Introduction: What’s old is new again 

Dark economic times have come to the province. The Premier, under pressure from business groups, appoints a prominent citizen to review the government’s finances. His report proposes dramatic cuts to most social programs and the public sector, including education. There is no broad-based public consultation involving public servants, teachers, doctors or university faculty.

Sound familiar? No, this isn’t Ontario in 2012; it is British Columbia in 1932. The Premier was Simon Fraser Tolmie, and the businessman was George Kidd. Fortunately for the people of BC, the recommendations of the Kidd Report are not implemented. Their economy recovers, and they go on to enjoy a period of unprecedented economic growth.

Economic crises – and the third-party reports they seem to generate – are nothing new. The Drummond Commission on the Reform of Public Services is simply the latest in a long line of government-mandated commissions that seek to use a recession to undermine and constrain the public services upon which citizens depend. And, just like all of those other reports, it falls to ordinary citizens to push back against short-sighted public service cuts.

What follows is a critical analysis of Drummond’s recommendations. It examines the Drummond’s recommendations for the higher education sector, and provides further commentary on his fiscal analysis and proposals for provincial labour relations. Overall, it finds that Drummond provides a series of recommendations without appropriate costing and with inadequate evidence that they will achieve the purported results. For a Commission that has enjoyed widespread public prominence, the final report is surprisingly thin on substance.

A Note on Sources 

Drummond provides little evidence or data to support his recommendations on change in the higher education sector. What evidence he does provide is based almost exclusively on three sources: the book Academic Reform, written by Ian Clark, David Trick, and Richard Van Loon; the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario; and the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (OUSA). There was no formal consultation process, and it appears the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities provided little data to the commission.

This incomplete sourcing and lack of primary research by the Commission creates problems of accuracy and accountability for the report and its recommendations. Clark et al are third-party policy entrepreneurs, accountable to no one. The Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario, [p. 1/2] despite its mandate, does not consult meaningfully with all sector stakeholders and pursues an idiosyncratic research agenda. OUSA is accountable only to its seven member student associations. Moreover, OUSA’s university expenditure research, cited throughout the report, suffers from a deeply flawed methodology and reaches conclusions that are at best misleading, and at worst tendentious.

As such, OCUFA concludes that data used by the Drummond Commission is incomplete, and that the Commission failed to conduct the research necessary to make appropriate and useful recommendations for Ontario’s higher education sector.

Drummond’s Fiscal Analysis 

When it comes to economic forecasts and projections of government revenue, assumptions matter. Assuming there are no changes in taxation rates, government revenues typically rise and fall in much the same pattern as gross domestic product (GDP). Pessimistic assumptions about GDP growth yield pessimistic conclusions about revenue.

The Drummond Commission adopted the same assumptions for growth in the next three years as the Minister of Finance did in his fall economic statement. Needless to say, what happens now affects the future. The respected Policy and Economic Analysis Program at the University of Toronto in October was forecasting considerably higher rates of economic growth than the commission. Even the alarmist report recently released by the Conference Board of Canada – Ontario’s Economic and Fiscal Prospects – assumes that nominal GDP growth in the next two years will be above five per cent.

Forecasting further out into the future is even more speculative. Even if economists were to agree on nominal growth, different assumptions about GDP inflation would yield disagreement about real GDP growth. The Drummond’s assumptions for average rates of growth leading up to 2018 are even more pessimistic than private sector forecasts.

Another key assumption is that there is a ‘spending problem’ in Ontario. As Canadian Autoworkers Economist Jim Stanford has observed, Ontario actually had a surplus prior to the 2008 financial crisis. In other words, we were paying our way. It was the ensuing recession’s double-barreled impact on revenues – a decline in both GDP and a decline in revenue as a share of GDP – that put Ontario into a deficit situation. The deficit will decline if the economy improves. Drummond assumes that we are now in an indefinite period of slow growth. If, however, we are in a cyclical downturn, then we can expect growth to improve beyond Drummond’s gloomy predictions. Were that to occur, Ontario’s current level of spending and spending growth would quickly return to sustainability.

Drummond’s assumptions, and the conclusions they produce, represents a huge fiscal drag on the Ontario economy. The scale of per-capita cuts proposed by Drummond will actually reduce GDP by $10-18 billion, or 1.6 to 2.8 per cent. If growth remains slow in the short-term, these cuts could actually pull the economy back into a negative growth situation. [p. 2/3]

Drummond’s mandate expressly excluded the revenue side of the deficit problem. Reform to the tax codes, or a reduction in corporate tax cuts would do much to reduce Ontario’s deficit while preserving the quality and accessibility of the province’s public services. Failure to include revenue in Drummond’s purview undermines the utility of the report’s recommendations.

In short, there is no reason to accept Drummond’s fiscal projections as inviolable fact, and the cost of accepting his questionable assumptions and implementing his plan may impose a growth-killing fiscal drag on Ontario.

Labour Relations 

All in, Drummond’s model of labour relations consists primarily of hard bargaining on the part of broader public sector (BPS) employers, with government assisting the employer in setting compensation goals, costing existing compensation structures, comparing them to “benchmarks” and then supporting the employer when the going gets tough.

There are no recommendations in the report to create any form of centralized bargaining for universities, government wage awards or freezes, or any other tool that would allow the government to directly intervene in university bargaining. Drummond categorically rejects these forms of interventions, noting that wage freezes are invariably followed by catch-up that leaves the system unchanged.

He notes that moderation of labour compensation will be essential to hold program spending increases to 0.8% per year, given that compensation accounts for half of Ontario government spending. He clearly expects that dramatic reductions in spending will do the heavy lifting for government, forcing wage restraint on the parties as well as a reduction in the size of the work force. Thomas Walkom, a columnist for the Toronto Star, estimates that as many as 250,000 jobs will be cut, driving the Ontario unemployment rate over 11%.

Drummond recommends that the government create a Labour Relations Information Bureau to create data relevant to bargaining, particularly on measures of productivity. He further recommends that the government create comprehensive benchmarking system for the BPS on total compensation that includes benefits, pensions, and movement through a grid.

While noting that the interest arbitration system generally works where the parties in the sector have negotiated settlements to use as benchmarks, he nonetheless recommends rather sweeping changes to the interest arbitration system. Most controversial is his recommendation that the parties no longer be allowed to select their arbitrator, but rather he/she be assigned by a tribunal independent of both the parties and the government. He wants timelines established for the issuing of awards, clear criteria particularly on ability to pay, and clear assessments and reasons provided in all awards.

He recommends that the Ontario Labour Relations Board be given the power to rationalize bargaining structures. Under his model, unions may apply to merge existing units, or combine newly certified workers into an existing unit. This is in fact a position OCUFA has recommended to the government in our current advocacy efforts on labour relations reform. [p. 2/3]

Overall, Drummond supports the status quo of local bargaining for reaching a collective agreement, but with more information and direction given by government to the employers. He is counting on the devastating size of his cuts to the funding of public services to force the parties to bargain concessionary agreements, eliminate jobs, and find “efficiencies”, which obviously can only translate into dramatically higher workloads for the remaining public sector workers.

Recommendations on Higher Education 

Drummond’s higher education-specific recommendations are divided into seven broad thematic areas. Each of these areas will be examined in turn.

1. Contain government funding and institutional expenses 

The most significant recommendation for higher education is that increases to government spending be held to 1.5 per cent per year. As the report itself freely observes, this amount keep pace with neither inflation nor projected enrolment. It therefore represents a significant cut, one that will get larger over each consecutive restraint year.

Again, assumptions matter. For its “status quo” scenario, the commission assumes that expenditure growth in the post-secondary sector will increase almost four per cent per year. It is not clear how the commission arrived at this figure, beyond relying on suspect data generated by Clark et al and OUSA. Calculation of yearly cost and expenditure increases depends primarily on the period of time used for analysis. The five years of growth under the government’s Reaching Higher plan – used by both OUSA and Clark et al – does not reflect the more recent reality of hiring freezes and negotiated increases that are less than the rate of inflation.

The commission acknowledges that funding from the provincial government is the lowest in Canada on a per student basis, and intimates that tuition paid by Ontario students is not enough to close the gap. It refers to quality decline as an “inevitable” result. At present, Ontario universities already have the lowest provincial operating funding per student, the lowest provincial operating grants and net tuition revenue per student, the lowest expenditures per student, the lowest expenditures on faculty salaries per student, and the worst student-faculty ratio.

The commission proposes to ensure that Ontario universities fall even further behind by limiting growth in MTCU funding to 1.5 per cent per year. This ‘increase’ is in reality a cut; the effects of inflation and enrolment increases will steadily erode operating funding per university student. The shortfall would be $580 million in the final year of Drummond’s projections. The cumulative damage would be over $1.8 billion (the figures for colleges are smaller, but no less dire).

It would appear that some of the funding gap is meant to be filled by students and their parents through increased tuition. The commission proposes to permit average tuition increases of five per cent per year, continuing the shift of educational costs to young people and their families. Even if tuition fee increases were sufficient to make up the shortfall in government funding, they [p. 4/5] will make no dent in the $900 million gap between Ontario universities’ per student revenue from of government grants and net student fees and the average level in the rest of Canada. Further, Ontario’s students already pay the highest tuition fees in the country.

It is hard to get around the fact that there will have to be classrooms, laboratories and the like to accommodate enrolment expansion. In the absence of government capital funding, institutions may find it necessary to enter the debt market. Whether it is to divert operating funding directly towards capital expenditures or to service debt, the result is a further squeeze on operating funding. To put this in perspective, the Council of Ontario Universities estimated in 2009 that it would cost $9.4 billion over ten years to accommodate expected enrolment increases. Stimulus funding from the federal and Ontario governments, and subsequent provincial commitments amount to $1.8 billion. Even with more intense usage, it is hard to imagine how the other sources of cost savings contemplated by the commission will bridge the remaining gap.

To further contain costs beyond the proposed cut to university funding, Drummond proposes that the government work with “post-secondary institutions to reduce bargained compensation in order to align increases with the trends in the BPS”.

