Posts tagged with funding.

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) |

Get out there and stop complaining

Joey Coleman, November 4, 2009 at 4:21 PM

 

Reading the latest edition of Academic Matters, published by the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations, the following sentence  in a piece on tenure jumped out at me: "Most academic work, specially in the humanities, is published for an audience smaller than a successful cocktail party, and the rest falls still-born from the press, ignored by citizen and colleague alike."

 

The statement is very true and goes to the heart of why funding for the liberal arts is not a public priority: the majority of liberal arts academics don't bother to communicate with the public.

 

Why is this? Are they stereotypical academic snobs who don't want to be associated with the unwashed masses, or is it a problem caused by the structure of the academy?

 

I attribute the primary reason for the disconnect being the complete lack of reward or recognition of the value in engaging an audience outside the academic bubble. To my academic readers, I ask the question: When was the last time you gave a public lecture outside an academic setting?

 

Therein lies the problem. Liberal arts academics are not leaving the academy and actually giving the public a reason to value their work. I shared pints with a tenured professor last week and we discussed this problem. This professor wants to deliver a public lecture on the topic of media and religion at an off-campus venue. The challenge is there are no incentives or supports for the professor to do so.

 

They cannot put this lecture on their C.V., they cannot count it toward their support to the university community, it will not be a "named lecture," and it does not count as research or teaching. In short, the academy gives no substantive value to this act of public engagement.

 

Yet, it is these acts of public engagement that are necessary if the liberal arts are to be valued by the general public. Academics often complain government funding is increasingly directed to research that can be "commercialized." While there are examples of research funding being directly tied to commercial applications, the change in funding models is more reflective of a general trend toward assessing value in government spending.

 

Blaming commercialization for new funding schemes allows the liberal arts to avoid self-reflection, a necessary exercise if the liberal arts are to reverse their downward spiral.

 

Taxpayers are demanding more value from government services and funding. Many people do not see the value in a lot of the liberal arts. It's up to liberal arts academics to convince the public of their value. Slapping an "arts matter" button on a briefcase and walking around campus isn't going to achieve this. Awareness events on campus will not, either.

 

Liberal arts deans across the country need to be bold, they need to burst the academic bubble that surrounds their faculties and encourage their academics to engage the masses.

 

We are living in an era of easy communication. Blogs can be set up in minutes, Twitter allows for instant communication and engagement, and the public thirsts for knowledge. So, why do academics continue to stay in their bubble, complaining?

 

Make off-campus engagement a requirement of the tenure process and give it the weight it deserves; engaging an audience of fifty citizens advances the academic mission more than a peer-reviewed article read by maybe a dozen people.

Tagged with funding, arts, engagement, liberal, public | Comments (9) |

Undergraduate education needs to move in a different direction

Joey Coleman, September 28, 2009 at 10:30 AM

 

Despite existing for hundreds of years, nobody can agree exactly what the mission of the academy really is. (There is actually a branch of philosophy devoted to this debate.)

 

What is the right balance of teaching and research for a fully-tenured professor?

 

The debate is hot again following a column by Margaret Wente, in a piece entitled "Want to know why professors don't teach?" She laments the loss of a "golden age" when university classes "were small and many of our professors were creative and enthusiastic."

 

I can't help but jump into the fray. 

 

Wente is correct in pointing out our undergraduate education problems will not be solved by throwing more money at universities. Despite record funding, especially funding of capital projects, undergraduate education is more crowded than ever. Partially, this is the fault of government funding not keeping pace with record enrolments; but it is also the result of universities under prioritizing their undergraduate programs.

 

Universities control their endowments and could use these funds to further enhance their undergraduate programs. A year ago, I attended a luncheon to hear a university president speak. He lamented the increase in "restricted donations" to his university. Alumni were donating too much money focused on undergraduate financial assistance. According to the president, the university needs more donors to give "unrestricted gifts" to enable the academy to focus on its priorities. One can only assume he meant something other than undergraduate financial assistance by this.

 

 

One of the big problems is the misuse of technology by universities. Instead of using technology to improve the quality of education; they are using it to decrease the quality. Instead of using advances in architecture and construction to build better classrooms, they are building bigger classrooms. Instead of using cost savings from the lower per-unit cost of assembly line education to improve student services and create learning spaces for students, universities spend their money on fancy athletic facilities, luxury dorms, and new stadiums. They also face significant pension deficits and infrastructure costs due to years of underfunding of maintenance budgets.

 

The only thing growing faster than class sizes seems to be the compensation of senior administrators and ridiculous student fees. (I'm willing to bet Wente didn't have to pay a user fee to graduate. Yes, at many of our fine universities, graduation is considered an extra option. If universities were selling cars, they would be charging extra for the steering wheel.) 

 

One of the largest cost items for universities can be human resources. For a few thousand dollars up front, the university can save hundreds of thousands by having one professor teach 400 students an introductory course instead of ten professors teaching 40 students each.

Universities have invested heavily in new multimedia technologies and sound systems for the gigantic lecture theatres they've been building in the last decade, so that that professor can teach large classes.  

 

Politicians get a share of the blame for this problem; they prefer to spend taxpayers' money in ways that create ribbon cutting ceremonies. A new "assembly-line" lecture theatre always results in a ribbon cutting ceremony or two. A Minister can usually get three or four announcements out of a new building. It is smoke and mirrors: everyone seems to think this new building is going to improve teaching quality and we, the media, uncritically deliver this message to the public. Providing funds to renovate existing buildings or operating funds to improve undergraduate education does not create the same ribbon cutting opportunities.

 

No government in Canada has the courage to reform universities and force them to allocate larger portions of their budgets to undergraduate education. No university is going to destroy their world "ranking" by investing in undergraduate education when they can spend those same dollars on research. (Rankings by academics for academics will be the subject of a future post.) Unless governments are willing to give universities even more money in the middle of the recession, the only way to improve undergraduate education is more efficient use of current funds.

 

One solution is to use technology to deliver online lectures so more professors can spend more time with smaller numbers of students and there wouldn't be a need to spend money building gigantic lecture halls and the technology to support that form of teaching.

 

They can start by using Internet technology to teach first- and second-year undergraduate classes. In this age, it is no longer necessary for each university in this country to use limited resources to create their own curriculum for introductory courses. Institutions need to meet, allocate courses and create online lectures. Instead of professor wasting the limited time their contracts allow for teaching reading slides to a class of hundreds, professors can hold more office hours and assist students to learn.

 

In recent years, undergraduate education has been moving closer and closer to the regurgitation model of secondary education, where the content of lectures is tested by "multiple-guess" exams. A move to independent study combined with increased faculty availability would bring undergraduate education firmly back into the traditional higher education model.

 

A great example of the interactive lecture style I'm referring to already exists at Hamilton's McMaster University. The introductory psychology course is no longer taught in a physical lecture theatre; it is offered entirely online. You can view the first lecture online and judge the quality of instruction for yourself here: http://www.intropsych.net/lectures/01-levels/player.html

 

I know I prefer Dr. Kim's online lectures over sitting in a lecture theatre with 500 other people while an underpaid, overworked sessional lecturer reads the textbook at me.

 

Tagged with classroom, funding, reform, undergraduate, technology, size | Comments (20) |