Waste Not, Want Not: Corporatization and "efficiency" in Canada's universities

by Claire Polster, University of Regina (permission given by the author to Leslie Sanders to post to YUFA Website)

Over the last twenty five years, Canada's universities have been encouraged to, and have sought to, become more like corporations in all of their activities, including their research, teaching, and governance activities. This corporatization process has been promoted and justified on the grounds that it would enhance our universities' contribution to national economic competitiveness and that it would render our institutions of higher learning more effective and efficient. Many analysts of higher education have challenged the former argument, noting that instead of promoting innovative knowledge production, corporatization is harming it, by, among other things, increasing competition and secrecy in academic research and encouraging academics to pursue potentially lucrative research questions which are not necessarily the most scientifically productive or socially beneficial (Turk, 2000; Washburn, 2005). Fewer analysts, however, have addressed the efficiency question. In this article, I argue that rather than making our universities more efficient, corporatization is leading them to waste precious public resources in a variety of ways. This poor use of funds erodes, in turn, the service that our universities may provide, which may not only further impair our nation's economic competitiveness, but also our more general quality of life. This, however, need not be the case. After addressing some of the ways in which corporatization is promoting inefficiency and waste within our universities, I also propose some measures to begin to redress this¹.

One of the areas where universities are squandering precious resources is in the pursuit of research grants, which have admittedly become a more important revenue source due in part to changes in government funding for higher education. (From 15.6% in 1992, sponsored research comprised 23.5% of university revenues in 2003 (Canadian Association of University Teachers, 2004: 3)). In order to encourage members of their "research teams" to apply for grants and to help them succeed, administrators are spending extraordinary amounts of resources publicizing new (and old) funding opportunities, organizing workshops on preparing grant applications, establishing informal mentoring programs for new applicants, producing formal programs to strengthen and / or vet grant applications, providing seed money to support the production or revision of grant proposals, hiring staff to work with academics on grant applications, etc. They are also taking more steps to reward successful applicants through generous receptions, announcements in on and off campus media, and various perks such as greater access to discretionary funds. Academics too are spending more time and other resources on grant seeking activities, often applying for larger grants and for more grants than they have in the past. They are also supporting colleagues' growing number of grant applications both informally and formally, through all stages of the process including peer review, interim monitoring, and final assessment (Polster, 2007). While these intensified and costly efforts may be understandable from the perspective of individual academics and universities seeking to survive in an increasingly competitive funding context, they are wasteful when viewed from a systemic perspective. Given that the amount of available grant money is not increasing in proportion to the additional resources being expended in seeking (and allocating) them, the returns on this investment of university resources are diminishing². 

In order to further enhance their institutions' granting records, university administrators are also becoming increasingly involved in the academic hiring process (which used to be primarily a departmental and faculty matter). This too leads to a waste or misuse of public resources. On the one hand, administrators are, more and more, rejecting the recommendations of departmental and faculty hiring committees because candidates do not conform to their expectations (i.e., do not, or do not promise to, bring in large grants). Such rejections not only waste financial resources given that new candidates must be sought, interviewed, etc., but they also waste the efforts and goodwill of both the department members who must redo the search (with no guarantee that even its results will be accepted) as well as the applicants for the job³.

On the other hand, administrators are becoming more interested and active in hiring "research stars" who can enhance the finances and reputations of their institutions. They are offering these prized academics all kinds of costly benefits and perks (including salary increases, reduced teaching loads, lab and other equipment, etc.) in order to lure them to, or keep them at, their institutions. They are also engaging in bidding wars with other institutions who are doing the same (Polster, 2007). As increasingly expensive research stars circulate within the academic marketplace, universities' costs - either of accommodating or of replacing them - continue to rise. Thus, again, from a systemic perspective, university investments are yielding diminishing returns and precious resources are squandered. 

Our corporate universities are also wasting funds in their growing efforts to recruit students. In recent years, several Canadian universities have dedicated significant amounts of resources to developing and mounting advertising campaigns to raise their profiles and attract students to their institutions.This, in turn, has compelled other universities to do the same, if only to protect their "marketshare". In addition to targeting newspaper ads, movie commercials, and billboards, among other things, to the general student (and wider) population, universities are putting more funds into direct marketing to "star" students. Not only are they tracking these high achieving students in order to offer them early admission, but they are proactively awarding them generous scholarships and sometimes visiting their homes in an effort to make their institutions seem more welcoming (Alphonso, 2006). According to Reich, in the United States, and presumably in Canada, universities are even entering into bidding wars for prized students, promising to better any deal that they get from anywhere else (Reich, 2001: 203-204). Both the logic and value for money of this use of university funds are quite dubious. From the perspective of the public interest, it makes little sense for our universities to divert precious resources from their core operations in order to persuade much less bribe students to attend them⁴.

