Who will argue for truth in a top-down governance model?

The undermining of shared governance at the University of Alberta (UofA), the province’s flagship university, 2,600 miles to the north-west of the University of Florida and on the other side of the Canadian-United States border, has been ongoing since at least the fall of 2019 – when then Alberta premier Jason Kenney (United Conservative Party, UCP) announced that Alberta’s higher education institutions were “overly dependent” on government funding.

Throughout his political career, which includes 10 years as a federal cabinet minister in the Conservative Party of Canada government of former prime minister Stephen Harper, Kenney has been strongly supported by Alberta’s oil industry and, in turn, has strongly supported the industry and the development of the tar sands in Northern Alberta.

Kenney, a college dropout, showed his animus against UofA in 2018 when, as leader of the provincial opposition, he loudly criticised the university for awarding an honorary doctorate to Dr David Suzuki, an environmental activist and vociferous critic of Alberta’s oil industry and of the development of the tar sands specifically.

Following the recommendations of a blue-ribbon panel led by Dr Janice MacKinnon, a former Saskatchewan minister of finance, the Kenney government began cutting provincial funding to the post-secondary education institutions. The government's aim was to shrink public funding as a share of the sector's total revenue. From $2.43 billion in 2018-19 (before the election of the UCP) the operating grant to the province’s PSEIs fell to $1.97 billion in 2022-23--a decrease of 18.8%.

Anticipated shortfalls, Alberta’s minister of advanced education said, were to be made up for by cutting operating costs, increasing tuition fees (by up to 7% per year) and “entrepreneurial and commercial ventures”.

The cuts fell most heavily on UofA, says Professor Laurie Adkin, who teaches political science at UofA and was the lead author on two major reports on restructuring of higher education in Alberta and the impact of the UCP’s cuts to higher education, co-published by the Parkland Institute (PI) and the the Corporate Mapping Project: PI is a non-partisan research institute that studies economic, social, cultural and political issues facing Albertans and Canadians.

In October 2019, the province cut 6.9% from its grant to UofA, with an 11% cut coming the following year. In 2021, the province reduced its grant by an additional CA$52 million (US$38 million), bringing the total reduction in 2021 to CA$222 million. Fully 49% of the province’s cuts to higher education have been absorbed by one institution: the University of Alberta.

Budget cuts with a message

“The government of Alberta sees the university as a hotbed of leftists. The message of these budget cuts is quite simple: ‘We are going to be disciplined’. How dare we question the oil industry, which has turned Alberta into, essentially, a petro-state, with all the problems of democratic governance that entails? They want us brought to heel and one of the ways to do that is by savagely cutting the budget,” said Adkin.

Conservative governments have the reputation for cutting budgets of colleges and universities. In Alberta between 1992 and 1996, the Conservative government of Ralph Klein, who never went to college, slashed the province’s grant to universities by 21%.

In 2013, another Conservative Alberta premier, Alison Redford, cut CA$147 million from the province’s post-secondary education budget. In his first year as premier of Ontario, 1996-97, Conservative premier Mike Harris, another university dropout, cut the province’s grant to higher education by 15% or CA$440 million.

However, as Marc Spooner, professor of education at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, points out: “Today’s conservative governments are different from those in the past. These are very good populists, conservative right-wing movements that have little respect for higher education and demonstrate that in several ways.

“They have a real desire to control the narrative that gets discussed. The way they’ve intruded into university governance, it’s evident in both Ontario and Alberta that they want to turn universities into colleges, institutions that effectively serve the labour market and economic interests only.”

In 2018, despite pressure from Kenney, the UCP, the oil industry, conservative media that dominates the province and donors to the university, UofA’s then president Dr David Turpin refused to overrule the decision to award Suzuki the honorary doctorate.

Turpin, who had taken great pride in leading UofA to being ranked 90th by the QS World University Rankings, said: “Our reputation as a university – an institution founded on the principles of freedom of inquiry, academic integrity and independence – depends on it.”