To understand what Drummond means by “work with”, we need to consider his recommendations in Chapter 15, Labour Relations, regarding BPS compensation as a whole. While generally supportive of maintaining local collective bargaining as the process by which compensation is established, he would like to see the government take a much more active role in establishing benchmarks for total compensation in the BPS. The proposals essentially focus on government assisting the employer in setting compensation goals, costing existing compensation structures, comparing them to “benchmarks” and then bargaining hard to get them into collective agreements.

Drummond uses his own runs from the Labour Force Survey to conclude that public sector compensation needs to be moderated relative to the private sector. He also relies on the OUSA paper to conclude that faculty compensation increases by 3 to 5 percent annually, which is based on a deeply flawed analysis of unadjusted Statistics Canada data. In fact, faculty settlements for 2011 ran at 1.5 per cent, below the private sector rate of 1.7 per cent and the BPS settlement pattern of 1.6 per cent. Drummond’s incorrect conclusion that faculty compensation is out-of-line with broader trends reflects the deep problems with the research that informs his recommendations on higher education.

2. Use differentiation to improve post-secondary quality and achieve financial sustainability 

‘Differentiation’ is a curious concept within higher education policy circles. It is presented as a means to preserve quality and increase efficiency in the face of resource constraints and growing enrolment. Rarely, however, does anyone precisely define what ‘differentiation’ means. Drummond is no exception to this trend.

There are several possible interpretations of differentiation: difference between institutions in program mix; differences according to the balance of undergraduate and graduate studies; and differences in terms of institutional mission, particularly the balance between teaching and [p. 5/6] research. The Drummond report does not specify a definition of differentiation, an ambiguity which undermines the usefulness of his recommendations.

The general thrust of his recommendations is that new mandate agreements should be created to “increase differentiation and avoid duplication”. Based on the report’s commentary, this does not seem to involve closure or rationalization of existing programs based on government direction. Rather, Drummond’s focus is on empowering government to control the introduction of new programs, particularly in graduate and professional studies. If implemented, these new mandate agreements would make it harder for individual institutions to launch new programs without a convincing case based on student demand or geographic need. Provided the development of these mandate agreements is open and consultative, this is not necessarily a negative recommendation. However, OCUFA rejects in principle any attempt by the Government of Ontario to interfere with academic planning and the operation of existing programs. Our current institutional and program mix has evolved organically with the needs of students and communities in mind. Closing programs will impair the accessibility of the system, as students will no longer be able to access comprehensive university programming in their local communities.

The report also recommends assigning responsibility for the development of new mandate agreements to a ‘blue ribbon panel’ or HEQCO. OCUFA believes that the development on any agreement – from the existing Multi-Year Accountability Agreements (MYAAs) to new mandate agreements – should be based on extensive consultations with students, faculty, and the local community. We are concerned that a blue ribbon panel would not have a significantly robust mandate to conduct such a consultation. Similarly, HEQCO has an abysmal record of sector consultation, and would be an inappropriate body for developing new mandate agreements.

The report also recommends improving Ontario’s credit transfer system. OCUFA has no objection to greater student mobility, provided academic freedom is preserved and negative financial implications are avoided. However, we firmly believe that improved credit transfer will actually require significant new funding in order to produce best results for students. Such new costs would include a new infrastructure to facilitate student transfer; funding to support greater movement of students from university-to-university and college-to-university; and funding to develop new college-to-university bridging programs. Like many of Drummond’s recommendations, credit transfer will not save Ontario money. It may improve system flexibility for students, but only at a significant cost.

Finally, Drummond recommends “a rational and strategic division of roles between the college and university systems” be developed. This division of roles has been part of the Ontario higher education sector since the creation of the community colleges in the 1960s, and the clear division of roles has only subsequently been blurred by a combination of institutional aspirations and political expediency. Drummond’s most substantive recommendation to restore the strategic balance of roles is to limit degree-granting by the community colleges. OCUFA supports this position. [p. 6/7]

Overall, Drummond’s differentiation recommendations are poorly defined, and provide little, if any, real savings. If anything, implementing these recommendations in a student-friendly way will require significant new government investment.

3. Encourage and Reward Quality 

Drummond’s recommendations on quality are focused heavily on teaching quality and performance indicators. On the teaching front, he recommends that institutions “devote more resources to experiential learning such as internships; allow for more independent or self-assigned study; develop problem-based learning modules; and increase study abroad and international experiences.” While most of these have potential to enhance the student experience, it is unclear how any of them would deliver savings or greater efficiencies. It is paradoxical that Drummond should recommend devoting greater resources to the student experience in one area, while calling for the dramatic reduction of these resources in another.

Drummond’s also encourages universities to pursue collective agreements that provide flexibility on teaching and research workloads. This recommendation is exclusively based on Drummond’s review of the HEQCO paper on teaching stream faculty. As he did not do any analysis of faculty collective agreements himself, Drummond concludes that the 11 universities that are identified in the paper as having teaching streams are in fact the only institutions that allow flexibility of workload. In fact, OCUFA’s analysis of the Ontario faculty agreements shows that flexibility of career path is widespread in the province, with a myriad of provisions allowing for elements of a faculty workload to be adjusted through individual negotiation.

The use of “encourage” once again must be read in the context of his overall framework for labour relations, which does not involve any change to the local bargaining model for establishing terms and conditions of employment. He clearly favours a merit-driven model for both “rewards” (which might possibly mean additional compensation) as well as changes to teaching or research workload.

Drummond is also keen to adjust incentives that favour research over teaching, yet provides no evidence to support his contention that current incentive systems across the system are weighted in favour of the former. Further, there is no evidence that local criteria do not support innovation in teaching. As we know, institutional mandates differ widely in Ontario, and as a result, so do the criteria for tenure and promotion. Some universities and faculty associations believe merit should be a component of compensation, others do not. Drummond does not address the biggest incentive for institutions to purse more research-intensive mandates: the pervasive underfunding of institutions through operating grants. Since much new money has been made available to support research and innovation, cash-strapped universities have adjusted their activities accordingly.

Drummond also suggests that funding be made sensitive to learning outcomes rather than growth. While he is correct in observing that the current formula encourages universities and colleges to increase enrolment, he does not recognize that this is due to the current inadequacy of per-student funding. If institutions received adequate funding per student, they would face less [p. 7/8] pressure to grow for the purpose of increasing revenue. More to the point, they would also have more resources to dedicate to student learning.

The report also makes several problematic recommendations with regards to quality indicators. First, it suggests that teaching evaluations and student satisfaction be incorporated into accountability agreements. At present, there is no common teacher evaluation score process in the province. Evaluation processes vary widely between institutions, and are rarely if ever designed for the purpose of sector-wide comparison. Comparing results captured by institutional course evaluations would by and large be a meaningless exercise.

Increasingly, student satisfaction ratings are carrying more weight as performance measures, a trend we are watching with some alarm (NSSE scores have recently been added to the multi-year accountability agreements). However, NSSE was not designed for system wide use where institutions have different mandates and serve different student bodies. Regression analysis on results has shown that, when controlling for a variety of factors like institutional size, catchment, program mix and demographics, differences in student satisfaction shrink considerably. Student satisfaction is a poor proxy for actual learning outcomes, and should be used with caution.

The Drummond report’s quality recommendations conclude with the idea that funding should be tied to outcome quality indicators. This idea has been floated for decades, and the problem is always the same: such a funding mechanism takes resources away from institutions that need it most, and hurts students at institutions not seen to ‘measure up’ to poorly designed proxy measurements of quality.

A performance funding envelope was introduced in the late 1990s by the Harris government and subsequently changed to reduce its punitive character: it is counter-productive to withhold funds necessary to accomplish the very goals the funding is meant to encourage. OCUFA has also contended for years that the plethora of funding envelopes and related reporting requirements increases administrative costs and diminishes universities’ capacity to plan and sustain the very programs the envelopes are supposed to support. Requiring universities to compete for such funding can only compound the problems. Net gains to students are, at best, theoretical.

4. Revise research funding structures 

There are two parts to the Commission’s recommendations on research. In the section that deals with research in the post-secondary sector, it proposes greater evaluation of the research funding system’s effect on university budgeting practices and a more efficient method of administering provincial research funding. The second is uncontroversial. The first proposal is more problematic for two reasons: it rests on the suggestion that the nature of research funding requires universities to subsidize research costs from other sources, and it seems to assume that research funding is an “investment” for which a commercial return must be its measure of success.

OCUFA has objected to demands that university research funding be funneled to areas of presumed commercial benefit or preferred priorities precisely because universities’ limited operating resources are re-directed from other research activities that have no immediate [p. 8/9] commercial value. But that is different from the commission’s intimation that teaching subsidizes research. Despite the fact that most provincial funding is allocated according to enrolment, it does not mean that funding is based only on enrolment, as operating funding has always been intended to support teaching and research.

The implication that Ontario university researchers are less productive than their American counterparts because they earn proportionately less licensing income also seems to suggest that university researchers are supposed to be better entrepreneurs than the entrepreneurs with whom they are expected to work to bring university research to market. Canadian and Ontario business investment in research and development has been consistently and markedly lower than the average in the rest of the OECD or G7 nations.

Elsewhere in the review, the commission recommends a review of business support programs. It is not clear what the implications of this would be for provincial support of university research. The commission does question the value of tax credits to business. According to the Minister of Finance’s economic statement in fall 2011, tax credits for research and development and innovation amount to $365 million. If those were cancelled, the funds might be directed instead to restore recently cancelled Ontario Research Fund programs, or to fund universities’ indirect research costs and reduce the apparent subsidy of research from operating sources. However, the commission also recommends pooling of refundable tax credits and direct subsidies into a single envelope. Ministries would then have to compete for the pooled funds according to plans for productivity improvements in the economy.

5. Maintain the current overall cap on tuition fee increases, but simplify the framework 

Central to the Drummond report’s recommendations on post-secondary education is the assertion that a tuition freeze would not be in students’ interest. Drummond claims that the reduction in institutional revenue that would result from a tuition freeze would lead to the deterioration of education quality, which would ultimately harm students. This accepts, however, that government can and will abdicate its responsibility to adequately fund post-secondary education in Ontario. Drummond recommends that the current five per cent overall annual tuition increase should continue, but should be modified to allow for greater flexibility across programs and student types within institutions. This recommendation allows students’ financial burden for post-secondary education to increase substantially while letting government off the hook from funding post-secondary education at a reasonable level.