Still another way in which our universities are spending unwisely is by contracting out more internal activities, ranging from marketing to hiring processes, to external consultants who are far more expensive than either in-house experts or other members of the university community and far less familiar with the nature, history, and needs of the institution. For example, in 2002, York University was widely believed to have paid millions of dollars to a private firm to develop its new visual identity including its corporate logo⁵.

This when the institution had its own designers on staff as well as an established fine arts faculty that could have easily done the work at far less expense and also turned it into a valuable student learning experience. It is also becoming the norm at many universities for head hunters, rather than members of the institution, to run searches for key administrative and academic positions. This use of external consultants seems particularly wasteful in the wake of the huge increase in recent years in universities' administrative complement that is presumably hired specifically for such corporate purposes. Further, at a time when business wisdom has it that "less is more" when it comes to an institution's management, this huge increase in the size - and cost - of university administrations is in itself cause for concern. This is especially the case as this increase in management has not served to lighten, but rather to increase, the administrative burden on faculty and staff at most universities, and thereby to further diminish the institutions' available resources for teaching and research related activities.

One final example of waste within our universities may be found in the huge increase in the amount of publicity that is being generated internally. As university resources become more tightly and centrally managed, academics and academic units are working harder to meet administrators' demands and expectations in order to raise their standing within the institution and the share of resources that they are allocated. It is not enough, however, simply to work harder: they must also be seen to be working harder both in relation to their past records and especially to those of others. Hence, they are attempting to make their activities more visible through a variety of means including glossy newsletters, splashy announcements in university and community media, lavish celebrations of research and other "successes", etc. These frequent and escalating publicity measures are costly to the institution both in material terms and in terms of academics' solidarity. From the perspective of the taxpaying public, they also constitute a poor use of funds, as rather than being used to finance additional academic work, institutional resources are being used by individual academics and / or units simply to capitalize on existing work.

There are many more examples of how our universities are squandering public resources that cannot be described here for lack of space. Instead, I will make three general points about this larger development and then turn to a discussion of what can be done. 

First, the main source of much of this waste is the growing competition both within and particularly between Canadian universities. As our institutions of higher learning become more corporate in nature, they are no longer satisfied with doing good work on their own terms and within their own niches, but they are increasingly focused on improving their standing - and share of system resources - relative to their competitors. Some of this greater competitiveness is due to changes in government policy, such as the recent shift to performance based funding in some key research support programs (Polster, 2002). However, it is also due to the nature and values of the increasingly pervasive corporate ethos as well as to its spin off effects, such as the tendency of competition to breed further competition.  

Second, it is worth emphasizing that greater competition within and between universities is not only problematic in that it erodes the value for money that the public invests in higher education, but also in that it impairs the quality of the service that our universities may provide. As our universities pour money into expensive advertising and recruitment campaigns or into rewarding academics simply for doing their jobs, they have fewer funds to devote to increasing their faculty complement, promoting teaching development, directly supporting research, democratizing their governance functions, keeping tuition fees affordable, etc. all of which would make a far greater social contribution. Consider, for example, how many professors could be hired with the money being spent on new university visual identities, or how many small research grants could be awarded internally were top grant producers not afforded the various costly perks that they routinely receive. 

Finally, as our universities progressively divert funds from their core operations to the corporate activities that manage and promote them, they may become obliged to continue doing this. For example, as the shifting of funds from university teaching toward advertising and student recruitment campaigns adversely affects the quality of education, it becomes more important if not necessary for universities to actively advertise and otherwise attempt to attract students to their institutions. Similarly, as more university funds are withdrawn from direct (i.e., in-house) research support in order to finance competitions for external research funding, academics must rely more and more on external funding; hence, the pressure to divert even more resources toward supporting external grant competitions increases in a viciously circular way. 

So what can be done to reverse this situation? The most effective solution  would be to encourage universities and the units within them to be less competitive and corporately oriented in their operations. While some direct steps could be taken in this direction, such as lobbying governments to abolish competitive forms of university based funding, a more indirect approach might be more effective at least in the short term. At the heart of the wasteful spending on the part of many of our universities is the belief in, and adherence to, the principle that institutions (and / or the units and individuals within them) must spend resources in order to attract resources. In contrast, those who seek to redress the current situation might suggest that rather than spending more in the hopes of acquiring more, our universities aim instead to reduce some of their costs and/or use their resources more judiciously so that they need not compete as vigorously for resources as they currently do. As well as conserving public funds, this approach has the additional advantages of potentially revitalizing - and diversifying - our universities and thereby enhancing their actual and potential social contributions. In so doing, it may paradoxically increase the very competitiveness of those institutions who opt to pursue this course. 

