All Posts Tagged With: "AUCC"

New copyright licensing deal won’t help: Jesse Brown

Photo by ailatan on Flickr

You don’t hear much about the cost of post-secondary education dropping, but here’s one area where students should be spending less money than ever: texts. I’d say textbooks, but that’s just it–the costly hardcover textbook’s day is all but done. Ditto the cumbersome photocopied course pack. A slew of cheap and free options are available to a professor assembling a syllabus.

There’s Open Access, a growing international movement to forego the price-gouging of the academic publishers and publish peer-reviewed scholarly works as freely available material. There’s the ever-expanding public domain. There are millions of high quality essays and articles freely and legitimately posted online. There are affordable subscription-based databases and collections. There’s Google Scholar to sort through it all. And there are fair dealing exceptions to Copyright, which will be extended to educational uses as soon as this summer.

Continue reading Canadian students pay too much for textbooks

AUCC’s new statement needs some editing: Pettigrew

The Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada has released its new statement on academic freedom. I welcome any clear, unambiguous statement saying that limitations to scholarly freedom, by anyone, are intolerable. It’s too bad that’s not what we got.

Although the AUCC proudly notes that the statement was unanimously accepted by university presidents, it must be noted that the views and interests of professors and presidents don’t always align. At many universities (though by no means all), the senior administration is viewed by the professoriate, not as the leader in academic progress, but as the occasional enemy of it.

While there is plenty to like in the AUCC’s statement, its framers have missed an opportunity by introducing numerous qualifications, and language that vaguely—and thus ominously—implies that the freedom of faculty can be subordinated to the will of the administration. Chief among these worrying qualifications are the repeated references to things like institutional “integrity,” “autonomy,” and “mission.” Given that university “missions” are usually dictated by senior administration, these qualifications imply that administrators are happy to give their professors all the freedom that they are comfortable giving them—and no more. That’s not really academic freedom at all.

Now, since it’s that time of year when essays are flooding in, let’s think of this statement as a first draft. In my never-ceasing desire to help universities be better, I’ve provided a copy of the AUCC statement, with edits that I believe could turn this C paper into an A.

Continue reading A lesson for presidents on academic freedom

With no Canadian accreditation body, universities look south of the border for stamp of approval

Simon Fraser University has applied for accreditation from the U.S. quality assurance board Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities. Being the first large research university in Canada to look south of the border for accreditation, the university’s move highlights the fact that Canada lacks any national mechanism for assuring quality of post-secondary institutions.

Simon Fraser University (SFU) academic planning and budgeting director Glynn Nicholls, who is also accreditation project manager, explained that SFU’s need for accreditation is related to its joining the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). The university became the first non-U.S. school to be a member of the 100-year-old sports organization when it was accepted as a member in July 2009. SFU’s varsity teams will compete in the Great Northern Athletic Conference, which includes Alaska, Washington, Oregon, Montana and Idaho.

Yet, member schools of the NCAA must be accredited and Canada offers no national quality assurance process that is comparable to that of the States. Here colleges and universities are approved by provincial governments, which generally do not assess institutions as rigorously as quality assessment bodies like the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities (NCCU). Since education falls under the provincial government’s jurisdiction, there is no national mechanism to assess institutions, leaving room for much inconsistency across provincial borders. Canada is the only developed country in the world that lacks a national accreditation system for post-secondary schools.

In the absence of an official quality assurance mechanism in Canada, membership in the Association of Colleges and Universities of Canada (AUCC)—a national lobby group representing over 90 universities—has served as de facto accreditation. This had had negative ramifications for some students. In the past decade, provincial governments, particularly in B.C. and Alberta, have given some colleges the right to grant bachelor degrees. However, just because the government in one province approves the right of an institution to grant a degree doesn’t mean that degree will be recognized by universities outside of that province, which can be a problem for students pursuing graduate or professional degrees outside their home province.

Many registrars require that bachelor degrees come from institutions that have membership in the AUCC, but not all degree-granting institutions qualify for membership with its emphasis on peer-reviewed research. This puts these colleges in an odd position: their provincial governments say that they are qualified to grant a bachelor’s degree; the national lobbying group for universities says that they are not. There’s no referee to break the impasse.

While this isn’t an issue for SFU, which is a member of the AUCC, Nicholls says it is “unfortunate” that there isn’t any national accreditation in Canada. “If there was a similar process in place, we would be supportive.”

SFU’s academic departments are regularly assessed, according to Nicholls, and the university always performs well in academic assessments. “But there has been a gap when it comes to looking at us at an institutional level,” he says. The NCCU accreditation process will probe SFU’s academics but also its administrative procedures by examining five key standards: SFU’s vision, whether it has the resources and capacity to pursue that vision, its planning processes, how it assesses success, and how it adapts to change.

Justifying the university means justifying what universities do, not what we want them to do

Over at University Affairs, deputy editor Léo Charbonneau, recently asked his readers for their thoughts about protecting universities against the possibility of massive cuts to higher education. He asks, “What’s the best line of argument to protect universities from the cuts to come?”

Charbonneau poses the question after reviewing an article by Paul Wells written for the alumni mag at Wells’ alma mater (see here, page 46). Wells, one of the few national columnists who thinks higher education is worth talking about, admonishes the idea that university administrators should take a pragmatic approach to protecting their funding.

Administrators like to emphasize the economic impact of higher education. Universities are special, they argue. Not only do they contribute to economic activity in the here and now (like every other large employer) but they make our workforce more productive, and contribute to job creation across the entire economy, and in the long term, in ways that no other sector can. Give them more money and we will get more economic growth as a result. ( The Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada made this very argument in its pre-budget submission to parliament’s finance committee).

