A question of steering

Dr. Richard Kool, President, Confederation of University Faculty Associations, BC

November 2012

The University of Northern BC Faculty Association, in cooperation with the UNBC President, organized a day of conversation about academic governance in mid November. An afternoon panel discussion about academic governance was held with Ellen Schoeck (past University Secretary, uAlberta), UNBC faculty members Drs. Margo Mandy and Erik Jensen, and Rob Clift. I opened up the discussion with these thoughts (slightly edited from the original).

Let’s start with the origins of the word “governance”. Governance and the term ‘cybernetics’ share a common origin; both are derived from the Greek kybernitiki, the art of steering and controlling (Johnson, n.d.). Changed into Latin, it becomes gubernetes, which translates into pilot, and from which we get the term ‘governance’. The work of governance is the work of steering. But there are two parts to steering: there is the person with their hand on the the wheel (what Aristotle would call ‘the efficient cause’), and then there is the person, and not always the same person, who makes the decision as to which way to go. Steering is teleological: there is a purpose in those decisions as to direction (Aristotle’s ‘final cause’), and the range of potential decisions, and who gets to make and enact them, can have powerful outcomes on a ship and its crew. 

The history of academic governance is a history of discussion about who steers the university “ship” and who makes the decisions on its direction and purpose. Those who make the decisions on which way the ship goes have operative power as long as the one turning the wheel listens to instructions. While the governance of a ship may be based on rules, it also has to have at its core a sense of trust. The hands on the wheel has to trust the brain making decisions, and vice versa. And the passengers must have trust in both. So within our various institutions, who is making the important academic decisions? Is it a ‘me’, an individual decision of a president or Provost; is it a ‘we’, an academic Senate involving faculty and librarians, staff, students and administration; or a ‘they’, often in the form politically-appointed Governing Boards, government itself, or corporate interests.

In the realm of academic governance, the faculty, through long tradition, had both their hands on the wheel and their brains involved in decision-making relating to the educational part of the enterprise. Yet increasingly, faculty and librarians, likely due to workload pressures and a reward system that does not adequately recognize service to governance as much as it may recognize other parts of the job, are either being shut out of or are retreating from an active engagement in academic governance.

Who directs, who steers, and to what purpose: these were the questions brought up both in medieval and contemporary discussions of academic governance. Any discussion of governance in an institutional context also has to ask the question about the purpose of the institution, as it seems clear that as an institution is governed, so does it become; governed as a university, it remains a university; governed as a corporation, and it becomes a corporation (Birnbaum, 2004).

Here is one way of understanding what a university could be, penned by Stephen Leacock, Principal of McGill, who wrote,
 

If I were founding a university- and I say it with all the seriousness of which I am capable- I would found first a smoking room; then when I had a little more money in hand I would found a dormitory; then after that, or more probably with it, a decent reading room and a library. After that, if I still had more money that I couldn't use, I would hire a professor and get some textbooks. (Leacock, 1922, p. 55)

Note that Leacock didn’t talk about, presidents, deans, or boards of governors; he spoke of students, spaces to eat and sleep and smoke, books, and a professor. And going back to the early medieval origins of the University, in Bologna, Padua, Paris, Oxford and Cambridge, the University was about students, teachers, books, and a place to do work. 

Organizations, like organisms, seem to move towards differentiation, and organizations, like organisms, seem to move towards hierarchical differentiation.  In both organizations and organisms, there are large systems and small systems, slow cycles and fast cycles, systems of various levels of control. Early in their development, universities, like other organizational systems, also became differentiated. Why has this differentiation in organizational structure not changed appreciably over modern times?

I’d posit that things haven’t changed, in part, because there are certain aspects of the structure of these ancient organizations that have worked, and worked well, and are lost at the very peril of the idea of the university. And one of those critical structures, differentiated centuries ago, was the concept of shared governance. When we are told that governance structures need to be changed, the message tends to be that the faculty need to worry less about being involved in the operation and direction-setting of the university, less in the steering, while leaving that to the Boards of Governors and the professional managers (Birnbaum, 2004).

Governance is a means to an end; the ends, the purposes of the university, are what we have to keep our eyes on. Shared governance in the steering of the university, shared between boards, presidents, academics, students and staff, has worked to protect the ends, which are the idea of the university as place of teaching and learning and research. But change the means- change the forms of governance, slowly reduce collegial and shared academic decision-making, minimize the active and meaningful engagement of faculty and librarians in the governance of the institution- and the ends of the institution will change too and what a university has been and is, will be changed.

So the issue before us is not just about academic governance, but about the whole idea of the university, about whose hands are on the wheel, and about who decides on direction and course, and how those decisions are made.

Birnbaum, Robert. (2004). The end of shared governance: Looking ahead or looking back. New Directions for Higher Education(127), 5-22. doi: 10.1002/he.152

Johnson, Barnabas D. (n.d.). The cybernetics of society: The governance of self and civilization. from http://www.jurlandia.org/cybsoc.htm

Leacock, Stephen. (1922). My discovery of England. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co.

Academic Freedom: A Threat to One is a Threat to All

Dr. Richard Kool, President, Confederation of University Faculty Associations, BC

October 2012

One of the privileges of being CUFA BC President is attending the meetings of our sister organizations, the Confederation of Alberta Faculty Associations (CAFA) and the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA). CAFA recently held their fall Council meeting in Edmonton, and joined with the Association of Academic Staff of the University of Alberta to host a presentation, The Relevance of Academic Freedom.

