Language that is narrowing the public sphere

Opera houses, universities, public schools, civic libraries, and civic museums, all express and explain the societies and cultures from which they come. You might think their antiquity would protect such places from the ups and downs of the economy and the changeable opinions of politicians.

And you would be wrong.

If you look past the placid exteriors of the Royal Ontario Museum or the British Museum, Columbia University, l’Opéra de Paris, the University of Toronto, and the rest, there is a tale of continuous change and occasional disruption.

Yet they persist. We who love these places do what we can to renew them and their social and educational purposes; we generally encourage public understanding and, of course, we engage in public criticism of them. We expect them to express freely their ambitions and objectives, to be open to scrutiny when they take decisions, to have a certain freedom of expression.

Since 1980, there has been a significant uptick in controversy and external pressure on/in these places. That pressure threatens their capacity to choose how they define their goals, the best way of achieving them, all the while trying to be transparent. In a broad sense, their freedom of expression has been reduced.

The pressure comes with a vocabulary featuring “accountability” and “efficiency.” It makes big promises: client choice, slimmed-down administration, fewer demands on the public purse. Although none of this is entirely new, the underlying attitudes are particularly well organized. Together they have produced a new managerialism since 1980.

The new managerialism claimed to rely on “objective” and “neutral” techniques favoured by business and by government. The main thing was to quantify the work of schools, hospitals and so on, showing how inputs (money, human capital) were related to outputs (employment, good health). Enthusiastic fans of the new management thought competition among institutions for improved rankings would lead to innovation and “real change.”

It didn’t work out quite as expected. Instead, the range of choice has narrowed, as our language has narrowed. We’ve grown accustomed to the language of outcomes and accountability measures—performance indicators by other names. Innovations there are, innovations that make statistical and financial sense, whether or not they are justified by the historic and public duties of the institution. Sometimes they’re not innovations at all, but rather marketing ploys.

I propose two examples. Both come from post-secondary education.

In 2014 the University of British Columbia opened Vantage College. For $37,950, international visa students can take an 11-month course that can lead to regular 2nd-year and upper year classes for degrees in Arts, Science, Engineering, and Management. At that point, if they stay at UBC, they’ll continue to pay differential fees. Megan Dolski of the Globe and Mail says this (Globe and Mail, 2016 August 26):

The B.C. government has capped increases in domestic tuition at a maximum of two per cent a year. But international tuition fees have climbed precipitously, with rates rising by 37 per cent over three years, starting in 2015…. Critics say some pathway programs could be misguided cash-grabs that offer back-door entry to coveted university programs through lower standards, bump out local students, and are available only to the super-rich.

There are similar experiments at Simon Fraser University (Fraser International College), at Manitoba, a half-dozen more universities in Canada, and various guises, hundreds in impecunious mid-sized public institutions. UBC is unusual in choosing not to invite an outside company to organize and run its international “gateway programme.” Instead, the UBC Senate approved Vantage, keeps an eye on its academic work and progress, and plans to verify that the College is meeting its and UBC’s objectives.

There is much to be said for Vantage College. The College adopted a fairly strict admissions policy. Its students’ academic qualities have led observers to think well of the place. Many would agree that Vantage students make UBC a more cosmopolitan place.

Still, two themes recur in campus debate and news coverage of Vantage and UBC. One is the financial benefit that Vantage confers on the university, and the other is the way that rising international enrolment is seen as contributing to UBC’s “reputational ranking” and “market presence” especially in Asia.

Stephen Toope energetically supported Vantage in his last years as UBC president for these two reasons. The short-lived presidency of Arvind Gupta began with a promise to raise UBC to the top twenty in the Times Higher Education Supplement rankings, with the help of experiments like Vantage. The latest president, Santa Ono, speaks of UBC as the Stanford of the North.

The future of Vantage College will unfold as it must. As to whether it is a true innovation or a marketing ploy, the jury is still out. Meanwhile, the University of British Columbia has accepted that to some extent it is a marketing firm, a financially successful service provider, a real estate developer. With the advantage of hindsight, one inclines to think that the evolution of political language since 1980 at least partly accounts for the new emphasis.