Such a line of argument would be great for universities if it were true, or, if it is true, if it could be proven. Unfortunately this is not really the case. As Wells writes:

The problem with that line of argument is that in a really nasty economic environment, governments on a tight budget will take that as a cue to go hunting for anything a university does that doesn’t, demonstrably, simplistically, generate the ideas that drive a new economy. Whatever they find that looks like a ‘frill’ by that definition will be in danger of getting cut. And frankly, most of what goes on at a university is hard to justify as part of a job-creation mill.

Charbonneau takes issue not with Wells’ analysis, but with Wells’ conclusions that universities “need to go back to basics and talk more … about the intrinsic value of knowledge, scholarship, beauty, contention, and an environment that urges scholars toward ambition and accomplishment.” Charbonneau finds Wells misguided, and says he doubts “whether it’s the type of argument that our current governments will buy into.”

Though Charbonneau does not come right out and say it, it seems obvious that he sides with the view that universities should adopt a pragmatic approach and tell governments what they think governments want to hear.

It should be obvious that Wells is correct on this question.

Of course current governments are not going to buy into the argument that universities are  justified by their core activities of teaching and learning. No one ever bothers to make the case to them. Instead universities act ashamed that they investigate the origins of the universe, or competing views on Milton’s Paradise Lost, and emphasize what are in actuality only incidental outcomes of higher education.

The logic of academia is internal, meaning its impact on the rest of society cannot be predicted or planned. And, if we start trying to plan it, then what made academia unique withers away. Taking the pragmatic approach does not convince governments to value higher education, it concedes the terms of debate to those who think intellectual pursuits are all about direct economic outcomes. What happens when people start looking for this return?

A more appropriate way to view universities might be something similar to how we view public spending on the arts. As a certain prairie based education writer put it earlier this week:

[T]he public is not stupid, and universities should not be so sheepish about what they do. If universities announced that they were no longer going to study ancient history, or the origins of the universe, or Shakespeare, then the public would likely be distressed.

After all, we support public funding for the arts because of the intrinsic good they are thought to confer on the community. Why not teaching and learning? Like the arts, higher education is a luxury of wealthy societies to be appreciated, not as a means to solve all our problems or to be debased on utilitarian grounds.

If schools want to justify themselves, or demonstrate their relevance, they have to show us what it is that they uniquely do.

To be sure, such reasoning puts schools at risk of being dismissed as frivolous, but it doesn’t have to. Higher education advocates should learn to own the debate and not be afraid to talk about what they actually do.

The new university that wants to change everything

This is definitely not your typical first-year course. Instead of being packed into a lecture hall along with several hundred strangers, these 20 students are lounging around an oval table in a brand-new classroom and laughing almost hysterically. It’s still September, but their familiarity is already apparent. The room quiets as a generously bearded, scholarly-looking man introduces today’s topic: the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. But instead of lecturing on the finer points of the seminal document himself, David Helfand, a visiting professor from Columbia University, directs the students to present their assigned discussion points, intervening from time to time to keep the conversation moving forward with the occasional question or gentle correction.

The conversation doesn’t need much prodding. Soon the students are jumping in with questions of their own, most of which are surprisingly thoughtful and relevant for a group only three weeks into their academic careers. “What’s the point of all those countries ratifying it if it’s not legally binding?” one young woman asks. Another student: “If we’re all supposedly equal, why give special privileges to disabled or First Nations people?” Another, unembarrassed by her youthful ignorance, admits, “Man, I never even knew what ‘whereas’ meant before yesterday!”

Helfand is a leading astrophysicist and chair of the department of astronomy at Columbia, and yet here he is, teaching a first-year class on human rights at Quest University, a little-known school up a mountain in Squamish, B.C. This class—and everything else at the barely year-old university—is far from ordinary. The student body is tiny. The focus is entirely on undergraduates. Tuition is $24,500 a year. Professors teach exclusively, and do not do research. To emphasize the point, they aren’t even called professors but rather “tutors.” And students don’t take individual courses as at other universities, but instead study in intense, 3½-week-long interdisciplinary modules known as “blocks.” Today’s class is part of the year’s first block, focused on the relationship between humans and nature, covering topics as varied as Jared Diamond’s Collapse, the philosopher Rousseau and the science of rivers. Although Helfand admits that he was initially skeptical of the unorthodox approach, he says it’s been a remarkable success. “So far, every subject works just brilliantly. The level of engagement is something I’ve never witnessed in 30 years of teaching university.”

Quest is Canada’s first non-profit, secular, private university—and its approach is arguably the most radical experiment in Canadian higher education since the great university expansion and transformation of the 1960s. And yet despite the promise in evidence in the classroom, this is an experiment that is not going well. Students aren’t flocking to the place. Enrolment is far below expectations. The university’s leadership has been a revolving door, its mission at times confused. The school’s financial health may be shaky. What does such a rocky start for Canada’s most ambitious and publicized higher education revolution say about the state of undergraduate education in Canada?

Quest is the brainchild of David Strangway, one of Canada’s most experienced academic administrators and a former president of the University of British Columbia. When Strangway retired from UBC in 1997, after 12 years at the helm, he had no intention of settling down to a quiet life in his hometown, the retirement haven of Kelowna. Then aged 62, he had bigger plans. He would build a university according to his idea of what undergraduate education should be: it would avoid graduate studies and research, and it would be private. The model would be the liberal arts colleges of the U.S. northeast, such as Vermont’s Middlebury College. In Strangway’s view, most Canadian universities no longer focus on undergraduates, but have instead become graduate research establishments that also teach undergraduate students.