For Drummond, ‘simplifying the framework’ means preserving the five per cent tuition cap while allowing institutions more flexibility to set fees within that framework. At present, fee increases for undergraduate arts and science students are limited to four and 4.5 per cent, depending on year of study. For professional and graduate degrees, the cap is eight per cent. Drummond proposes removing these program caps, provided the institution does not exceed the five per cent hard ceiling. While this may not lead to sharp fee increases, student groups are concerned it will undermine fee predictability and lead to unsustainable long-term fee increases.

Ultimately, given the continued tuition increases without a corollary increase in government funding for colleges and universities, the Commission’s call for an effective cut to provincial [p. 9/10] funding for post-secondary education further shifts the cost of higher education onto the backs of students and their families.

6. Re-evaluate student financial assistance 

On student financial assistance, the Commission’s recommendations attempt to compensate for rising tuition costs by calling for increased student access to financial support through government funded grants, particularly for low-income students. This is offset by calling for an increase to post-secondary institutions’ financial responsibility for OSAP loan defaults. This recommendation, however, would merely shift the cost of loan defaults from the provincial government to colleges and universities. That said, the current default rates for universities (3.7%) and colleges (10.6%) are so far below the proposed adjusted threshold at which post-secondary institutions would be required to reimburse the province for default costs (20%, down from 25%) that the recommended changes would likely not result in any real change to post-secondary institutions’ financial obligations.

None of the recommendations are costed out, however, and the report does not provide a clear indication of the savings the proposed tuition and student assistance reforms will generate. One is left to conclude that the primary goal of Drummond’s tuition and financial aid recommendations is to continue the shift of educational costs onto students and their families, while targeting aid money towards those most affected by this shift. This is a familiar strategy to observers of Ontario’s higher education system.

7. Generate cost efficiencies through measures such as integrating administrative and back office functions 

The report concludes with suggestions for saving money through increased administrative efficiency, primarily by establishing a single pension fund administrator and by adopting a new model of degree delivery at Ontario universities.

In terms of a single pension fund administrator for all university plans, this is not a new recommendation. The Council of Ontario universities established a working group on pensions several years ago to quantify the potential savings from consolidation of pension assets. Although the working group has not moved to implementation of this proposal, we understand that the committee is in fact still active on this issue.

Drummond also throws his weight behind the 2011 budget announcement of a review of single employer, public-sector pension plans. According to OCUFA discussions with Finance Ministry staff in January 2012, the review has been subject to some internal development, but no announcement on its establishment or start date is imminent.

The report also suggests that universities should explore year-round programming and three-year degree programs. The first recommendation ignores the realities of student finance and the student labour market, while depending on a rather facile understanding of how resources are used at universities throughout the year. The three-year degree proposal fails to recognize trends in student demand: existing three-year options are highly unpopular with students, to the point [p. 10/11] that they are being phased out by some institutions. Moreover, students want more flexibility to complete their studies, not less time. Again, Drummond provides no explanation of how these proposals might work, or what savings they would generate.

Conclusions 

The final report of the Commission on the Reform of Ontario’s Public Services is a poor plan for ‘transforming’ our public services. It is essentially a roadmap for huge cuts hiding behind a screen of poorly costed and considered recommendations for change. In particular, the report:

1. Is based on a variety of questionable economic assumptions, predictions and forecasts;

2. Is first and foremost a plan for huge cuts;

3. Sets the stage for hard-bargaining throughout the broader public service;

4. Proposes a funding framework for higher education that does not keep pace with inflation or enrolment, and as the paper admits, will lead to a decline in quality;

5. Provides recommendations for generating efficiency and savings in the higher education sector, with no evidence of how this will happen or how much it will save;

6. Proposes shifting educational cost onto students and their families; and

7. Relies on third-party policy entrepreneurs for research, much of which is incorrect.

In short, this is not the way forward for Ontario. The downturn-as-justification-for-cuts scenario is an old one, and it has been rejected by the public before. It is now critical that the Government of Ontario pursue an alternative strategy that takes into account the needs and concerns of Ontarians – a strategy that protects education, promotes effective economic and social development, and rejects the logic of austerity.

OCUFA is criticizing the report of the Drummond Commission on the Reform of Ontario’s Public Services for being long on cuts and short on insights. Taken together, Drummond’s recommendations would continue the erosion of educational quality at Ontario’s universities and colleges.

“Drummond recognizes that higher education is severely underfunded. He also recognizes that universities and colleges are the keys to social vitality and economic success,” said Constance Adamson, OCUFA President. “True ‘transformational change’ requires the courage to fund the sector at a level that allows it to succeed. By only fiddling around the margins, Drummond is proposing that higher education drive Ontario forward on a half-empty tank.”

Drummond’s chief recommendation is that government funding of universities and colleges be limited to 1.5 per cent per year. As the report itself points out, this is an effective cut to higher education funding that does not keep pace with enrolment or inflation. Ontario’s universities already receive 25 per cent less per-student funding than they did in 1990; Drummond’s recommendations will make this under-funding even worse.

Drummond’s recommendations also contain serious factual errors. He recommends that Ontario faculty contracts be brought in line with the broader public sector. In 2011, faculty compensation increases were below both the private sector and broader public sector, at 1.5 per cent. The report further recommends that faculty be given more flexibility to adjust how much teaching and research they do. Right now, almost all of Ontario faculty’s collective agreements allow them to do exactly that.

“If Drummond had bothered to ask Ontario faculty about their jobs, we could have given him a better idea of what was actually going on. As it is, his picture is incomplete,” said Adamson.

“Overall, Drummond is asking Ontario’s universities to do more with less. But in the face of steadily rising enrolment, this just means less for our students: less interaction with professors, fewer learning choices, and more barriers to young people seeking an exceptional experience.”

Chapter 7: Post-Secondary Education 

In this increasingly global marketplace, post-secondary education (PSE) remains a vital asset for Ontario, as over two-thirds of all new jobs in the province are expected to require PSE. The province’s economic growth and competitiveness will need to rely considerably on the ability of the post-secondary system to continue offering high-quality education, while accommodating significant enrolment increases.

Ontario’s PSE system has produced impressive results despite significant challenges. In 2009, 63 per cent of Ontario adults had completed some PSE, the highest such rate in the member countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

In addition, both universities and colleges combined have absorbed a 36 per cent increase in enrolment since 2002–03. Part of this increase has been the result of demographics, but it has also been fuelled by an Ontario strategy aimed at improving economic competitiveness. The government recently committed itself to raise the post-secondary attainment rate to 70 per cent by 2020.

It is also notable that, even with greater enrolment growth, more students are completing programs. Between 2002–03 and 2009–10, degree completion rates increased from 73 per cent to 79 per cent in universities and from 57 to 65 per cent in colleges.

The quality of Ontario’s post-secondary system is high, from both a Canadian and international perspective. International rankings have recognized the province’s institutions and programs for the quality of education they provide. Those same institutions, particularly universities, compete not only for students, but also for the best faculty to maintain excellence in the sector. However, to meet the challenges of rising demand for higher education at a time of constrained funding, the post-secondary system will need to become even more efficient. 240 Challenges Ahead Post-secondary education in Ontario will face significant pressures to meet five critical demands: educate a rising share of the population; help equalize economic and social outcomes across the population; provide an important component of lifelong learning; be an engine of innovation; and deliver quality education in an efficient manner.

[p. 239/240]

Challenges Ahead 

Post-secondary education in Ontario will face significant pressures to meet five critical demands: educate a rising share of the population; help equalize economic and social outcomes across the population; provide an important component of lifelong learning; be an engine of innovation; and deliver quality education in an efficient manner.

With enrolment projected to increase by an average of 1.7 per cent through to 2017–18, about one of every six adult Ontarians will be enrolled in the province’s public post-secondary institutions. The existing system has demonstrated the flexibility, capacity and willingness to accept more students. But its funding levels –– from provincial grants and tuition combined –– are the lowest in Canada, and an inevitable result of rapid expansion has been some loss in quality: more sessional instructors, larger classes, fewer projects, less contact with professors and so on.

Aside from enrolment growth, the PSE sector faces other challenges. Ontario provides its universities and colleges with the lowest per-student provincial operating grants in the country; they are lower today on a per-student basis than they were in 2006–07 for colleges and in 2007–08 for universities. This reduction has occurred while the institutions’ costs have been rising by three per cent to five per cent. Just to keep the system operating as it does now, post-secondary institutions will need both more funding and more efficiency.

To offset these costs, universities have relied on revenue from tuition fees, which are largely regulated, and interest from endowment funds and private term-limited donations, which are now depressed by low interest rates. “University administrators have coped with cost inflation through two strategies: expanding class size, and/or increasing the proportion of teaching done by part-time instructors [some of] who do not do research.”[1] In addition, the full costs of research have been covered by funnelling operating funding towards innovation.

In this knowledge-based era, education and innovation will be the key for Ontarians to be prosperous. But for Ontario to succeed in the competitive global economy where many other jurisdictions are improving their educational systems, Ontario graduates will need much more than a simple handle on facts and figures. The value added by a PSE must increasingly be the ability to think critically, to express those thoughts clearly, and to adapt and apply knowledge to new areas and tasks. Experience in using ever-changing technology is also integral to students’ preparation for the workplace.

Such challenges, combined with government spending constraints, will require our post-secondary institutions to adopt a holistic approach to dealing with these daunting issues.

[p. 240/241]

Need for Clear Objectives

A key target for the government has been to increase attainment rates. The government’s Reaching Higher plan — a $6.2 billion cumulative investment in PSE to improve access and quality — has contributed to success in meeting that target. Through Reaching Higher, over 200,000 more students, including 60,000 more apprentices, were pursuing higher education in 2010–11 than in 2002–03.

However, there is no coherent, purposeful plan that extends beyond attainment or addressing the parts as opposed to the whole system. Because the government’s formula for allocating grants to post-secondary institutions has tied funding to enrolment growth, it follows that enrolment growth has been the predominant outcome.

The role of government should be to negotiate and articulate a clear set of expectations for each institution, informed by the university’s or college’s strategic plan. This plan should outline how the institution will achieve improved quality and establish a performance measure of that expectation; it should also modify funding based on the degree to which an institution succeeds in meeting the expectations.

