Accounting Questions (Guest post by Laurie Adkin, Political Science)

I have observed, over the years, that institutions lack memory. They respond to pressures, but without identifying causes or analyzing the outcomes of past reforms. They repeat the same moves without awareness of past experience.

Two departments are merged to reduce administrative costs. Fifteen years later the department splits to form two departments because of conflicts among faculty over disciplinary or methodological orientations. Twenty years later the two departments are merged to reduce administrative costs . . . . Does anyone do an analysis of the money saved by the first merger? The increased administrative workload for academics and the loss in research productivity? The costs of increased employee medical leaves? The costs in terms of faculty departures? Time lost to the formation of internal, specialized committees and their administration by faculty?

A university does a major restructuring of units, merging them into new divisions, but without understanding the differences that led to the boundaries among the units in the first place. Within the new divisions, the units continue to try to govern themselves according to their own disciplinary traditions. Students find multiple obstacles to the fulfillment of interdisciplinary degrees, finding supervisors, and meeting the requirements of graduate programs. What was supposed to be interdisciplinarity turns out to be a Byzantine system that no one can navigate. Do administrators ask what was necessary to make interdisciplinarity function? Was there money to hire new faculty with interdisciplinary backgrounds? Was there a reduction of workload somewhere to permit faculty to devote more time to interdisciplinary research and teaching? Were new interdisciplinary programs created? Was there funding for these?

What is accounted for, in accounting?

And then there are lost opportunities because of lack of vision.

A small interdisciplinary group of scholars sees the need for the development of new programs—perhaps a research institute. The institution says “there’s no external money for that, we’re not interested.” Another university takes the lead, and within ten years has an international reputation in the new area of research, attracting students from around the world. Do administrators ask how they could better respond to the knowledge of researchers in future? What, for that matter, is the process by which such decisions are taken?

This lack of memory and analysis of past reforms is what makes academics (at least, the older ones) jaded and unenthusiastic about change. They’ve seen it all before. It probably means more work. (Are reduction of workload and improved work conditions ever goals of administrative reform?) Will mergers and cuts to administrative staff address the underfunding of graduate programs, or result in more faculty positions? Or is everyone just expected to do more with less until they are used up and take early retirement, search for another job, or fall ill?

When is there a process in which we are all asked to consider:

• What is the university’s mission?
• Given our resources, what should we prioritize?
• What kind of community do we want to create?
• How do we want to govern ourselves?
• How do we need to organize work to make self-governance something that everyone can participate in?
• How can we communicate our goals directly to citizens?

In other words, when is there a process in which we have a real conversation with one another (rather than a “base to leadership and leadership to base” dialogue) about what is most important to us as a community of scholars and educators? When the outcomes are open-ended and not pre-selected by administrators? Instead of working toward inclusive and deliberative institutional norms, universities have gone in the opposite direction—one of hierarchical, executive-style governance.

The flip side of this model is a professoriate disciplined into passivity, apathy, and hopelessness by their workloads. So, when leadership issues a call to members to attend town halls to “be heard,” the turnout is generally poor. Hands are wrung about how hard it is to motivate engagement. Yet, we don’t need to rely on collective action theory to understand why it is not rational to expect individuals who are working 45-60 hours a week—never mind their family responsibilities and desires for personal lives—to be involved on an ongoing basis in university citizenship, too.

Class sizes have doubled since I was hired, and some faculties at the U of A are in the process of again increasing teaching loads in the form of the number of courses taught as well as class sizes. Is anyone interested to know why the normal course load [in Arts] was reduced from five courses to four in the late 1990s and how that change affected research funding and productivity? Or do we just reverse gears, close our eyes, and count on a miracle of human labour-power to keep the machine working faster and producing more?

Workload is not a problem attributable only to personal failures to manage time. The institution cultivates a workaholic culture, while HR sends out advice on healthy lifestyles and mental health, individualizing responsibility for the predictable consequences of over-work and stress. And work hours and stress are not equally distributed; care-givers and members of minority groups, for example, are called on to do more in a day than other members of faculty. Universities have conducted work-life studies but have never taken them seriously. Self-care and citizenship require time—time that is structured into our lives and given the same importance as work.

Adaptation to online teaching has greatly increased the workloads of instructors and technical support staff, and this pandemic could go on for a long time. Previous rounds of budget cuts have pared administrative, teaching, and technical support for faculty to the bone. Yes, the budget cuts were imposed by governments (that also engage in cyclical destruction), but this isn’t just about external circumstances; it’s also about how we, as a community, and our leaders respond to what governments throw at us. It’s also about how we distribute burdens and budgets internally—how we decide, and who decides, the priorities. I was here through the Klein government years; this is not the first time the universities have faced brutal budget cuts. What have we learned from how we responded to those?

In so many ways, universities operate not on the basis of what they preach, that is, research and knowledge, but on the basis of what is expedient in the short term for governments and those who implement governmental directions. Where is there a model university that has a truly deliberative and inclusive process of self-government? Where is there a university that applies the abundant evidence from mental health and social well-being research to its own employment and education practices? Where is the university that applies the research on the benefits of interdisciplinary research and teaching to its program design and organizational structure? Where is the university that acts on the knowledge of global and local ecological and social crises when making its investment decisions and prioritizing research and teaching areas? 

So, around and around we go, reliving the same cyclical crises and calls to get involved, and restructurings and destructurings—always within the same flawed frameworks of governance and work norms. No one is inspired or given hope by these. We are not practising what we preach, that is, learning from research, experience, reflection, history, and meaningful dialogue. There is a difference between change and transformation.

It will require real leadership to stir the hope of transformation and build consensus about its goals when fatigue and cynicism have become so entrenched. But no one knows what is possible, until one tries.