I wrote the following in the wake of The Great Brain Robbery.  I don’t recall that it was ever published: maybe because newspapers have short attention spans.  My (commissioned) review of The Great Brain Robbery was never published either.  The reason given was not exactly convincing, naïve though I habitually am.  My reason for publishing this piece is given in one of the footnotes.

In a recent article, "Universities up against the ivy-covered wall ", Dave Todd found it "depressing" that some critics focus, not on underfinancing, but on  "the job universities are doing with the money they have". An odd view, surely, for a journalist to take? Administrators and faculty members might well prefer the focus on underfinancing; but taxpayers have every right to know what universities do.

The authors of a classic study of universities, The Academic. Marketplace, wrote of "a tradition of secrecy... and self-deception ..remarkable in a social group wedded to the forms of truth". Agreeing with that harsh judgement, I think journalists should examine carefully what happens inside universities.

Professors are not endeared to colleagues who make critical public statements; that is one reason why tenure is necessary. I am prepared to make such a statement because I believe, with another authority, that "academic patriotism... impels a clear-recognition and searching diagnosis of ailments". There has been too little recognition and diagnosis within the universities during the fifteen years I have taught in this province.  If it takes financial crisis to induce a careful look at universities, and remedial action where indicated, then financial crisis hasn't come a day too soon.

Privileges entail responsibilities. In universities two privileges are rightly valued.  These are autonomy (the right of a university to govern its affairs without government interference) and tenure (which is meant to safeguard academic freedom by protecting professors from arbitrary dismissal). I support autonomy and tenure, but the responsibilities they entail have too often been ignored.  Power has been too often exercised without responsibility. There has been too little accountability.

Among the areas in which autonomy has been abused are appointment, contract-renewal and tenure. One implication of autonomy is that a university has the right to appoint, re-appoint or give tenure to a faculty member if that person is best for the position, even if another person is apparently better qualified.  It can give tenure to a person who has only a B. A. degree, even though a Ph.D. is available. Clearly, universities should think hard when they do this kind of thing; and in practice good universities almost never do it.  Whenever someone is appointed, or re-appointed, when a person with higher qualifications is available, the probability of abuse is high. I have seen it occur often, and sometimes the likelihood of malice operating against the well qualified outsider has been obvious, indeed documentable.

As Malcolm McGregor said, in his Sun review of The Great Brain Robbery, democracy is alien to a university, but democracy is what we've got: not full participatory democracy, but the kind of democracy that can elect the under-qualified and exclude the qualified. In a recent Vancouver Magazine article my colleague John Mills wrote that an early Dean of Arts at SFU was elected to that position "because he was low on the totem pole, and we thought he would be one of us". There is reason to believe that more than one departmental chairman was elected on a similar principle: not senior, not especially well qualified, it wouldn't be in his interests to insist on high standards. Why did this happen? Because in the great expansion of the 1960s many were appointed as faculty members who were still graduate students elsewhere; why would they want tenure to depend upon rigorous standards which they couldn' t themselves be sure of meeting? With a largely underqualified electorate, it was predictable that irresponsible voting within personnel committees would be likely to ensure re-election to those committees. I have said in an SFU Faculty  Association meeting that  I have seen this happen; and that I am prepared to give details to any properly constituted committee of enquiry.

The results of this particular version of democracy have not been edifying. Here is an extreme but not isolated example. It was brought to the attention of a departmental tenure committee that an instructor had been failed out of an M. A. program after some eight years in that program (a good student should get an M. A. in two years). One would expect agreement that there was no case for renewal of contract; however only one person in a departmental committee of seven took that view. Nevertheless, the contract was terminated, on the advice of a higher university committee. But what happened next? A lectureship was awarded to the failed M. A., who continued to be responsible for courses. The intent of the higher committee was thereby frustrated. [Some two years later] after this situation was brought to the attention of the then Vice-President Academic, the special-lectureship arrangement ended. [NOTE 1] What happened then? The department involved, ever ingenious at looking after those it took to its bosom, admitted the failed M. A. as a student to its own graduate program, with the usual teaching assistantship. The M. A. degree was finally attained, after some fourteen years. Should public funds have been used over such a period of time for such a purpose? Should university students have been taught over such a period of time by a person so qualified?

The concept of autonomy allows for the possibility that such a situation might be justified. But who should decide? A departmental chairman, with only two or three years of experience as a university teacher, who has only a bachelor’s degree? A committee composed partly of inexperienced, underqualified, and untenured faculty members whose personal interests are best served by keeping standards low? A favourable decision made in such a case by persons, many of whom themselves lacked experience and the highest qualifications, is disquieting. When the same people sit in committee and recommend each other for tenure., one has doubts. When such persons, this time on a hiring committee, vote against a well-qualified candidate, there is similar cause for disquiet.  When, as members of another committee, they judge graduate students and applicants to the graduate program, one is again concerned.

The apparent favouritism described above is not unique. One could muster half a dozen examples from one department alone. [NOTE 2] That may partly answer Dave Todd's question, "Why is Canada the only advanced industrial democracy that, faced with calls for a more efficient education system, is also under pressure to deliberately make life more difficult and even uncomfortable for the professors?" (Unless England is no longer an advanced industrial-democracy, the question is inaccurately phrased:)

Dave Todd perhaps spoke better than he knew when he pointed to the University of California's recent twenty per cent budget increase. Not a  bad model, the University of California. California has profited from high technology; it has long been aware that good universities attract scientific and technical talent. Intelligent people want their children to attend good universities. Good universities make good appointments, and don't exercise undue sentimentality when considering professors for tenure. In British Columbia not merely tenure, but high rank and salary, have been given to people whose qualifications would have looked dubious in the California State College system, and would certainly not have kept them alive in the University of California's tenure competition, even supposing they would have been appointed initially. Meanwhile, fully qualified people (in some cases people whose qualifications and abilities would not look out of place in the best. universities in the world) have been condemned to unemployment, to non-academic: employment, or to the grossly exploitative jobs on the margins of the academic profession that have disgraced it for so long.

The plain truth is that a significant number of tenured faculty members have academic records markedly inferior to those of unemployed and underemployed Ph.D's. They have apparently seen no incongruity or cause for compunction in voting against the employment of persons better qualified than themselves; on several occasions they have successfully recommended graduate students to positions when fully-qualified people were available. I consider that a scandal.

It is facts like these (and they are demonstrable facts) which caused me, earlier this year, to argue that the Association of Canadian University Teachers of English should study the way in which hiring and related matters (like the awarding of tenure and the administration of graduate schools) have been carried on. It is intolerable that abuses of university autonomy and the privilege of tenure should be allowed to continue indefinitely. However, I am not unduly hopeful. As Bercuson and his co-authors say at the end of The Great Brain Robbery, there are too many vested interests in the present system to expect much reform from within it.

Note 1: two years or so later because I had taken 8 months of unpaid leave and, with 8 months accrued research leave added to it, went off to Oxford for 16 months in order to live in an academic atmosphere in which I could feel sane.   The Vice-President, Academic said that he had not connected the name with the person when he signed the employment form.

Note 2: not all from the early seventies.  This paper is not as outdated as one would wish it to be. Ways have been found since then of infiltrating some dubiously qualified persons into teaching positions.