The government should provide grants to post-secondary institutions in a way that allows them to maintain best practices, pursue continuous improvement and improve quality across the board. Setting outcome targets based on the individual mandates of each institution is integral because it is unreasonable and potentially unproductive to expect all institutions to deliver the same results. For some institutions, government might bias the performance measures towards research output and productivity. For others, the performance matrix might be biased to excellence in undergraduate teaching. For still others, regional economic development would take on greater importance.

Research is a necessary component of higher learning. In Canada, post-secondary institutions conduct about one-third of non-government research, compared to an average of 15 per cent in the OECD and the G7. Canada’s high ratio is a direct result of huge investments by federal and provincial governments in post-secondary institutions to support research. However, all levels of government should take a focused approach and carry out an evaluation to ensure that institutions are not cross-subsidizing research at the expense of teaching. In addition, efficient funding practices should be undertaken like those identified in the 2009 Auditor General’s report on the Ontario Research Fund.

Before discussing some more specific issues with the status quo, we address two very topical matters in PSE: whether tuition freezes are in students’ interests and the balance between research and teaching excellence.

[p. 241/242]

 i) Tuition freezes are not in students’ interests

The fact that tuition fees are rising faster than inflation is troubling. It is imperative to first ensure that post-secondary institutions are being run extremely efficiently; tuition revenue should represent a good investment for students. Institutions and government must continue their efforts to ensure that access is not impaired by financial barriers to education. However, the reality is that tuition freezes are not in students’ interests.

The likely result is a further marked deterioration in the student experience, meaning larger classes, with fewer opportunities to debate and develop critical thinking skills. This position is supported by a tuition policy study conducted for the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation, which concluded that “freezes, reductions or eliminations of fees”[2] can have a negative impact on education quality while placing greater strain on institutions. Freezing tuition now reduces revenues at a time of constrained government funding; institutions will find other ways to make up for lost potential revenues, resulting in lower-quality PSE.

ii) Research efforts should not trump the teaching experience

As federal government support for research tripled between 1997 and 2003, universities responded universally. Most universities (and, more recently, some colleges) have elected to pursue the myriad federal and provincial research dollars available, all in the name of becoming “world-class research centres.” The reality is that few of Ontario’s research centres will become the best in Canada, never mind the world. Many, however, have gone so far as to apply cross-subsidies within their institutions, effectively taking money from undergraduate tuition revenues to further support research. Increasingly, institutions are allowing professors to sacrifice teaching commitments to conduct more research, as has been noted in books such as Academic Reform. Clearly, there must be a better balance; excellent research should not trump excellent teaching.

Status Quo Is Unsustainable

The confluence of sustained enrolment growth, lower revenue streams from investment income and higher costs driven by compensation has led to the realization that even maintaining the status quo requires increased efficiency and system reform. Internal rates of inflation at post-secondary institutions, which is the cost of continuing to do the same thing, average three to five per cent. The current system is unsustainable from a financial and quality perspective, as enrolment growth crowds out the funding that is available even to maintain the status quo.

[p. 242/243]

Perceptions differ on what constitutes teaching quality, but Ontario’s post-secondary sector faces issues such as increasing reliance on part-time faculty, larger class sizes (which might not be conducive to students’ engagement in education) and full-time faculty who do less teaching than a decade ago.[3]

“Many Canadians are becoming concerned about the quality of teaching and learning in our universities. Similar worries are being voiced in the United States, where studies like those described in the recent book, Academically Adrift, have suggested that, for many students, four years of university produces little or no measurable improvement in writing skills, critical thinking or complex reasoning.” Ian Clark, “Improving Undergraduate Education in Canada – The Good and Not So Good News,” Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, Nov. 21, 2011.

Ontario is not alone in this. A recent study from the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada identifies the following challenges nationwide: “the overall size of many universities, which has become problematic; large class sizes and an increasing student-teacher ratio; and limited student-faculty interaction.”[4]  However, Ontario could do better in terms of quality with existing resources.

Transformational change is needed to afford a high-quality system with appropriate access. Among the challenges is the need to address quality deficiencies, especially at the undergraduate level.

[p. 243/244]

Thrust of Our Recommendations 

The Commission recommends the following:

1. Contain government funding and institutional expenses;

2. Use differentiation to improve post-secondary quality and achieve financial sustainability;

3. Encourage and reward quality;

4. Revise research funding structures;

5. Maintain the current overall cap on tuition-fee increases, but simplify the framework;

6. Re-evaluate student financial assistance; and

7. Generate cost efficiencies through measures such as integrating administrative and back-office functions.

Training is addressed in Chapter 9, Employment and Training Services.

Contain Government Funding and Institutional Expenses

The Ontario government has played catch-up for post-secondary sector funding through the implementation of the $6.2 billion Reaching Higher program and additional infrastructure investment. Currently, about 46 per cent of total university operating revenue and 47 per cent of college operating revenue is provided through government operating grants. Institutions also rely on other sources of funding such as tuition, interest from endowments and ancillary fees. Based on 2008–09 data, tuition fees accounted for about 37 per cent of total institutional operating revenues.

The province’s current fiscal situation has added an additional challenge, as grants to postsecondary institutions and other sectors must be constrained for the government’s budget to return to balance by 2017–18.

Recommendation 7-1: Grow government funding for the post-secondary education sector by 1.5 per cent per year until 2017–18.

Such growth means that grants will not keep pace with projected enrolment growth of 1.7 per cent per year, nor with the general rate of inflation, never mind with the institutions’ historical internal rates of inflation. Nevertheless, our recommendation protects annual growth in post-secondary funding at a time when many other public services will be rationalized.

[p. 244/245]

[chart 7.1: University and College Per-Student Funding in

Ontario since the 1990s (not adjusted for inflation)]

Ontario’s post-secondary institutions must become more efficient to preserve, if not enhance, quality within tighter financing conditions.

Recommendation 7-2: Work with post-secondary institutions to reduce bargained compensation increases, where they exist, and instead align them with trends in more recent settlements in the broader public sector; a rigorous performance system should also be introduced to guide compensation, where one is not already in place.

Salaries, wages and benefits now account for about three-quarters of university and college expenditures, with annual cost inflation in the sector projected at three to five per cent.

[p. 245/246]

[chart 7.2: Increase in Total Expenditure per Fiscal Full-Time Equivalent

(FFTE) in Ontario Universities from 2004-05 to 2009-10]

Recommendation 7-3: If capital budgets are constrained, post-secondary institutions should consider using alternative financing and procurement, especially for buildings that do not qualify for government funding, such as residences.

Residences provide an identified revenue flow, which make them promising as alternative financing procurement projects for private partners.

Increase Differentiation through Establishing Mandate Agreements

The current design of Ontario’s public university and college system was largely established by the late 1960s. Both systems have grown since then and the mandate of colleges has increasingly evolved to include some degree-granting powers, blurring the original rationale for creating the college system as discrete from universities.

Recommendation 7-4: By 2012–13, establish multi-year mandate agreements with universities and colleges that provide more differentiation and minimize duplication; these should be implemented beginning in 2013–14.

Not every institution needs to become a comprehensive research university, nor does each college require new degree-granting authority. The primary intent of further differentiation is to provide clarity to the system in terms of mandates.

[p. 246/247]

“For learners, greater differentiation of Ontario’s university sector offers clearer choices from a larger number of high quality programs, clarifies the institutions that best serve their career and personal aspirations, and facilitates mobility and transitions between institutions and Ontario’s post-secondary system.” Harvey Weingarten, President and CEO, Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario.

Differentiation is not a panacea for all the system’s issues but simply a logical progression to improve quality and sustainability. Inherent in differentiation is the potential for reducing inefficiencies and realizing cost savings by minimizing further duplication of programs.

Recommendation 7-5: Institute a process for establishing mandate agreements using a review by either a blue-ribbon panel or the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario to ensure the highest-quality programs are funded to grow and expand. This should be completed in the 2012–13 fiscal year and must be transparent for the institutions and the public.

Recommendation 7-6: Establish and implement a rational and strategic division of roles between the college and university systems.

This division of roles would include the following features:

• Colleges and universities should agree on a standard of educational attainment and quality that would allow college students who have completed two years and meet predetermined academic achievement criteria to transfer into the university system;
• Colleges should not be granted any new degree programs, but should have existing programs grandfathered;
• New programs at any post-secondary institution should not be approved by government until the development of multi-year mandate agreements is complete;
• When considering future growth, the creation of new professional and specialized programs such as law, medicine and business should not be approved without a compelling business case; and
• The Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology should work with the College of Trades to optimize the delivery of apprentice training in non-degree programs (see Chapter 9, Employment and Training Services, for details on the College of Trades).

Recommendation 7-7: Create a comprehensive, enforceable credit recognition system between and among universities and colleges. This is an absolutely essential feature of differentiation.

[p. 247/248]

When students want to transfer from one university to another or from one college to another in comparable programs, they should be able to transfer a good number of credits.  The decision on credit transferability should be communicated in a timely manner.  Residency clauses, which, for example, require students to take 75 per cent of their credits at one institution to receive a degree from that institution, will also need to be revised to facilitate ease of transfer between institutions.

In the 2011 Budget, the government invested $73.7 million over five years for credit transfer but more work must be done to ensure that colleges and universities comply and expand credit-transfer agreements.

Furthermore, a two-way credit-transfer system between colleges and universities is also required, given the number of students who choose college post-university and those who choose university post-college.

Encourage and Reward Quality

Beyond the use of differentiation to support quality, the Commission proposes several specific initiatives. Evidence from student surveys on the quality of their learning experience, such as the National Survey of Student Engagement, has shown dissatisfaction with large class sizes and inadequate library facilities, to name a few.

The Commission highlights three specific areas that should be addressed:

I. Refocus resources and rewards towards teaching in post-secondary institutions;

II. Refocus provincial funding to reward teaching excellence; and

III. Establish a performance regime in mandate agreements that include certain quality indicators.

I) Refocus resources and rewards towards teaching in post-secondary institutions

Recommendation 7-8: Post-secondary institutions need to devote more resources to experiential learning such as internships; allow for more independent or self-assigned study; develop problem-based learning modules; and increase study abroad and international experiences.[5]  Many institutions already incorporate these features into their programs, funding them from within existing portfolios.