Academic freedom seems to be a bit like motherhood: rarely (at least inside the academy) would someone (publically) speak against it. But how one conceptualizes and then actualizes academic freedom can vary quite widely. For example, the President of uAlberta, Dr. Indira Samarasekera, spoke at the presentation about the great public good that academic freedom provides, and quoted approvingly from the faculty handbook about the academic freedoms enjoyed at her university. However, the organization representing the university presidents in Canada, the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC) recently promulgated a “new” definition of academic freedom that is seen by many faculty members, associations and the Canadian Association of University Teachers as retreating from, rather than advancing, this vital freedom. And while our university presidents all espouse the principles of academic freedom, neither Dr. Samarasekera nor our BC university presidents have challenged the AUCC definition.

The major speaker at the presentation was Dr. Jocelyn Downie, a Professor of Ethics in both the Faculties of Law and Medicine at Dalhousie University. Dr. Downie presented a highly nuanced analysis of academic freedom around the questions of what is academic freedom, why does it matter, and why should we talk about it.

In her lecture, Dr. Downie related the Olivieri case (1) (a sordid tale of an academic clinical researcher, Dr. Nancy Olivieri, who was abused by the University of Toronto, the Hospital for Sick Children (HSC) and the drug manufacturer Apotex) to her analysis of academic freedom. Beyond the details of this case, I was reminded of the writings of Raul Hilberg, who spoke, in the context of the Holocaust, of the roles of victims, rescuers, bystanders and perpetrators. All of these roles were played out in the Olivieri case, and all are related to academic freedom in our institutions.

Olivieri was clearly the victim here, and her life and career were seriously impacted by the attempt to limit her ability to carry out research in an ethical and responsible manner congruent with the standards and norms of her discipline. The perpetrators are clear too. She was threatened by a drug company seemingly more interested in profits than in the health of the research participants or in the people who might ultimately be taking a flawed medication. Perpetrators also included the institutions involved; the Hospital for Sick Children and the University of Toronto, who, at the same time as Olivieri was being threatened, sued and barred from carrying out her research, was negotiating with Apotex for a donation of funds reaching into the tens of millions of dollars.

But for me, the real concern is with the rescuers and the bystanders. Four of Olivieri’s colleagues came to her defence, standing up for her academic rights and, based on their principals, put themselves in harm’s way (2). Outside of her institutional colleagues, the CAUT was and continues to be a strong advocate for Olivieri and for academic freedom. But four colleagues is not a very large number: most of the academic clinical staff at HSC and uToronto were bystanders and while their motivations have never been studied, it is easy to understand what they might be: fear of retribution, worry about their own research funding, and no desire to be branded a troublemaker. It is not hard to imagine why one would not get involved in a fight against both your direct employer and a large drug company.

So why does academic freedom matter? Because, as Dr. Downie says, “society needs people willing to speak truth to power.” Power rarely appreciate hearing truth, whether power be in the form of pharmaceutical companies that do not want to hear from the Therapeutics Initiative at UBC or from researchers like Dr. Olivieri, or in governments that would rather not hear from its scientists about the state of the environment. If and when we become aware of pressure being put on colleagues to “toe the party line”, or when our colleagues are threatened with loss of funding based on their research and thoughts, or when the threat of tenure decisions are used to try and silence controversial voices, we are, at that point, all threatened. And while there may be a single victim initially, unless we all become involved in efforts to ensure academic freedom, bystanders too end can end up as victims.

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[1] Thompson, J., Baird, P., & Downie, J. (2001). The Olivieri Report. Toronto: James Lorimer and Company.

[2] Baylis, F. (2004). The Olivieri debacle: where were the heroes of bioethics? Journal of Medical Ethics, 30, 44-49. doi: 10.1136/jme.2003.005330

Looking into the faces of the future

Dr. Richard Kool, President, Confederation of University Faculty Associations, BC

September 2012

Taking on the responsibility of being CUFA BC’s president, and being the first president from Royal Roads University, is quite an honour and I’d like to thank my colleagues past and present on CUFA BC Council for giving me this chance to serve the academic staff at BC’s research universities. 

I'm an Associate Professor at Royal Roads University, where in 2003 I founded a transdisciplinary MA program in environmental education and communication. I was also part of the team that, in 2006, unionized our faculty association and wrested a first collective agreement out of a very intransigent university administration.

I’ve been a registered student at three of our member institutions: UBC (MSc from the Institute of Animal Resource Ecology), SFU (summer program for educators at Outward Bound) and UVic (a wonderful course in qualitative research methods), and have instructed as a sessional at UVic and as a TA at UBC. So UNBC is the only institution of our five in which I’ve had no formal involvement.

I plan, over the course of my two year term, to write to faculty association members on a regular basis about things that are on my mind when it comes to the realm of post-secondary education.

And while there are many important things to talk about as I look forward to my two year term-- things like the issue of power, academic governance and collegial decision-making, funding issues and our concern about student access to higher education and the issue of affordability, issues around academic freedom and the attacks by governments on “inconvenient” knowledge—I do feel that September is the time of year when we renew our vows, so to speak, and welcome students back to school: into the library and our offices, labs, rehearsal halls, art studios, seminar spaces and lecture halls. At the start of the school year, I am often reminded of a line from late Canadian folk singer Stan Rogers’ beautiful song about Prairie farming, Watch the Field Behind the Plow, where Stan sings “put another season’s promise in the ground.” Every year, we get to touch the lives of young (and not so young) people; “another season’s promise".

There is a great honour and privilege in this work of being an academic. We are the carriers of a long history of knowledge-creation, both theoretical and practical, of artistic creation and performance, of critical philosophical and social insights, of deeply felt arguments as well as the means of resolving them. Our work as scholars and educators is done from a place where we honour those whose shoulders we stand on, while looking into the faces of those who may choose to stand on ours. In fact, it’s shoulders all the way down.

Teaching, to me, is a faith-based activity. We do what we do with the faith that it will make a difference in our student’s lives even if we never know what that difference might be.  September, for me as a teacher, is always about looking into the faces of the future.