Posts tagged with canadian.

Why are athletics a priority in this fiscal reality?

Joey Coleman, May 18, 2010 at 3:46 PM

Canada's collegiate athletics have increasingly professionalized in recent times with money, and now drugs, raising questions about how the system operates and what effect it may have on the academy.

Thankfully, Canada is a long way from the American university model, in which the highest paid university employee is the football coach and the top priority of the university's governing body is the football team. However, we cannot rest on our laurels, especially in light of recent drug-related charges that have been laid against two current and one former member of the University of Waterloo football team, as well as the substantial growth in athletic scholarships at Canadian universities.

The two are completely unrelated, but point to the increasingly competitive nature of varsity athletics at Canadian universities. Sport is no longer an addition to the university experience, in which players play merely for the enjoyment of the sport. They are playing to win and universities are spending record amounts of money to ensure a CIS title for their school.

New athletic centres, high-performance training centres and football stadiums built in the last decade point to the sports arms race heating up.

It continues today, with the University of Toronto's Scarborough campus the latest to impose punishing ancillary fees upon its student body to fund the non-academic ambitions of the university to be a sport powerhouse. In this case, UTSC students have agreed to pay $80 per two-term academic year for the next four years as part of a 25-year $30-million ancillary fee contribution to a Pan-Am Games sports complex to be built on the suburban Toronto campus. The fee increases to $280 per two-term academic year after the last of the students who voted to impose the fee are scheduled to graduate in 2014. (I wonder if students would have voted in favour of the $280 fee if they had to pay it themselves. I strongly suspect they wouldn't.)

While there is an argument to be made that UTSC students are getting a bargain with the provincial and federal governments providing the bulk of funding for the athletics complex as part of their Pan-Am Games contribution, one cannot help but notice the irony of an institution founded to primarily provide undergraduate education imposing a substantial ancillary fee to build an athletics centre at the same time as the University is trying to find cost-savings as it wrestles with its first taste of fiscal restraint since the mid-90s.

Not all universities have diverted their focus and funds towards university athletics. Recent athletic financial assistance (AFA) statistics released by the CIS show some interesting disparities between universities. Trent University is the only Canadian university to not direct financial aid to its varsity athletics on the sole basis of their athletic status, instead granting them financial aid on the basis of their academics and financial need. Nipissing follows closely with only $5,600 in funds spent on AFA. Interestingly, Canada's top spending university on athletic financial assistance is the University of Regina at $509,153. With 267 varsity athletes, the average per athlete is $1,900. University of Guelph with 435 athletes, the most in Canada, spent $102,850 for an average of $236. Overall, Canada's 10,804 university athletes received $9,907,758 in AFAs last year.

The trend in the past five years, as reported and graphed by the CBC, is that many Ontario universities have more than doubled or even tripled the amount of money being directed to AFAs. Some of the fluctuations can be attributed to accounting changes as universities change their books to reflect the increased importance they are placing on the recruiting of and funding for "star" athletic prospects. Nonetheless, even if by an accounting change or an increase in funds, universities are increasingly prioritizing their varsity athletic programs during a time of limited resources and cutbacks to academic programs.

With fiscal reality returning to higher education, now is the time for a serious discussion of the role of university athletics in the Canadian academy. UBC physicist, Nobel prize winner and American academic Carl Wieman lamented: "People just don't realize that college athletics at public universities [in the U.S.] has become so dominant that the governing boards, the presidents, are thinking about the success of the football team first and undergraduate education second." We're nowhere near the distortion of priorities that exist in the United States and need to ensure our universities remain focused on education. With Canadian universities looking to join the NCAA in the next years, the time for an open and frank discussion is now.

Many of the policy issues discussed in this piece are covered extensively on the CIS blog.

Aside: Following the drug charges in Waterloo, there are calls for the Canadian Football League to start drug testing. The CFL is the only North American pro league without a drug testing program. I'm shocked to learn that this has not been happening and it makes me question the credibility of the league. 

Tagged with funding, canadian, cis, interuniversity, athletics, sport | Comments (17) |

Why are we relying on think tanks to do the thinking in this country?

Joey Coleman, January 11, 2010 at 4:30 PM

 

Last week, the federal Conservative government told the Canadian Council on Learning it would stop funding the organization.

 

If the CCL, which produces reports on the state of lifelong learning in Canada, cannot continue its work, Canada would have one less body issuing reports about post-secondary education and one less body funding research in the field.

 

Professors and education stakeholders were upset by the funding cut, with more than a few taking to Twitter to ask "What happened to #cdnpse research? No more CMSF, CPRN , CCL  .... StatCan only 1 left?"

 

Translated out of Twitter speak, they are lamenting that only Statistics Canada is left to publish information about post-secondary education trends in this country. With the demise of the Canadian Millennium Scholarship Foundation, Canadian Policy Research Network, and the Canada Council for Learning this year, there are a lot of reasons to be concerned.

 

No one is asking the bigger questions: Why do we need think tanks to do research, and why are these think tanks wholly reliant on the government to fund their operations?

 

Isn't this why we fund faculties of education stuffed with professors?

 

Considering that most tenured professors are earning well into the six-figures within many of these institutions, why are they not producing the high quality research into the public policy issues related to post-secondary education? Isn't the dissemination of knowledge and quality research part of their mandate?

 

As for the other question - why Canadian think tanks are overly reliant on government funding for their operations - truly independent research into public policy needs to be removed as much as possible from the mechanisms of government. With tenure and the structures of universities, independence is better ensured than it can ever be within a think tank that relies on the government for 95 per cent of its funding.

 

If there is value to the functions of the CCL as a think tank, there is nothing stopping private individuals and foundations from funding its operations. There is also nothing stopping the provinces that supposedly find the CCL valuable from funding it themselves.

 

If, as Gary Mason argues, the government shut down the CCL because it didn't like what the CCL was saying, this points to another reason why faculties of education need to step up.

 

It's nearly impossible for the government of Canada to fire professors or shut down universities. This is why professors have tenure and universities have endowments; it guarantees their ability to speak out.

 

In the end, there appears to be a lack of will to do more than huff and puff about the demise of yet another source of higher education knowledge.

 

It's especially frustrating to observe some well-paid professors of higher education studies complain that other people are not tackling the big issues in education.

 

As for the government's decision, it was wrong, but we all share the blame for allowing the higher education information void in Canada to continue to exist. We should be demanding greater accountability and transparency from both government and universities.

 

(You may also be interested in Eye on Higher Ed: Alex Usher argues CCL has always been Dead Man Walking.) 

Tagged with funding, on, tank, council, canadian, learning, think | Comments (8) |