A future funding model should contemplate such alternative approaches to furthering the five objectives of post-secondary institutions we have identified above.

[p. 248/249]

Recommendation 7-9: Encourage universities that do not presently have flexible provisions regarding teaching and research workloads in their collective agreements with faculty to consider such provisions in future bargaining. While each university must conduct teaching and research, top-performing teachers and researchers should be recognized with the appropriate workloads and rewards.

Progress on this front should be noted: 11 Ontario universities already have such flexibility.[6]  These successful practices should be continued and mirrored in the remaining complement of post-secondary institutions.

Some institutions have also experimented with alternate career paths, including formalizing teaching-only or research-only streams. We consider this to be a viable option for topperforming teachers and top-performing researchers.

Recommendation 7-10: Have post-secondary institutions redesign incentive systems to reward excellent teachers, as is currently done for researchers.

Teachers should also be rewarded for developing innovative methods of teaching and learning, with tenure and promotion linked to innovation. “Safe spaces” should be created for faculty to try innovative approaches to teaching, and these attempts at innovation should be included in merit reviews. This innovation should be supported through funding and other types of recognition. Successful models can then be scaled up and shared, both within the institution and with others. This would encourage new forms of campus culture to develop and lead to more interactions between teachers and students.

II) Refocus provincial funding to reward teaching excellence

Recommendation 7-11: Link further provincial funding allocations to quality objectives, which will encourage post-secondary institutions to be more responsive. In addition, the province should alter the funding model to also reward degrees awarded, rather than just enrolment levels.

Because higher enrolment generates higher funding, the current funding framework encourages post-secondary institutions to increase enrolment.

Recommendation 7-12: Government and post-secondary institutions must measure learning outcomes; that is, the value added through education, not just whether a person graduates.

[p. 249/250]

Graduating from a post-secondary institution should not simply be an indication of a student’s ability to master certain facts and figures (most of which can be memorized even if not understood). The capacity to integrate ideas and create innovative solutions to problems is at the heart of the higher education experience. This will be critical to the economic and social success of Ontario, in an economy where graduates will be working over their career in ways that cannot even be imagined now.

This approach will require ensuring that academic standards for graduation are maintained and remain in line with provincial performance metrics. This should create an incentive for schools to make the learning experience as relevant as possible, leading to more students remaining in school and higher graduation rates.

III) Establish a performance regime in mandate agreements that includes certain quality indicators

Considerable progress has been made in establishing common indicators between the Council of Ontario Universities and the multi-year accountability agreements set by the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities (MTCU) with universities. System-wide indicators for universities in 2009–10 include indicators of credit transfer system use, participation rates of under-represented communities, space utilization and class size. Outcome indicators such as university student satisfaction, rates of graduation and post-graduation employment are also used, while Colleges Ontario has a broad set of indicators including employer satisfaction with recent college graduates’ skills and performance. However, the underlying measures used to indicate the quality of the learning environment should be enhanced for both universities and colleges.

Recommendation 7-13: Enhance performance measures in multi-year accountability agreements with post-secondary institutions through the use of teacher performance scores and student satisfaction ratings where the primary reasons for dissatisfaction are adequately captured.

Recommendation 7-14: Work with private career colleges (PCCs) to collect and publish the same performance indicators as public colleges and universities. Private career colleges should bear the cost of such reporting.

This can be done through regulation on the part of the Ontario government or through a Delegated Administrative Authority (DAA) vehicle by enlisting an association such as the Ontario Association of Career Colleges or some other comparable body to provide oversight and ensure accountability.

[p. 250/251]

No data have been collected or published on the student experience in PCCs since 2006.[7]  That leaves prospective students very vulnerable to institutions that do not provide a reasonable student experience, including reasonable prospects of studies leading to a job.

Recommendation 7-15: As a part of the mandate agreements with post-secondary institutions, tie outcome quality indicators to funding.

Since post-secondary institutions are multi-faceted, producing educated students, research and innovation, and local economic development, there should be a more all-encompassing method of measuring outcomes and linking funding to the results. Beyond the indicator improvements suggested above, efforts should be made to ensure that the funding agreements cannot be gamed through the provision of watered-down degrees.

Revise Research Funding Structures

Recommendation 7-16: Evaluate the research funding system of post-secondary institutions and research hospitals as a whole, including how it is affecting university and hospital budgeting practices.

The federal government, which to its credit prompted the surge in university-based research, does not cover all associated research costs. As a result, universities subsidize research from other sources. The review should also analyze commercialization outcomes of research and development investments. “The ability of Canadian universities to commercialize remains very weak, as research suggests that U.S. universities perform about 14 times as much research as Canadian universities, but receive 49 times as much licensing income –– a key indicator of the value of innovations.”[8] The Commission sees great value in investments through the Early Researcher Award and the Ontario Research Fund — Research Infrastructure program (the provincial component of the federal Canada Foundation for Innovation investment).

Recommendation 7-17: Award provincial research funding more strategically and manage it more efficiently. Consolidating and offering a single-window approach for access and reporting through an online portal will greatly improve efficiency and reduce paperwork, both for government and for post-secondary institutions.

Maintain Current Tuition Fee Increases but Simplify the Framework

Recommendation 7-18: Maintain the existing tuition framework, which allows annual tuition increases of five per cent. However, simplify the design to maintain the overall ceiling but allow institutions greater flexibility to adjust tuition fees at the program level, within the ceiling.

[p. 251/252]

Currently, the tuition framework allows, among other conditions, a maximum annual percentage increase for new students for first-entry undergraduate programs and another, slightly higher, percentage increase for professional and graduate programs. The result is a complex fee administration with different fees for different programs, and, for any particular program, a different fee for every cohort of students. The maximum total fee increase each year (all programs, all years) may not exceed five per cent. The multitude of corollary conditions should be removed while maintaining the overall tuition increase ceiling.

Re-evaluate Student Financial Assistance

Tuition increases must not come at the expense of student affordability and access.  A necessary complement to maintaining the current tuition framework is an improvement to the student loan financing system. The federal and Ontario governments spend billions on student financial assistance. The total will rise by almost another $0.5 billion when the new 30% Off Ontario Tuition[9] grant matures.

In 2009–10, total Canadian student financial assistance was $8.3 billion (in 2010 dollars).  Most student loans are repaid, so from a fiscal perspective it is relevant to look at the total excluding loans, which was $5.1 billion. Of that, $3.4 billion was not directly related to need, with $2.4 billion of tax measures being the largest component. By way of comparison, total tuition revenue for universities and colleges was $5.8 billion in 2010.

The corresponding numbers for Ontario (including the portion of federal assistance accruing to Ontario recipients) were $4.0 billion of total assistance, or $2.2 billion excluding student loans.  Of that, $1.4 billion was not related to need, with tax measures accounting for $1.0 billion.  Tuition revenue in Ontario was $3.0 billion in 2010.[10]

This funding, however, is not focused on lower-income students whose access is most likely to be compromised by financial considerations. Indeed, the combined impact of all forms of assistance including student loans, loan remissions, grants and bursaries, tax credits, savings incentives and summer employment subsidies provides little more for students of the lowest-income families than those of the best-off.[11]

[p. 252/253]

Further, the student support system is not consistent with the ample evidence that family income is not the most serious access problem. Statistics Canada’s Youth in Transition Survey and work commissioned by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) show having no family history of college or university is the most significant obstacle to PSE.[12]

Income seems to be even less of a deterrent in Ontario than in other provinces. An evidence-based approach to access would suggest that more attention be devoted to “improving student motivation and performance at (or before) the high school level, providing better information to students and their families about the costs and benefits of education from an early age and carrying out other interventions targeted at the early-rooted and family-based factors that seem to be the most important determinants of access.”[13] Addressing the most acute access issues then becomes very much an issue for the elementary and secondary school system, in conjunction with post-secondary institutions, community organizations and businesses.

Recommendation 7-19: Maintain the Ontario Student Access Guarantee, which represents 10 per cent of additional tuition revenue that institutions are required to set aside to fund bursaries and other student assistance programs.

Recommendation 7-20: Reshape student financial assistance provided by both the federal and provincial governments, including the newly announced 30% Off Ontario Tuition grant, to target more of the assistance to low-income students whose access is most likely to be compromised by financial obstacles and broaden the approach to improving access to post-secondary education.

In its present form, the 30% Off Ontario Tuition grant will be provided to students whose family income is less than $160,000. Student financial assistance should be redirected towards those who need it most.

Recommendation 7-21: Explore phasing out provincial tuition and education tax credits to invest in upfront grants.

[p. 253/254]

Although tax credits are intended to provide assistance to all post-secondary students –– by recognizing for tax purposes amounts spent on PSE –– the timing of providing financial aid to students through tuition credits is inconsistent with promoting accessibility or affordability. Students typically accrue most of their expenses at the start of the first semester while tuition credits arrive at the end of the academic year because their timing is governed by the annual cycle of tax filing and refunds.

As for universal government transfers, a report prepared for the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation in 2007 concludes that the tuition and education tax credits do not encourage participation in PSE and are costly given the fact that they are “at best neutral and at worst regressive.” The report further concludes that “eliminating credits would create an opportunity to use these funds in less regressive ways and allow for some effective restructuring of Canada’s ‘complex web of student financial aid systems.’”[14]

Recommendation 7-22: Streamline student financial assistance by decoupling loans and grants. Eligibility for grants should not be contingent on loan applications.

Students may be eligible for a grant and a loan, but might be unaware of the grant availability unless they have already applied for a loan through the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP). Currently, students who are required to apply for OSAP loans to gain access to their grants often repay these loans immediately simply to get the grant that is tied to the loan.

Recommendation 7-23: Harmonize the variety of scholarships, grants and other assistance programs that the government offers, into already-existing programs of a similar nature, across post-secondary institutions.

Recommendation 7-24: Lower the current 25 per cent Ontario Student Assistance Program default-rate threshold for triggering cost-sharing to 20 per cent for all post-secondary institutions in Ontario and work with institutions towards the objective of setting a still-lower threshold in future.

