP, Shell, Conoco Phillips, Total, Haliburton, Marathon, Occidental ,Petroleo Brasileiro, Schlumberger

$30-million/3 years

Big Oil Collaborations

Findings In 9 of the 10 agreements, the university failed to

retain majority academic control over the central governing body charged directing the university-industry alliance. 4 of the 10 alliances actually give the industry sponsors full governance control.

8 of the 10 agreements permit the corporate

sponsor or sponsors to fully control both the evaluation and selection of faculty research proposals in each new grant cycle.

None of the 10 agreements requires faculty

research proposals to be evaluated and awarded funding based on independent expert peer review.

Findings (continued)

8 of the 10 agreements fail to specify transparently, in advance, how faculty may apply for alliance funding, and what the specific evaluation and selection criteria will be.

9 of the 10 agreements call for no specific management of financial conflicts of interest related to the alliance and its research functions. None of these agreements, for example, specifies that committee members charged with evaluating and selecting faculty research proposals must be impartial, and may not award corporate funding to themselves.

Findings (continued)

9 of the 10 agreements affirm the university’s right to publish, but in many instances this contractual right is curtailed by potentially lengthy corporate delays. The National Institutes of Health generally recommends no more than a 60-day delay on academic research publication, which it deems adequate time for the corporate sponsor to file a provisional patent application and remove any sensitive proprietary information. None of the 10 agreements analyzed abide by this maximum-60-day federally recommended publication delay; most far exceed it.

The same in Canada?

Research Collaborations

University Partners

Consortium for Research and Innovation in Aerospace in Quebec

14 universities9 research centres

52 companies

Alberta Ingenuity Centre for In-Situ Energy

Calgary Shell, ConocoPhillipsNexen, Total, RepsolAlberta Innovates

Centre of Oil Sands Innovation

Alberta Imperial OilAlberta Innovates - Energy & Environment Solutions

Consortium for Heavy Oil Research by University Scientists

Calgary Nexen; ConocoPhillipsPetrovera Resources Husky Energy

Enbridge Centre for Corporate Sustainability

Calgary Enbridge

Mineral Deposit Research Unit

UBC Mining industry

Vancouver Prostate Centre

UBC PfizerBC Cancer Agency

Program Collaborations

University Partners

Partnership UOITDurham College

Ontario Power Generation

Munk School of Global Affairs

Toronto Peter & Melanie Munk Charitable FoundationGov’t of Ontario

Balsillie School of International Affairs

WaterlooWilfrid Laurier

CIGIOntario Gov’t

Partnership Toronto Pierre Lassonde -Goldcorp Inc.

Partnership Western Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP

How do the 12 measure up?1. Transparency?

The terms of 10 were secret.

2. Academic freedom protected?

7 had no specific protection for academic freedom.

3. Does the university retain complete control over all academic matters?

6 had no provision assuring the university retained control of all academic matters affecting their students and faculty. 

4. Disclosure of Conflicts of Interest?

Only 1 requires disclosure of institutional or individual conflicts of interest. 

5. Requirement that academic staff have no financial interest in the collaborating partner?’

Only 1 prohibited financial conflicts of interest

How do the 12 measure up?6. Right to publish?

5 protect faculty members right to publish; 5 do not; and for 2 it is not clear.  

7. Recruitment and evaluation of postdocs and faculty members protected from being influenced by their potential involvement in the collaborative project?

6 had not such protection.  

8. Mechanism for regular, publicly-available assessments of the effects and effectiveness of each agreement?

No agreement had that provision. 

9. Independent post-agreement evaluation plan?

Absent in 11 of 12 agreements.

For 7 research collaborations only10. Funding decisions based on peer review?

Only in 1 of 7 research collaborations  

11. Clear details about how faculty apply for funding and what evaluation and selection criteria will be used?

Only in 3 of 7 research collaborations  

12. Researchers assured access to all the data collected?

Only in 3 of 7 research collaborations  

 

University governance

#2

Thorsten Veblen, The Higher Learning in America.  New York: Sagamore Press, 1957 (originally published 1918)

Faculty of a well administered university are organized into “the many committees for the-shifting-of-sawdust…These committees being in effect, if not in intention, designed chiefly to keep the faculty talking while the bureaucratic machine goes on its way under the guidance of the executive and his personal counsellors and lieutenants.” (p. 186)

1918

“...the charges that one so often hears today, that universities are becoming so large, so complex, and so dependent upon public funds that scholars no longer form or even influence their own policy, that a new and rapidly growing class of administrators is assuming control, and that a gulf of misunderstanding and misapprehension is widening between the academic staff and the administrative personnel, with grave damage to the functioning of both.”

James Duff and Robert O. Berdahl, University Government in Canada, 1966, p. 3.

1966

“It was consistently suggested during our hearings that the control of the university had fallen into the hands of an administrative group of senior officials (the president, the vice-presidents, the deans) and that this group, in fact, ran the university without any genuine accountability.”

1993

Independent Study Group on University Governance, Governance and Accountability. Ottawa: CAUT, 1993.

What can academic staff& students do?

“At a certain point…we don’t have universities any more, but outlying branches of industry. Then all the things that industry turns to universities for – breadth of knowledge, far time horizons and independent voice – are lost."

More specifically, we can:

o Use collective bargaining creatively to ensure academic freedom & collegial governance

Collective Bargaining

academic freedom promotion and tenure complement intellectual propertydispute resolution - discipline selection of senior administrators appointments workload financial exigencyprogram redundancyregularization

What can we do?

o Use collective bargaining creatively to ensure academic freedom & collegial governance

o Defend labour rights & have a vision that goes beyond business unionism

o Use our academic freedomo Mobilize colleagues & students around these and other

issues, e.g., accessibility, equityo Build real alliances with students, alumni, broader

university community, other labour & civil society groupso Take these issues to the public

Our action or inaction will determine our future