My second example is the hiring (2012) and firing (2014) of a university president, Ilene Busch-Vishniac at the University of Saskatchewan [U of S]. Little is known about the search committee that recommended Prof. Busch-Vishniac. Perhaps they felt she combined desirable scientific accomplishment with administrative experience. That must have sufficed. Alas, soon after taking office President Busch-Vishniac decided to adopt Robert Dickeson’s programme prioritization process [PPP] in an attempt to balance the university’s books.

Leo Groarke and Beverley Hamilton characterize the PPP this way:

The heart of Dickeson’s process is a review of all programs that aims to rank them in a way that enables a university to decide what programs it should cut, consolidate, or complement as it attempts to put its financial house in order.  Variants of PPP all share the notion that universities should review and rank their programs– academic and non-academic – in order to pick and choose among them.

Things got interesting as the provincial government refused to increase funding to cover growing deficits at the U of S. The university had a long commitment to social and cultural diversity in Saskatchewan, along with vigorous faculty and students who wanted to be heard during the PPP.

As pressure grew, the president took action. One action involved closure of the School of Public Health. Its dean and professor Robert Buckingham wrote a widely circulated essay rejecting much of the PPP and heaping discreet ridicule on the policies of the upper administration. The higher administration saw Buckingham as disloyal, either disloyal to them or disloyal to the statistics in the PPP, and  Buckingham was fired.

Apparently in the corporate worldview of the University of Saskatchewan president, academic freedom did not extend to her fellow managers.

Melonie Fullick summarizes the upshot:

Dr. Buckingham’s dismissal and the resultant public outrage led to a chain of events that included an apology from President Ilene Busch-Vishniac and the rapid reinstatement of Dr. Buckingham to a faculty position (though not to his role as dean) on May 15; the resignation of provost Brett Fairbairn [Fairbairn had signed Buckingham’s dismissal letter] and an emergency meeting of the board of governors on May 19; a major student rally on May 20, and ultimately the board’s decision to fire Dr. Busch-Vishniac on May 21.

How and why would the U of S allow the situation to deteriorate in this way? Partly it was a straightforward mistake. Ms Busch-Vishniac may not have been vetted as carefully as one might like. And certainly the provincial government played an influential part, exercising its influence through control of the provincial grant. But the affair is a reminder of the linguistic, not just political pressure under which the U of S laboured at the time. The government talked a vocabulary of “accountability” and “efficiency”; the high administration talked the same way; and among the old Turks who dominate the “literature” on university reform the same language is lingua franca.

The think tanks (Canadian, American, British, Australian) talk this way, too, taking advantage of the neoliberal political currents that still dominate policy making in post-secondary education. One thinks of Brutus saying “we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.” (Julius Caesar, IV, iii, 222-4)

What is to be done about this linguistic impoverishment? For one thing, it is long since time to recover and reinvent the language we associate with the common good in education, health, and social services. My earlier list mentioned “access,” “equity,” “discipline,” “academic freedom.” What does access mean if serve a public that includes everyone without distinction of social class or ethnicity or gender—and moves beyond national borders? Have we a special duty to extend access to refugee students? How far should we go and why? We make better hospitals and museums when we educate first-rate doctors and curators, and develop a vocabulary that recognizes the power of the disciplines and their obligations.

Governance is surely as important as vocabulary. I mean the recovery of participatory governance at every level of the public institutions.. It’s time to recover a vigorous model of governance that would help us to avoid mistakes in presidential hiring, or hasty decisions about globalization, and the list goes on. It won’t be in anyone’s best interest if decisions continue to be driven by the numbers dans une société intoxiquée par les chiffres. The arts and sciences are public, so should be the institutions that rely on them.

The ratings-and-ranking fantasies of the 80s and 90s have begun to look just plain odd. There must be a Jonathan Swift out there, waiting for an opportunity write the ultimate satire on measurement-madness. There’s an authoritarianism in the way ratings-driven public institutions actually function, but for a sharp attack on totalitarian administration one can rely on George Orwell.