Any school exceeding this threshold would be required to reimburse the province for default costs above the threshold. Although progress has been made in lowering default rates across the system, more can be done to ensure that a relevant education is provided that will lead to jobs and protect taxpayers.

[p. 254/255]

The average OSAP default rate for PCCs now stands at 13.0 per cent, while the rates for universities and colleges are far lower at 3.7 per cent and 10.6 per cent respectively. The high default rates for PCCs mean the exposure of taxpayers is substantial. Through OSAP, almost $200 million in loans and grants were provided to an annual average of 9,500 PCC students over the last three academic years.[15] In addition, the government provides $350 million per year through employment and training supports.

Recommendation 7-25: Extend the review period for Ontario Student Assistance Program default rates, which are now measured roughly two years after borrowers start repaying.

The government should track repayment beyond the third year after school is completed, looking at defaults that occur in the fourth through sixth years. Default rates recorded over this longer period should be applied to the default cost-sharing.

Any institution subject to cost-sharing for two consecutive years would be placed on probation and would be required to submit to the MTCU, as well as to implement, a plan for reducing its default rates below the 20 per cent threshold.

Generate Cost Efficiencies through Measures such as Integrating Administrative and Back-Office Functions

Recommendation 7-26: Have the post-secondary sector leverage its existing collective purchasing capacity through the Ontario Education Collaborative Marketplace and regional buying groups.

This move would enable a co-ordinated approach to strategic sourcing, contract management and product/process standardization. This would be similar to other collective back-office functions such as the student application process, administered through the Ontario University Application Centre (OUAC) for all universities, or the Ontario College Application Services (OCAS) for all colleges.

Recommendation 7-27: Establish a single pension fund administrator for all university and college pensions, while recognizing differences in pensions.

Most hospitals, colleges, municipalities and school boards now operate as separate employers but participate in a single pension plan. All Ontario colleges take part in the Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology (CAAT) Pension Plan, which is administered by an independent, arm’s-length board. The CAAT Pension Plan has assets of about $5.5 billion.

[p. 255/256]

In comparison, Ontario’s university sector has a very fragmented pension arrangement with more pension plans than institutions –– 29 pension plans for 23 institutions, 17 defined benefit plans, four defined contribution plans and eight hybrid plans (a defined contribution plan with a defined benefit floor). These plans vary widely in the benefits they provide and the contributions made by employers and plan members. There is also wide variation in the size of these plans. The market value of assets ranges from about $15 million to about $2 billion. In total, the sector has about $10 billion in assets.

This fragmented arrangement means that each university administers its own pension plan(s), which implies that each institution may not be realizing the economies of scale that would result if this function were more centralized. In view of this arrangement, the consolidation of administrative processes and practices, including the pooling of assets for investment purposes, may generate savings for the sector.

With a consolidated approach, the administrative function would be carried out by another body. However, each employer/sponsor would remain the legal administrator of its plan, retain its fiduciary responsibilities and determine plan benefits, while minimizing costs.

The 2011 Budget announced the government’s intention to undertake a review of singleemployer, public-sector pension plans, with one goal being to pursue greater efficiencies in plan administration. We support this undertaking; consolidation of the administrative functions among all pension plans may achieve greater cost savings.

Recommendation 7-28: Before new capital spaces are approved, require universities and colleges to demonstrate increased use of space and consider year-round optimization of existing spaces.  Priority should be given to the deferred maintenance in the current capital stock before new capital projects.

Any campus expansions funded by the province should be viewed through a return-on-investment lens. Factors such as the increase in productivity for the institution through a better learning experience for students, energy cost reductions through the use of renewable energy sources and energy-efficient building design should be considered. Currently, the principal driver for expansion may be increases in enrolment, and while energy conservation aspects may be part of the building design, they are not integral to the productivity outcomes expected from the expansion.

Recommendation 7-29: Compel post-secondary institutions to examine whether they can compress some four-year degrees into three years by continuing throughout the summer.

[p. 256/257]

This could improve the facility efficiency and reduce the opportunity cost for students. As many students work in the summer, the four-year degree should not be abandoned, but instead the three-year option should be made available to those with the desire and capacity to pursue it, in much the same way that co-operative education streams are available in some programs.

Recommendation 7-30: Cease funding for international marketing of Ontario’s universities and integrate it into existing trade mission activities. Universities, colleges and the federal government already invest in these activities.

[p. 257/258]

Conclusion

We believe our recommendations address the five significant pressures facing PSE in Ontario. These include educating a growing share of the population; helping to equalize economic and social outcomes across the population; providing an important component of lifelong learning; being an engine of innovation; and delivering quality education, especially with a constrained provincial fiscal situation.

The status quo is unsustainable and the proposed reforms matter, as they clarify the roles of our post-secondary institutions and government. Taken together, the reforms present a holistic approach for a sector that we recommend will receive funding growth of only 1.5 per cent per year to 2017–18.

If the cost containment measures recommended here are not enough to allow the ministry to live within the 1.5 per cent growth annually, then it will be necessary to eliminate the 30% Off Ontario Tuition grant. The government’s highest priority should be to fully fund the operating grants for colleges and universities contained in the individual institutions’ new multi-year mandate agreements, followed by existing capital commitments. This will ensure Ontario’s PSE institutions continue to focus on delivering quality education, which will in turn benefit students academically and provide the brand recognition that will serve them in their future careers.

The challenge is for post-secondary institutions to do more with what they have and make the education even more relevant for the undergraduate experience. Differentiation is the next logical step for our post-secondary system. Within that clarification lies the potential for more than simply increased efficiencies, but also support for education quality.

For the individual, PSE represents an opportunity to equalize economic and social outcomes and provide real private returns with social spillover effects. This requires some contribution from individuals, not only financially but also academically. For the public, our economic competitiveness hinges on our post-secondary sector and, as such, our recommendations guide the sector to achieve a more cost-efficient, affordable and higher-quality system, with modest funding growth.

[Notes]

Attendance at the January meeting was good, filling Watson 217. Some people sat on steps or stood in the back of the room, so it was challenging to get an accurate count. Objections and corrections were made to the minutes for 9 December.  Mr. Jones (English) claimed that the minutes “need to be more detailed and accurate.”  He said that “Instead of describing discussion in the style ‘there was considerable discussion about X,’ the minutes should record statements, such as ‘Mr. X claimed Y’ or ‘someone claimed Y.’  In other words, specific arguments need to be preserved in the minutes, especially on new or contentious issues where the Faculty is finding its way.”  He proposed several additions to the minutes, including the following:

• “Page 6, Section 6, re Question Period:   Not even mentioned in the Minutes is a question concerning Blyth that was asked by Ms. Davies (Philosophy and Gender Studies).  She noted that faculty members not employed by Blyth have been asked by members of the Arts and Science Faculty Office interested in the development Blyth’s for-profit programs to share syllabi or other material for courses taught at Queen’s.  She asked whether the University or Faculty of Arts and Science could assure faculty that their intellectual property rights will be respected.  To this question the Dean answered ‘yes.’   This is an important exchange that needs to be recorded in the minutes.”
• “Page 7, Section 8, ‘Motion’:  The ‘Statement’ quoted on p. 7 needs to be attributed.  It was read out by Mr. Jones on behalf of 62 signatories.” (See “http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/bfaadmissionsstatement/signatures.”)
• “The Dean and the Head of History both denied that Function ‘D’ of Faculty Board, ‘to control registration,’ had been overridden when the Dean unilaterally froze admissions.  They both claimed that ‘registration’ and ‘admission’ are completely different things.”
• “There was a great deal of testimony from both BFA students and BFA faculty to the vitality and importance of the BFA program.”
• “Strong objections were made to the Dean’s shutting down of admissions on the basis of one half-time retirement two years away, when, as the Dean of Arts and Science admitted, the teaching role of that half-time instructor could be filled at least for a year by hiring an adjunct for around $25,000.”
• “These specific points need to be recorded in the minutes.  More generally, the minutes need to represent the various viewpoints with more detail and accuracy.”

Debate ensued about what level of detail is appropriate for Faculty Board minutes.  Mr. Nielsen (Mathematics) pointed out that minutes can be detailed or abbreviated, and that Faculty Board decided long ago to use an abbreviated style.  He said it would be inappropriate to change this suddenly for the present case.  Mr. Jones objected that while abbreviation may be appropriate for routine business, detail is appropriate for new or contentious business where Faculty Board is finding its way.  Mr. Holmes (Geography) observed that his own comments concerning Blyth in the meeting of 9 December had not been accurately represented, and that the 9 December minutes give five pages [pp. 1-5] to the Dean’s report and only one page [p. 7] to the BFA motion and its extensive discussion.

Faculty Board did not approve the minutes but agreed to bring a revision to the following meeting for approval.  Mr. Jones agreed to transmit his corrections in writing.

BFA Motion.  Under “Business Arising from the Minutes,” Mr. Jones made the following statement and requested that it be inserted into the minutes:

The practice of letting Faculty Board move motions and then refusing to comply with them brings into question whether we have a democratic process or merely democratic  window-dressing for an autocratic process.  Putting aside for a moment the question at the root of all this, i.e., whether the upper administration has the right to make decisions that have both financial and academic impacts without consulting the Faculty Board and Senate as the representatives of the academic view—putting that question aside, I believe that where the Dean’s office does not feel that a Faculty Board motion is in order, or where it believes that it cannot comply with a motion under consideration, its proper recourse is not to let the motion pass and then ignore it.  The proper recourse would be to declare the motion to be out of order and let the faculty board decide whether that is indeed the case.  Once the motion is passed, faculty board has an obligation to see it enacted.  Faculty Board uses Bourinot’s rules, and the rules state:

The democratic right to introduce a proposition in the form of a motion, and to have a full debate and a free vote on the matter, carries with it an obligation on the part of the majority to respect its own decisions, just as the minority is obliged to accept and respect the decisions of the majority.  In other words, a decision reached by due process must be recognized and observed as such by all concerned; if it calls for action, that action must be taken. (Geoffrey Stanford, Bourinot’s Rules of Order, 4^th ed. (M&S, 1995), pp. 47-48)

I also object to the grounds upon which the Dean has refused to act in accordance with the December motion.  He is quoted in the Queen’s Journal as saying:

“The fact that there was a majority is, in a sense, irrelevant because it is not in the authority of Faculty Board to rule in a resource issue.”

and:

“This came up two or three years ago and the legal ruling is the same as Diane Kelly gave in Senate. The authority is not that of Faculty Board or Senate.”  (Queen’s Journal, 13 Dec. 2011)

Concerning the first point, the problem is that the freezing of BFA admissions is not solely “a resource issue.”  It has a resource aspect, over which the Board of Trustees and the upper Administrators have authority, but it also has an academic aspect, over which Faculty Board and Senate (students and faculty) have authority.  Concerning the second point, what the Dean has invoked as a “legal ruling” by the university counsel Diane Kelly is not a “ruling” but a legal opinion.  There is a vast legal difference between the two.  Ms. Kelly’s opinion [see Senate minutes for April 2009 p. 3; also Senate minutes for November 2011] is one among others, and the opinion of noted constitutional expert David Mullan is in clear disagreement with it.  There is a notice of motion in Senate asking that Senate take steps to resolve this disagreement.

