I am leaving very soon on a research trip, so there will be a hiatus in this series.  Likely future topics:

Footnote to Finley's Ethics 01; On the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates: or, are perpetual administrators a good thing?  Should our cv's be protected by privacy laws?

In view of recent correspondence in the newspapers about the apparent lack of prestige of Canadian universities and whether the “Canadian first” policy should be dropped in hiring, the following two items, written long ago, still have their relevance. First, “Would the Universities have defended Socrates?” This was written in response to an attack,  by Philip Resnick of UBC, on The Great Brain Robbery.  Next, a review of The Great Brain Robbery, which was commissioned, promptly written but never published, for reasons perhaps best left unguessed at.

BUT WOULD THE UNIVERSITIES HAVE DEFENDED SOCRATES?

Philip Resnick's defence of the universities ("But was Plato cost-effective?), Sun, December 27) puts the case for universities as independent centres of free enquiry and critical thinking, but largely ignores the question of how well they have in practice governed themselves. He says that "universities are not above criticism, nor are university faculties immune from some of the weaknesses that characterize any large-scale organization". On the other hand he dismisses The Great Brain Robbery as an "insult" and "attack" upon university faculty members, and as laying all the faults of university size and scale and governance at their doorstep. This seems to me a fairly typical academic ploy: to argue in the abstract for free enquiry and critical thinking, while condemning actual attempts to enquire into and think about the universities themselves, especially when carried on in publications that taxpayers might hear about and even read. I am not the first to notice this tendency; 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", and Sir Walter Moberley , in The Crisis in the University, found it necessary to stress that "academic patriotism... does not exclude clear recognition and searching diagnosis of ailments".

One issue that Prof. Resnick raises but does not address is that of tenure: he writes of "the principle of academic tenure, not as a matter of job security, to which faculty do not have some absolute right, but as a principle of academic freedom". A question that has been both urgent and largely ignored for many years now, is how one safeguards academic freedom without safeguarding mediocrity and incompetence.

In another recent article on universities, Dave Todd pointed with approval to the University of California's recent 20 per cent budget increase. What he did not mention was the difficulty of obtaining tenure in the University of California. In British Columbia not merely tenure, but high rank and salary, have been awarded 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. This was no inevitable outcome of market considerations; while faculty members were busily recommending one another for tenure in the early seventies, well qualified people (the first sizeable generation of Canadian Ph.D.s) were looking for academic positions. Philip Resnick and other defenders of universities in the abstract have to convince a Universities Minister who knows universities from the inside; they also have to convince some very well-qualified taxpayers who know universities from the inside, and therefore know there are faculty members who after fifteen years or more of sabbatical leaves and research semesters have still made virtually no contribution to knowledge in their disciplines.

Moreover, the question of standards is related to the question of costs. Tenure and promotion awarded on inadequate grounds implies an unjustified commitment of salary over a long period of time. Prof. Resnick deals with this by saying that faculty members do not oppose the use of merit as a means of rewarding those whose contributions to teaching and research are particularly noteworthy, and that there would not be widespread opposition to some adjustment in existing salaries. I am glad to hear it, because the present situation is absurd.  [Some local colour deleted here on the tried and tested assumption that our truth-seeking institutions don’t want too much truth, even if it w as written down a quarter of a century ago].  I was recently told of a tenured assistant professor at UBC, without publications, earning $60,000 a year. I have not checked on that salary; but I have witnessed sufficient absurdity in my own university over the years to find it believable.

Philip Resnick is right: university administration should relate to the philosophy of a university, and we should be suspicious of management practices "modelled on what goes on in the private sector". But we should remember, when we express our high ideals, that taxpayers and students have a perfectly proper stake in how they are worked out in practice. Perhaps it is time for a commission of enquiry into just that question?

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David J.Bercuson, Robert Bothwell, .J.L Granatstein, 

The Great Brain Robbery: Canada’s Universities on the Road to Ruin, 160 pp., McClelland and Stuart, 1984

If all professions are a conspiracy against the public, the academic profession is no exception. Complicity brings its rewards, and nonconformity its punishments. Perhaps that is why this book , which reads as if written currente calamo [ roughly, “with flying pen] by a single person, has three authors. "Safety in numbers" still has force.

    The book's title accurately suggests its argument and tone. It is frankly polemical, intended to catch headlines and get itself talked about. In the course of developing their view the authors  touch upon a wide variety of topics: the absurdities of "formula-funding", the replacement of the core curriculum by the supermarket curriculum, problems inherent in unionization, the vital connection between teaching and research, the ease with which tenure was gained in the early seventies, the protection afforded by tenure to the "terminally lazy", and the absurdity of having significant numbers of un-and-under-employed Ph.D's who are markedly better qualified than many faculty members. Predictably, this work has encountered hostility; it galls the kibes of vested interests.