An ‘Orwellian’ restructuring

In response to the drastic budget cuts, UofA contracted with the Nous Group, a management consultancy company. (‘Nous’ is a Greek word that, following its use in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, is usually translated as ‘intellect’ [that humans have and animals do not]).

According to an e-mail from Jennifer Crosby, UofA’s director of media strategy, the university “has a bicameral and collegial governance system of long standing that allows for and values meaningful discussion and debate on academic affairs and direction of the university”.

Yet, explained Adkin, the university’s administration accepted Nous’ recommendation to restructure the university into three colleges, which was done with minimal input from faculty.

“It was really quite Orwellian,” says Adkin. “Nous was chosen to advise the administration on policy, to oversee the imposition of a far more corporate model on the university so that it would be organised and run as a business corporation rather than a university with a bicameral governance system. The very thin, almost symbolic, form of a consultation process was really an exercise in legitimation.”

UofA’s teaching faculty, which has only 34% of the votes on the General Faculties Council (GFC) (one of the lowest such percentages among Canadian colleges and universities), voted against a proposal presented by the executive to reorganise all the faculties into three colleges, each governed by a college dean.

Instead, the GFC voted for a modified version of the proposal which replaced college deans with deans’ councils and a shared administrative service. Normal governance procedures would have seen Bill Flanagan, president of UofA, who chairs the GFC, bring the GFC’s recommendation to the board of governors and support it.

“To everyone’s great shock, the president brought the motion of the GFC to the board and then recused himself from voting,” she says in an indignant tone, “because he didn’t agree with the GFC’s motion.”

Higher Education: Corporate or Public: How the UCP is restructuring post-secondary education in Alberta, published by the Parkland Institute this past May and for which Adkin was the lead author and research director, cites a January 2021 letter to Flanagan signed by 40 out of 73 UofA department members describing “the board’s action in this regard as ‘a dramatic overreach and a violation of the established precedents of bicameral collegial governance’” and noted that the board does not have “the expertise to determine metrics by which the academic performance of the new colleges should be judged”.

The letter went on to characterise Flanagan’s actions as “a serious breach of trust and of your responsibility as president of the university”.

The dismantling of collegiality

Had Nous’ plan come before the board of governors a few years earlier, it might not have been accepted. During the four-year term (May 2015 to April 2019) of premier Rachel Notley’s New Democratic Party (NDP) government, the board’s make-up was quite different than it had been before and after Kenney’s election.

In addition to the ‘internal’ board members representing university constituencies, the Alberta government appoints ‘public’ board members. Traditionally, the Conservative premiers of Alberta appoint ex-Conservative politicians, and businessmen and women, with a large number coming from the oil patch.

Notley, by contrast, appointed many women to achieve gender parity on the boards of public agencies and institutions, sought to improve representation of racialised Canadians, Indigenous communities and people from diverse areas such as artists, and health and social service professionals in both the public and non-governmental sectors.

Between August and October 2019, 45 of the NDP’s appointments were rescinded and replaced by people more aligned with the UCP.

“Once it went to the board of governors, it was a done deal. The board had the legal authority, was responsible for the budget and accepted the restructuring proposal,” said Adkin.

This process shows how collegial governance at the UofA vanished. “When I came here (in 1991),” said Adkin, “it was not uncommon for a university president or vice president to come from faculty positions and return to faculty positions after serving their terms. They were more likely to consult with faculty over the direction of the institution.

“We now have an executive model of leadership, with VPs and presidents being hired from the outside, sometimes from corporate rather than academic backgrounds. They are appointed by the boards; faculty have no meaningful input into the hiring of these individuals. They view the faculty as ‘employees’ to be managed, rather than as colleagues who have an important role in decision-making.

“In the past, presidents viewed their roles as representing faculty and acting as intermediaries between the GFC and the governors. It was never an easy job, but presidents and boards seemed to respect certain norms of collegial governance – such as the authority of the GFC to make decisions about academic affairs.