Mr. Jones then asked the Dean the following question:

We are dealing here with a confusing set of questions concerning what is to be done in a bicameral institution when decisions have to be made that have both financial and academic impacts.  In these cases it is understandable that there will be disagreements.  But to work these out fairly it is all the more important that we follow the processes that we do have.  In order to clarify these processes for future reference, I ask the Dean of Arts and Science whether it is better to declare a Faculty Board motion out of order and deal with it as such on the floor of Faculty Board, or whether it is better to treat it as a valid motion in Faculty Board and then ignore it as an invalid motion outside of Faculty Board.

The Dean admitted that he had believed the motion to be invalid, at least in parts, at the time, but he said he had decided to let the motion proceed on the grounds that it was good for Faculty Board to have the discussion of the issue.  Ms. Davies observed that it is important to conduct discussions under the understanding that they are discussions (as opposed to representing them as votes), and that it is important for the procedures of Faculty Board to be clear and transparent.  Mr. Jones noted that a vote resembles a gamble in that if one loses one must still respect the decision, just as one would have expected the other side to respect the decision if they had lost.  According to Bourinot’s Rules, pp. 47-48, he repeated, Faculty Board had an obligation to enforce its motion.  He also pointed out that the difficulties for the Dean in obeying the motion were not nearly so great as pretended.  The motion, he noted, allows that the admissions freeze may be re-imposed so long as it is done with proper academic consultation.  He said that the motion did not envision giving Faculty Board unilateral authority over the matter, but required only that in such a decision, which had both financial and academic impacts, the Deans should have to consult not just with their financial advisors (the Board of Trustees) but also with their academic advisors (Faculty Board and Senate).

Ms. Mercier (Philosophy) suggested that since the 9 December vote had been taken, Faculty Board’s  obligation to enforce the passed motion was real, even if the motion itself was technically invalid.  She suggested a motion that Faculty Board seek a legal “decision” or “opinion” on whether the motion was a valid motion and whether Faculty Board was obliged to support it.  Mr. Baird (Chemistry) objected that such an opinion would come too late to be relevant to the BFA Admissions Freeze.  Ms. Mercier responded that it would be useful to discover in principle whether motions such as the 9 December motion are valid and how they should be treated. Next, Ms. Hosek (Modern Languages) moved that Faculty Board vote to allow Ms. Mercier’s motion on the floor. Ms. Lamb (Music) seconded the motion. Unfortunately, many people did not distinguish between the procedural motion to allow discussion and the substantive motion by Ms. Mercier. Thus the discussion was confused—some discussing the substantive motion rather than the procedural motion. Clear leadership from the Chair of Faculty Board would have been appreciated at this point. Faculty Board regulations require that a procedural motion to allow discussion of substantive motion from the floor receives 2/3 approval in order to pass, and this motion failed because only 65.6% of those present voted in favour.  Mr. Morelli (Physics) pointed out that this failure to obtain the required 2/3 majority does not prevent faculty from giving notice of the same motion for the next Faculty Board meeting.   After the vote, the Chair acknowledged that Faculty Board needs more clarity in its procedures and stated these would be dealt with by the Procedures Committee. While there seemed to be general agreement that procedures need to be clear and transparent, there was some disagreement regarding how.

Before reaching the point of voting on the procedural motion, Faculty Board did approve extending the meeting by 30 minutes to 5:30 p.m. Once the vote had been completed the remaining Faculty Board business was completed quickly. Mr. Greenfield (History) raised concerns regarding the negative impact of the Queen’s 4.3 grading scale on undergraduate students in the humanities, and the great and sudden increase in numbers of undergraduates on the Dean’s Honour List, once the 4.3 grading scale was implemented. Faculty Board adjourned at 5:20 p.m.

Dear Stakeholder,

Whether you are a student, faculty, support staff, or simply a member of the local community whose business and cultural life is enriched by the continuing existence of this institution: this is to you.

Queen’s is in trouble. For the most part it’s not trouble specific to Queen’s, although our university has its share of specific problems, in particular a recent history of gross misallocation of resources leading to a parlous financial state that has been used time and again as a weapon in negotiations between the board of trustees, and everyone else to whom Queen’s means so much more than a business.

The summer passed with contract negotiations that saw professors and support staff substantially worse off. The fall saw the effective cancellation of the Bachelor of Fine Arts program, due to the inability to hire a single new tenured faculty professor to replace the one retiring to emeritus status. Across all departments virtually no new professors are being hired and adjuncts have been laid off. Tuition and class sizes continue to increase as clickers proliferate to make 1000-student survey courses ‘interactive’. Students are paying more for less, while faculty work harder for less, and both parties are told there is no money even while grandiose construction projects are started one after the other. There is money to renovate the commerce building, of relatively recent construction, while the BFA program is housed in a building with a leaky roof.

Little of this is unique to Queen’s, rather, it increasingly characterizes higher education in North America today. Tenure is being phased out in favour of single-course contracts–with devastating results for academic freedom, as well as research, teaching, and learning. Funding for humanities and arts is drying up, while schools of commerce, management and technology flourish. Increasingly, putative market-place advantages and short-term efficiencies are the sole determinants of academic decision-making.

We don’t pretend to have easy answers to the many problems confronting Queen’s. We do want the entire university community to be involved in shaping solutions.

Therefore, first and foremost, we say it is necessary to ask questions about governance structure. As in many North American institutions, at Queen’s, ultimate authority rests with an appointed board of trustees, with elected bodies such as the university senate playing roles that are at best advisory, and frequently purely symbolic. A closed decision making process leaves open the door to the many ills of autocracy: lack of accountability, failures in judgement, and outright corruption. A profit model begs the question of who profits.

Queen’s is not a corporation, but a school. We all know that, it seems obvious, but it also seems like it’s being forgotten. We are inviting everyone to a conversation about the best ways to run educational institutions … and if business is really the best model to follow.

Because this is a conversation we should be having.

For more information:

• General Assemblies: Grey House, Bader Lane, 4:00 p.m. Mondays
• Facebook: “Occupy Queen’s”:  https://www.facebook.com/pages/Occupy-Queens-University/218000281609385
• Website: http://www.occupykingston.ca/occupyqueensu/

Whereas the Federation’s Arts and Education policy clearly states that the Federation “strongly opposes any move by a post-secondary institution to cutback or eliminate Fine, Applied or Performing Arts Programs from its curriculum”; and

Whereas, via this same policy, we recognize that “the arts are an integral part of Canadian culture,” and of education in Canada; and

Whereas enrolment in Queen’s Bachelor of Fine Arts Program has increased by 50% in the last year; and

Whereas the Program underwent a process of restructuring in 2008, on Queen’s Administration’s behest, to reduce staffing needs due to a planned funding shortage, and in order to maintain the Program; and

Whereas Queen’s University recently announced the suspension of their Bachelor of Fine Arts Program due to the staffing shortages coming out of the above mentioned process of restructuring; therefore

Be it resolved that a letter be written to Queen’s University Principal Daniel Woolf to demand the immediate reversal of Queen’s University decision to suspend their Bachelor of Fine Arts Program, and that all future program freezes, closures, and amalgamations, be submitted before Senate for approval, prior to implementation; and

Be it further resolved that member locals be encouraged to send similar letters to Queen’s University Principal Daniel Woolf.

The Society of Graduate and Professional Students (SGPS) at Queen’s passed the following Motion on 13 December 2011:

Moved: Anne‐Marie Grondin (vpcca@sgps.ca)

Seconded: Jillian Burford-Grinnell (president@sgps.ca)

WHEREAS Queen’s recently and unilaterally suspended new admissions and upper-year transfers to the Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) program for the 2012-13 academic year based on an assessment of the faculty resources available to support the program; and

WHEREAS this decision sets a precedent for future closures, freezes, and amalgamations of undergraduate and graduate programs at Queen’s; and

WHEREAS, under the “Purpose and Functions of Senate,” the central function of Queen’s Senate is to “determine all matters of an academic character that affect the University as a whole”; and

WHEREAS Senate is also authorized to “approve university-level policies relating to the academic mission and academic services including but not limited to policies related to admissions”; and

WHEREAS a petition is currently being circulated by campus community members asking that “the BFA admissions-freeze and all such contemplated freezes, closures, and amalgamations be henceforth submitted to the proper authority of Queen’s Senate for approval,” that “all such policy decisions (…) be based not only on financial or ‘resources’ criteria but on long-range academic considerations,” and that the broader Queen’s community be consulted in the process; and

WHEREAS a motion was passed at a recent annual general meeting of the Canadian Federation of Students tasking the CFS Executive to write a letter to Queen’s Administration asking that the aforementioned decision-making process be respected; therefore

Be it resolved that Council endorse a letter to Queen’s Senate requesting that admission freezes, closures, and amalgamations henceforth be considered by Senate and be given academic as well as financial consideration.

Be it further resolved that individual Councilors be encouraged to sign the petition to this same effect http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/noclosurewithoutprocess/.