There are a number of steps our universities could take to reduce their costs and / or make better use of their resources while simultaneously revitalizing and / or enhancing their operations. For example, rather than contracting out various activities to external and expensive "experts", institutional and / or local talents could be called upon to carry them out: fine arts, business, and other students could help design institutional logos and other promotional material; faculty could conduct administrative and other hiring searches; qualified members of the surrounding community could participate in university task forces and evaluations, etc. Not only would involving the academic and broader community in these activities help to reduce the university's costs, but the quality of the outcomes might be significantly enhanced given their greater knowledge of, and investment in, the institution. Many other spin off benefits could flow from this approach as well. Among other things, it could help cultivate a renewed sense of community in the university and generate greater commitment to, and pride in, the institution, none of which are achieved by the more corporate approach that currently prevails.

Another step universities could take is to redirect some resources that are currently invested in enhancing the outcomes of external competitions towards in-house operations. For example, rather than using funds to help academics succeed in external competitions for research grants, these funds could be directly invested in supporting in-house research. With more research funds available in the institution, and presumably with less onerous application and adjudication procedures, both the granting success rates of academics and their actual research output would likely increase⁶. To further maximize the return on the public's investment in academic research, universities could support, encourage, and reward academics for using research (as well as other) resources as frugally, rather than as liberally, as possible which is presently the case⁷. Here again, numerous spin off benefits could flow from this approach, including the production of greater creativity, collaboration, and sustainability in academic research. 

Universities could also reduce the amount of resources they invest in recruiting "star" faculty and students and apply these instead toward making their institutions more generally attractive as places to work and to learn. Such an approach would yield more widespread and longer term benefits than the measures that are currently in use which not only fail to secure, but may serve to undermine, academics' and students' commitment to any particular institution and often erode institutional capacity and morale as well. It would be ideal to involve members of the university and the local community in campaigns to enhance the institution's general working and learning environment. As well as helping to lower the costs and improve the outcomes of such efforts, this kind of engagement could in itself enliven and enrich the university atmosphere and thereby increase its attractiveness to potential students and faculty. Similarly, universities could redirect the amount of time and money they invest in advertising campaigns toward enhancing the quality of the education they offer and, thereby, their reputations. This would produce a far more powerful and enduring draw than slick newspaper advertisements or movie theatre commercials.

Another suggestion would be to limit the kind and amount of internal publicity (including the ubiquitous newsletters, presentations of awards, and receptions) that are escalating within our universities. While this publicity may occasionally help inform and connect members of the academic community, its primary function is to enable - indeed compel - academic units to compete for institutional profile, often at the expense of their core responsibilities, particularly public service. Rather than abolishing all forms of publicity, academic units could employ options that consume fewer resources and are less destructive to institutional solidarity. For example, departments and / or faculties could set up low maintenance and user friendly Websites where individual academics may post any accomplishments or results they wish to share with the university and broader community.

A final, more ambitious, and perhaps more controversial proposal would be to reduce the size and responsibilities of academic administrations. As implied above, the significant growth in the size of these administrations has produced heavy costs for most universities, as have the expanding demands and exigencies that they are imposing on academics and academic units (including requirements to participate in growing numbers consultations, committees, etc. and to provide more - and increasingly standardized - documentation of their activities). Larger administrations have also centralized university operations, limiting the autonomy, flexibility, and diversity of academic units on campus. Reducing the size, and devolving the responsibilities, of university administrations would thus conserve university resources and allow them to be used in ways that are more productive, diverse, and tailored to local needs. Not only could this improve the functioning and morale of particular academic units, but it could also increase and enrich the university's contributions to the public whom it serves.

The above are only a few of the many ways in which our universities could make more effective use of the public funds that are entrusted to them. They are offered here less as prescriptions for action than as food for thought and a starting point for discussion. While some might outrightly reject these measures as naive and even harmful to universities' competitive position, I would argue that they and measures like them have the potential to substantially enhance our universities' operations and general climate and thereby to increase their attractiveness to students and academics. They are also more likely to boost the general public's commitment to, and involvement in, their universities which are also crucial to the well being of these institutions. Thus, rather than holding back the institutions that adopt them, these measures could help to establish new university leaders that others sought to emulate. Such a transformation would produce a benevolent circle in which the use of public funds became progressively more efficient while the outcomes of their use were improved as well. If this were not enough to recommend them, the implementation of the kinds of measures advocated here might ultimately also help to erode the corporatization process itself (such as by promoting greater participation, collectivism, and democratization in our universities). Given the multiple harms that this process has caused, this would be a most welcome development.

Notes