    Those who deplore this book's popular style and uncompromising tone might reflect that one more temperately expressed might have been difficult to publish, would not have been widely read, and would have had less chance of doing good in the world. This work will probably be more widely read than Edward Shi1s's soberly written The Academic Ethic, which I want by the way to recommend. Its quiet style makes it less fun to read, but it is equally concerned with excellence in scholarship and teaching and its recommendations at crucial points are in fact stronger.

    I welcome The Great Brain Robbery, and think that for the most part it is talking much-needed and highly-belated sense. It can of course be faulted at points. On the subject of Canadian academics as publishing scholars or otherwise the American survey referred to has little relevance. The authors' observations of their colleagues ("no publications at all in many cases") leave one wondering a little.  One knows of people who are not balls of fire, but most have pushed pen across paper at some time or other. "He keeps referring to ' my  article'," a graduate student  said to me once.  Has he only published one?”

   The criticism that the authors express contempt for students is understandable. I don't think they meant to give that impression. They are talking about what is wrong with Canadian universities, not about what is right, but the suggestion that "too many students, regrettably, snatched away from the television set or the game arcade for a few hours each day, want only to he entertained in the classroom" (p. 88), doesn't accord with my impression.   Many students are ill-prepared for university--level courses, and some lack intellectual curiosity, but most work rather hard and indeed resent time wasted in the classroom.

    Professors are more open to criticism; they are paid to be scholars and teachers, badly paid if good at what they do, and overpaid if not. Being good at what they do involves more than putting in long hours.  As Sir Ernst Gombrich said: “The question to ask about a university teacher is not whether he pulls his weight but whether his word carries weight.” Bercuson et al. are right to stress the obligation on professors to take seriously what they are paid for. Are they right in suggesting that too many are not doing their jobs properly? That tenure has been granted too readily? An officer of the Canadian Association of University Teachers suggested that on this point they exaggerate and cited the Economics Department at UBC as one place in which tenure is not easily come by. But how representative is that: department? ^{(NOTE 1)} As I wrote earlier this year in calling for an enquiry into hiring practices and related matters within English Departments, tenure has in some cases been awarded on grounds which would be considered inadequate in any decent American university, and by the application of procedures which would similarly be considered inadequate. When people outside the system, working full-time at things unrelated to their academic interests, and without access to the research funds and leaves which faculty members enjoy, can in their spare time produce more and better research than many professors, then something is scandalously wrong. I know more than one such, and with the graduate student quoted here can only deplore "the shield that tenure has provided for those who could not compete in conditions of free and equal competition".

I wonder how far this book's strictures on quality apply to universities in general, and whether they apply rather to arts faculties. Perhaps naively, I find it hard to imagine science faculties tolerating nonsense equivalent to that sometimes bandied around as literary criticism, or the sheer disregard for ascertainable fact some 1iterary scholars display, in print and in the classroom. [Note 2] It seems that the humanities are becoming increasingly marginalized, and contempt lurks within the universities themselves.   Contempt seems implicit in the way some universities have allowed faculties of arts, and perhaps departments of literature in particular, to be run.  Where else could the under-qualified, the inexperienced, the refugees from other professions who saw no reason to qualify themselves for this one, have had such a field--day? The alleged "subjectivity" of the humanities is no excuse for riotous mismanagement; in the last two decades there has been a good deal of it, and the results are still with us. Administrators generally would rather let sleeping dogs lie than grasp the nettle of reform!

    Whether or not this book is "fair" in its accusations will be endlessly debated. The context of the ills it alleges is the enormous expansion of the university system of the past 25 years. In 1959 there were 5, 325 full-time university teachers in Canada; apparently there are now 33,900. Those who argued that rapid expansion would result in degraded undergraduate teaching were proven right, as  swollen graduate schools took in students who should never have been admitted at that level, and decanted them into classrooms as teaching assistants. It would be interesting to discover how many have been admitted to one graduate school after failing at another, and let loose once more (and once more at taxpayers' expense) on first and second year undergraduates. Of course it is true since the great expansion that more departments than formerly can point to faculty members of international stature; yet taken overall, the same departments are glaringly inferior to what they could and should have been, as a legacy of the years when mediocracy ran rampant.  The existence of so many better qualified people outside and on the margins of the profession is sufficient  indication of that.

Note 1.  I once met a nationally prominent member of that department at a dinner-party.  We had a brief conversation about the context in which each of us worked.  He told me how tenure-decisions were made in his department: if, in the candidate's field, there was more than one better scholar in Canada, then there was "blood on the carpet."  In the department with which I am most familiar, it has not been like that around here.

Note 2.  Of course I was perfectly aware by the mid-eighties that administrators from more than one discipline, in the course of defending the academically indefensible, also exhibit a disregard for ascertainable fact.  Since then, as a result of documents from the early seventies, obtained through the FOI process, I can expand this to “administrators and their trusties.”

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