“The president now appears to see himself as an employee of the board and accountable only to the board. The board, moreover, disproportionately represents private business perspectives that are aligned with the UCP government’s agenda for restructuring post-secondary education. So, the situation is that the faculty have only minority representation on the GFC, and only two representatives on the board (neither of whom we elect directly). No one is accountable to us.”

For her part, Professor Carolyn Sale, who teaches English at UofA and was for many years a representative on the GFC, told University World News: “The selection process for university presidents is now a closed process with no public dimension – that is, there are no public talks by candidates.

“Head-hunting firms help find the candidates, and while a few faculty members may sit on the confidential search committee, academic staff in general have no voice in the selection process, with the university community learning about who has been hired only after the board signs off on the appointment.

“This aspect of the corporatisation of the academy means that the academic community is not properly involved in the selection of the university’s academic leader. This runs fundamentally counter to the principles of collegial governance.”

A telling recent episode

A more recent episode, concerning the authority of the GFC, further underlines the crisis in collegial governance at UofA.

In her e-mail to University World News, Crosby attached a letter from Flanagan to the GFC dated 10 November 2022 and glosses it by saying that the university “is fully committed to collegial governance and decision-making. It is fundamental to the success and reputation of a university that its academic affairs be informed and guided by academic expertise.

“It is also of fundamental importance that all the university’s stakeholders, as represented on our General Faculties Council, including academic and non-academic staff and our undergraduate and graduate students, have a full opportunity to participate in the process. Recent discussions within our governing bodies – include space and processes for dissenting voices – are evidence for rather than against collegial governance.”

Flanagan’s letter, which speaks of “how we might improve the process of bicameral and collegial governance” and how the GFC “wants and quite rightly expects to have a full opportunity to engage in a meaningful way in the academic direction of the university” before going on to list the matters – for example, faculty of education restructuring, statement of free expression and sexual violence policy – that had been brought to the GFC before going to the board of governors.

Flanagan’s letter was occasioned, in part, by a motion put forward to the GFC on 17 October 2022 that after underlining that the GFC “cannot exercise its statutory powers under the Post-secondary Learning Act unless it is advised, in advance and in a timely manner, of all policies that the president or the provost intends to take to the board of governors for its consideration” and moves that:

“The president shall provide the General Faculties Council with notice of all policies that the president or the provost intends to take to the board of governors for its consideration so that the General Faculties Council will have both the opportunity and sufficient time to exercise its statutory right to make recommendations to the board on any matter.”

Kate Chisholm, chair of the university’s board of governors, requested a lawyer’s letter about the motion. On 30 November, Neil Wittmann, QC, wrote to Chisholm telling her that the motion was ultra vires.

The reason the motion was without force or effect was because of the word “shall”, Wittmann writes, which “duly interpreted means that it is not capable of discretion and that compliance is mandatory. It is dictating the conduct of the president or provost with respect to ‘all policies’ that the president or provost intends to take to the board of governors for consideration”.

Wittmann found that the “GFC has no power to compel the president’s conduct”.

Chisholm communicated Wittmann’s legal opinion to the members of the GFC on 1 December; a day later, Sale wrote to Chisholm responding to Wittmann’s opinion by first pointing to the fact that without proper information, the GFC cannot do its job.

“The power of the GFC to make recommendation to the board is vitiated by the president if he does not provide the GFC adequate notice of policies and procedures he is planning to bring to the board so that the GFC has an opportunity, if it wishes, to present recommendations to the board before the board takes decisions on the matters in question.”

Secondly, while Sale agrees that the GFC had no “legal authority to enforce its will on the president” (and has never claimed otherwise), the norms of respectful and collegial governance are a different matter, even a higher bar.

“No university president should seek to prevent its senior academic body from exercising its authority or expressing its will, nor should any university president disregard that stated will.”