Dear Colleagues:

There is a revealing story just out in Queen’s Journal concerning Friday’s Faculty Board motion to rescind the BFA Freeze:

http://queensjournal.ca/story/2011-12-13/news/arts-and-science-faculty-odds-university-administr/

See especially:

“The fact that there was a majority is, in a sense, irrelevant because it is not in the authority of Faculty Board to rule in a resource issue,” Dean of Arts and Sciences Alistair MacLean said.

This is the first explicit assurance we have had, so far as I know, that the Deans of Arts and Science mean to disobey their own Faculty Board again (as they did in 2009).

This denies Faculty Board the functions that are specified in the Motion that it passed on 9 December, and puts very much in question whether the Deans will recognize any function of Faculty Board beyond the rubber-stamping of Administrative proposals.

See also this statement:

“This came up two or three years ago and the legal ruling is the same as Diane Kelly gave in Senate. The authority is not that of Faculty Board or Senate,” MacLean said.

Note that Dean MacLean explicitly poses Diane Kelly’s legal opinion as a “legal ruling.”  It is not a ruling but an opinion.

Queen’s needs to work out the contest of authorities by (a) admitting that this is an opinion on behalf of the managerial rights of the Board of Trustees in financial matters, (b) considering another opinion on behalf of the rights of Senate and the Faculty Boards to govern in academic matters, and (c) putting those opinions into dialogue with one another to decide how Queen’s financial and academic authorities can cooperate in matters that have both financial and academic dimensions.

Mark

The Arts and Science Faculty Board voted to reinstate admissions to the Fine Arts program for the next academic year, but University administrators say this vote won’t affect the suspension decision.

A motion was brought forward at a Faculty Board meeting on Dec. 9 and passed with two thirds of members in support.

“The fact that there was a majority is, in a sense, irrelevant because it is not in the authority of Faculty Board to rule in a resource issue,” Dean of Arts and Sciences Alistair MacLean said.

Along with resuming admissions, the motion requires that both the dean and associate dean of Arts and Science consult with Senate and Faculty Board in regards to the fate of programs.

The University has asked its lawyer, Diane Kelly, to provide her legal opinion on whether the dean does, in fact, have the overriding authority to suspend admissions to a program.

“This came up two or three years ago and the legal ruling is the same as Diane Kelly gave in Senate. The authority is not that of Faculty Board or Senate,” MacLean said.

A similar decision was made at a February 2009 Senate meeting where MacLean announced that due to financial restrictions, Arts and Science would cut programs with 25 or fewer student-concentrators.

When the decision was questioned by faculty members, it was brought to Senate in April 2009 and Kelly stated that the dean, as a managerial officer of the Board of Trustees, had the right to suspend admissions to an academic program.

“Deans have the authority and responsibility to take steps to ensure the faculty is fiscally sound,” she said to Senate.

Jordan Morelli, an associate professor in the department of physics, said the problem surrounding the suspension of the Fine Arts program is the lack of discussion between the Dean and Faculty Board.

“All of them speak of a collegiate atmosphere, not Draconian unilateral steps by administration. In my view, this is all about process,” he said.

Morelli said the opinion given by the University’s lawyer is very one-sided.

“It is her responsibility to her client to come out in favour of the administration here. Even if there are other genuine arguments against her, she is not paid to espouse those positions,” he said.

Morelli said ideally, Senate and Faculty Board would be able to hire a lawyer of their own to represent their opinion on whether the dean should have consulted both bodies before making the decision.

“Senate has no budget, so Senate can, at most, request that a lawyer be hired. It’s incumbent on the university administration to provide Senate and Faculty Board with a lawyer.”

Morelli said since Senate and Faculty Board are limited in their resources to hire a lawyer, the next step is to ask for help elsewhere, including the Queen’s University Faculty Association’s general meeting on Tuesday.

“The administration says ‘We don’t have to listen to you, we don’t have to respect democracy at all,’” he said, adding that the Fine Arts admissions suspension is leading to the collapse of the University’s academic integrity.

Our Senate unanimously approved a “Queen’s University Academic Plan 2011” on November 22.  Some have asked how the unanimous approval came about, for just before voting, Senate received a petition with almost 800 signatures[1] explicitly “urg[ing]” it “to reject” the draft plan and endorse instead an alternative motion submitted by Senator Jordan Morelli in October.  Senate had also received a second, parallel petition, also urging that it “reject” the draft plan, signed by over 60 “Friends of Queen’s.”  Two academic units (the Department of Art and the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies) had issued statements unanimously endorsing the Morelli motion (the first point of which was “that Senate reject the draft currently proposed by the APTF”).  And QUFA Council, a body representing all academic units at Queen’s, had voted 30 to 2 to endorse the Morelli motion. So how could Senate, with all of these requests “to reject” the proposed draft, unanimously approve it?

The answer is complicated. On the one hand it should not be forgotten that Senate rejected, in October, a motion that the votes on the “Academic Plan” should be conducted by secret ballot (Minutes, p. 4).  The very existence of such a motion reflects that there are members of Senate who feel vulnerable when they have to vote in the open on politically controversial issues.  That more than one of every six people who signed the Morelli petition signed with “anonymous,” a pseudonym, or first-name only, suggests that the fear of being seen to dissent is widespread.  This is not a sign of healthy democracy in itself, nor is it a healthy sign that our own Senate should have voted down (by a vote of 22-7) a Senator’s request for the protection of a secret ballot.  The minutes do not mention that anyone offered an argument against the use of ballots:  it is, in fact,  hard to be sure what that argument might be.

On the other hand, if we consider not just the November meeting of Senate, where the November draft was not discussed in substance before voting, and where no one objected to the verbal incoherence in the amended motion before voting to approve it—if we consider not just this meeting of Senate but the whole process since September, it is evident that opposition, including the Morelli motion and the petitions supporting it, made many positive differences in the outcome of the “Academic Plan.”  For in three drafts presented since September, the Academic Planning Task Force (APTF) made several deletions in response to objections.  Not only did they drastically reduce the number of specific recommendations, but they dropped their proposals for “UNIV 100”; they ceased recommending that Queen’s employ undergraduate TAs as teachers and pay them with academic credits; they withdrew their endorsements of virtualized, blended, and “distance” learning; and they also excised the earlier drafts’ recommendations for reducing disciplinary course “content.”  Further, in the November Senate, Jordan Morelli succeeded in making two significant amendments to the APTF motion itself.  First, he revised the wording in section (a) so that the phrase “Academic Plan” refers to the whole document, including the “pillars,” rather than to the 12-page introductory summary.  Second, where the APTF motion (section (d)) called for ongoing planning “under the leadership of the Provost,” Senator Morelli substituted language ensuring that ongoing planning will follow the consultative “process established by the 2010-2011 APTF” and that it will answer to Senate rather than the Provost.  This is critical because the Provost is an officer of the Board of Trustees.  It is Senate that has, at least in principle, responsibility for safeguarding Academic standards at Queen’s.

In these ways, some of what was sought by the original Morelli motion has still been achieved.  Nor is it only for what was deleted from the APTF’s September draft or from its November motion that we can be thankful.  Several strong sections, which the Morelli motion had suggested approving separately, have survived within the “Plan” as now approved by Senate.  These include the sections on “Fostering Students as Writers” (pp. 20-23); on “Disciplinarity and Interdisciplinarity” (pp. 26-31); and on “Globalism, Diversity, and Inclusion” (pp. 32-45).  Embedded as they now are within a connective tissue of more anodyne recommendations for “inquiry” and “transformative learning,” it is easy to lose sight of these sections.   But they are the three key sections that were begun last spring and posted by early summer, and that are fully grounded in the APTF’s intensive consultations and the earlier unit responses (their footnotes amply reflect this connection with the consultative basis).  These parts make significant recommendations and should be read by everyone.

But the downside of approving the whole APTF draft under the title “Queen’s University Academic Plan” is clear and simple:  whatever you may call it, this is by no stretch a complete “University Academic Plan.” The APTF achieved a good deal, but a comprehensive plan wasn’t part of it; even the “Four Pillars” rubric cannot dress up a few narrowly focused fragments as a four-square plan for all or even most parts and aspects of Queen’s.  In September’s Senate, several complaints were heard about the “undergraduate-centric” quality of the draft plan and its neglect of questions of research and of graduate and professional education. This is a serious gap for a research-intensive institution, and is the more serious today when graduate studies are under special pressures, e.g., when universities are routinely responding to financial difficulties by admitting more PhD students, by using them to train more undergraduates, and by hiring fewer PhDs.  Others have observed that the lack of faculty renewal is the main source of academic challenges now facing Queen’s.  Yet on this issue too our new “University Academic Plan” is entirely silent.  Queen’s is, like all modern universities, under intense pressure to respond properly to the academic potentials and discontents of electronic media and online resources.  And it has lately been responding to this pressure in practice by developing CDS and even writing a “business case” for increased use of virtual course delivery; yet there is nothing at all about this subject in our new “Academic Plan.”

And so on.  I truly don’t mean to minimize what the APTF has achieved:  it’s just that it can also be dangerous to inflate it in the fashion of Queen’s News Centre.  This round of our academic planning originated in 2009, when the Administration sought to close programs with low student numbers and was told that it needed to do some academic planning first.  And throughout the process there has been intense and persistent pressure to accept proposals for cost-cutting measures—centralization of departmental offices, expansion of year 1-2 courses, re-weighting of course-credits, use of undergraduate TAs, jettisoning of specialized “content,” and, of course, virtualization—as though these were notable academic enhancements.  So now we can expect the Administration to declare its “academic planning exercise” over, and (having jumped the gun with the BFA) start sharpening its pencils.  The truth is that our planning has just begun.

What we should have learned through the process of the past two years is that academic planning really can’t be completed; we need “a plan” less than we need a rational, open, and genuinely consultative process for continual planning.  That is where the APTF really shone, at least in the early days, before it began blacking out sections of its website.  It consulted widely, it wrote down and posted what it had heard, it drafted, and posted its drafts, it re-drafted in response to the feedback on those postings, and the parts that it completed in this fashion prove the benefits:  listening is better than making it up, and many heads are better than one.  The triumph of Senate last month was not in approving a “Queen’s University Academic Plan” (that remains imaginary), but in approving Senator Morelli’s final amendment for rolling the incomplete process forward.    If Senate continues this process and works to keep it democratic and transparent, we can be optimistic about the half of this glass that isn’t full.