Posts tagged with council.
Why are we relying on think tanks to do the thinking in this country?
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.)
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JOEY COLEMAN