As proof of the disregarding of collegial governance norms, she goes on to cite that in response to the GFC wanting notice of matters brought to the board, in his letter of 10 November, Flanagan wrote that going forward all GFC members will be informed of the agenda by e-mail at least five days before the meeting.

“To respond that members of GFC will have the notice of policies going to the board five days or so in advance of a board meeting,” Sale wrote to Chisholm, is to mock the GFC’s desire to have the genuine collegial governance on which the university has purportedly been based since 1910.

Decline in quality

The budget cuts at UofA have led to the elimination of 800 non-academic positions through layoffs and retirements; and some 1,200 full-time positions will be gone by the time the administrative restructuring is complete.

Further, the cuts have led to increased class sizes, explained Adkin, while the restructuring has forced her faculty, arts, into an administrative merger with education, business and law. The present dean of this college (social sciences and humanities) comes from the former school of business.

While Adkin’s faculty has maintained its structure, the faculty of education has seen its departmental boundaries eliminated which, Adkin has been told, has resulted in administrative chaos. In the arts faculty, department-level support staff have been removed, and a smaller number of staff now service multiple departments.

In the 2022 university rankings by Times Higher Education, UofA was ranked 31st in the category of internationalisation, ahead of the University of Toronto, Harvard and Stanford. The political science course catalogue lists the sort of courses that would be expected of this ranking. However, because the UofA has not replaced a number of faculty who retired, while the courses are listed, they are not taught.

“Nobody has been hired to replace me to teach the courses in the government and politics of Alberta,” says Adkin, who is retiring this year. “We have courses in almost all fields that are not taught and may be removed from the catalogue.

“There are significant gaps in our curriculum – areas that a leading department of political science ought to be able to offer – on the politics in Latin America, South Asia and Western Europe. We have no one teaching the politics of the Russian Federation. We’ve lost our key expert in American politics and there is no sign that they will be replaced.

“In the history department, there is no one teaching American history since that professor retired. Given the importance of the United States to Canada and Alberta, and the way contemporary American politics influences Canada, you would think that courses in American politics and history would be deemed essential in a leading Canadian university.

“It is not that my colleagues don’t agree; it’s that the departments are not being permitted to replace the faculty who are relocating or retiring,” Adkin said.

In her blog posting of 19 April 2022, Sale makes clear the cost of years of budget cuts – lost budget ‘lines’, each line representing the recurring budget for professors. In 2013, her English and film studies department lost eight lines when eight faculty members took voluntary severance buyouts following Redford’s almost CA$150 million cut to the post-secondary budget.

Each year since, as a faculty member has left, another line has been lost. Last year, the senior administration refused to hire a medievalist, despite the obvious importance of such expertise to the study of English literature.

Before these cuts began, UofA’s English department was ranked 22nd in the QS World University Rankings. The refusal of senior administrators to invest in the department has resulted in the department slipping into the 100-150 range in the most recent rankings.

“The university as a whole has now slipped out of the top 100 worldwide,” she writes, “and is no longer one of the top five universities in Canada.”

Who will ask the hard questions?

The crisis in governance across North American colleges and universities is more than campus battles between administrators and boards of trustees, and faculty, who are often accused of looking back at a golden age – when they were graduate students or young professors.

As each of the professors and experts I interviewed made clear, something essential about their profession (which, I should admit, was also mine) and the institutions they have devoted decades to serving, is at stake.

Perhaps the easiest way to grasp what’s at stake is to ask, “What happens if colleges and university professors and students are not insulated from pressures from their boards and, in the case of public colleges and universities, the political pay masters?”

“We lose the capacity of the university’s faculty, who are responsible for their [the institution’s] educational mission, to ask the hard questions, produce uncomfortable results and argue for truth,” said Mark Criley, senior programme officer in the department of academic freedom, tenure and governance in the American Association of University Professors.

“Their [professors’] expert opinions, of course, don’t always agree. But that’s part of the process. Part of what’s essential is to allow for evidence-based argument-driven inquiry. And it’s not well-served by a top-down model where a governing board or administration serves like a board of directors.”