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Conference Report on OCUFA Conference – Accounting or Accountability in Higher Education
23-24 January 2009, Toronto, ON
By Leslie Sanders, School of Arts and Letters, Atkinson, York University
25 Feb 09 – In my report on the OCUFA conference Accounting or Accountability in Higher Education, I will just raise a few points. The entire excellent conference will be published this spring, and the PowerPoints of those speakers who used them, as well as the speaking notes for the first plenary talk, by Theresa Shanahan (Faculty of Education, York), are online. Even in its present form, Theresa Shanahan’s paper is a “must read” critical overview of the issues. Besides, two colleagues have already submitted great summaries (see links at the bottom of this report).
My focus is on the forms of accounting rather than the general concept of accountability. As Shanahan reminds us, the obligation to be accountable for expenditures of public monies by public educational institutions is not new. However, contemporary forms of accountability are increasingly a matter of counting, and as two speakers insisted, using the same Albert Einstein quotation: "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." Joy Mighty, Director, Centre for Teaching and Learning, Queen’s University and a Professor in Business, pointed out how equity and other social justice issues go missing in the kind of counting / accounting required of her to defend the programs in her Centre, when, for example, she is expected simply to show increased attendance at workshops without any ways of indicating what occurred (other people, in social agencies, for example, have described the amount of resources they now must put to counting activities, valued only if they produce higher numbers than before). See Lynn Eakin’s Beyond Numbers Website.
My second point concerns the talk by (Assistant Professor) Amy Metcalfe, Department of Educational Studies, University of British Columbia, who addressed how accounting has affected the younger generation of academics, taking herself as an example. She observed that she and her colleagues constantly have to ask themselves what will “count” when taking on academic activities, especially those other than writing for refereed publications. How much would, for example, her talking at the OCUFA conference count – invited (good-ish) but not refereed (very bad), with a publication, with a publication in a conference proceeding, again not refereed, but in Toronto(!). You get the drift… This focus on what counts limits their participation in the range of involvement that has (for older generations of academics) been part of academic life; for example, forms of service within and outside the academy, student engagement outside of direct teaching responsibilities, and so on.
The third point I wish to make is really a question, and it regards an issue not taken up at the OCUFA conference. How do these measure and metrics affect collective agreements? What are the dangers, pitfalls, tensions and struggles that contract language can mitigate or intensify? This is only a report, so I’ll only suggest that YUFA does need to give the matter thought.
Other Delegates from this Conference:
Julie Clark
Sharon Murphy
Richard Wellen