A Deeper Look - Issue #13 | Apr 11 2021
Canada's Higher Education Sector, Safety and Community, Be Kind, Be Calm, Be Safe
Hello Everyone,
Welcome back. I took a short break last week to catch up on some rest. This week we look at the following:
[Policy Paper] Investing in a Better Future: Higher Education and Post-COVID Canada (Royal Society of Canada)
[Essay] Safety is Fatal by David Napier (Aeon Magazine)
[Read of the Week] Be Kind, Be Calm Be Safe (Dr. Bonnie Henry, Lynn Henry)
Investing in a Better Future: Higher Education and Post-COVID Canada (RSC Policy Brief) - Royal Society of Canada
On 29 March the Royal Society of Canada published a policy brief entitled, “Investing in a Better Future: Higher Education and Post-COVID Canada.” The report comes as a result of a RSC Task Force established by RSC’s president, mandated to provide evidence-informed perspectives on major societal challenges in response to COVID-19. Enclosed below are selected highlights:
Executive Summary:
“The urgent concern in the sector has been declining public funding for colleges and universities: a shrinking proportion of faculty are in full-time continuing positions…the academic integrity it is supposed to reinforce, has become more vulnerable to the vagaries of political and donor interests; many universities and colleges have become reliant on a volatile international education market to partially fill funding gaps; and too many students are burdened, even excluded, by the high cost of tuition, and lack the academic, technological, and mental-health supports they need to excel. The pandemic has not created cracks in the [post-secondary education] PSE sector it has highlighted and evened worsened cracks that were already there.”
Canada’s Colleges and University’s During the Pandemic
This section details how colleges and universities have responded to the challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic:
Over-reliance on International Funding: The shift to online instruction revealed the heavy reliance of Canada’s post-secondary institutions on international students in an attempt to offset a decline public funding.
Effectiveness of Online Instruction: The report explains that researchers have yet to target studies that effectively isolate the “effectiveness of online instruction fro the challenges of teaching and learning in a pandemic.” Negative effects of online instruction on students have been technological challenges, reduced facility access, social isolation, financial effects, and increased inequities, and a reduced ability to socialise with other students. The move to an increased level of online instruction in a post-pandemic environment is also not without its considerations. Issues of high tuition fees, the costs of technology, equity, access, faculty workloads, expertise in teaching online, as well as the impact of partnering with non-academic corporate partners that may not have the same commitments to student privacy and academic integrity will all require thought and attention.
Investing in the Post-Secondary Education Sector
The report argues that there has been an erosion of funding to Canada’s post-secondary education (PSE) and this has reduced its capacity, much to the country’s own detriment:
The Value of PSE to Canada’s Social Fabric: “One of the well-established, public benefits of PSE is social inclusion. In addition to the “labour market premiums” attached to PSE (Frenette, 2014), there is a documented correlation of higher education with better social cohesion and tolerance of diversity”
The Need for a Wide Range of Expertise: The COVID-19 crisis has highlighted the need for a wide range of skillsets in helping societies respond to adversity and uncertainty. “ COVID has challenged governments to think urgently across academic fields of study - about the social determinants of health, effective communication, information literacy, health data, food systems, local economies, the socio-historical, psychological, and practical barriers to vaccine acceptance, and so on… Canada will need a wide range of expertise as well as cutting- edge research.”
Rising Tuition and More Part Time Faculty: “While students have been paying more and more, the sector has seen significantly increased reliance on underpaid, precarious faculty. These highly qualified academics work in short-term and part-time contracts, often with little-to-no support for scholarship and discovery”
Student Enrolment and Teacher Workload: “Ballooning student enrolments coupled with relatively stagnant full-time faculty numbers create a simple math problem that can only be solved three ways: increasing class sizes; increasing non-full-time teaching staff; increasing teaching hours by full-time faculty. All three measures are being used, to varying degrees, across the country.”
Performance Based Funding (PBF) and its Problems: The report explains that Canada has seen an increased rise of performance based funding (PBF) models, studies of which have show that these often fail to deliver. These models are “data-driven analyses that focus on metrics such as post-graduation income or course completion rates.” The report notes that the adoption of these models constitute “part of a larger project to hand the reins of PSE institutions over to apps and algorithms.” These models often reward short-term prioritisation as “uncertain funding tied to changing demands from governments incentivises short-term thinking and hiring.”
Building Research Capacity: Conservation, Innovation, Understanding
Building up Canada’s PSE sector is vital as it adds to Canadas research capacity and creation of conversation of knowledge.
The Conversation of Knowledge: The report offers a specific definition of conversation of knowledge explaining: “We add “conservation” because, across continents and millennia, institutions of higher learning have had at the core of their mission the preservation and transmission of knowledge, from languages to specialised skills, as essential to the functioning of their societies. Importantly, this transmission of knowledge cannot be reduced to the creation and consumption of degrees - the exchange of tuition dollars for a credential. It is the creation, exchange, renewal, and expansion of the world itself.”
Internationalization:
The report details the implication of Canada’s strategy of using higher education as part of its “generally export-led growth strategy.”
Financial Risk: The current international model has “exposed public institutions to undue financial risk.” A growing dependence on international student enrolment portends financial risk in the case of an international student recession.
Questions to Ask: The report asks, “apart from the financial risks, we have to ask ourselves some serious questions about recent trends. Should government policy allow our public institutions to be dependent on an unpredictable market for their very survival? What risks does this dependence entail for the quality, credibility, and effectiveness of the PSE sector?”
A Sustainable Model?: Is the current model of internationalisation predicated on the student’s best academic interests and quality of life? The report observes that “at most PSE institutions, international students pay higher tuition fees in addition to their living expenses—typically two-to-three times as much as domestic students—and, depending on their country of origin, can face steep learning curves, not only in cultural and social norms, but also in currency fluctuations, housing, and language (Calder et al., 2016). When universities target international students without regard for their integration and well-being for the duration of their studies, they are, in effect, enacting academic imperialistic practices under the guise of internationalization.”
Safety is Fatal - Aeon Magazine
David Napier is professor of medical anthropology at University College London, director of the university’s Centre for Applied Global Citizenship, and director of its Science, Medicine, and Society Network. In his essay entitled Safety is Fatal he makes several interesting observations on the relationships between medicine, the metaphor of vaccines and immunisation, the role of hope, and societal morals.
Crisis and Culture: “In a crisis, as we’ve seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, people define ‘culture’ more aggressively, looking for alliances in the very places where they can invest their threatened social trust; for the centre is threatened and perhaps ‘cannot hold’”
Dunbar’s Number: “The British anthropologist Robin Dunbar popularised the question of group size in his book How Many Friends Does One Person Need? (2010). In that study, he took on the challenge of relating the question of group size to our understanding of social relationships. His interest was based on his early studies of group behaviour in animal primates, and his comparison of group sizes among tribal clans. Dunbar realised that, in groups of more than 150 people, clans tend to split.”
Exploring the Unfamiliar: “Because boundary exploration helps us define who we are; because the unfamiliar makes us conscious of what’s central; because we need to approach things that are unusual if we’re to diversify and grow. It’s the idea behind the avant-garde (literally, the advance guard) – the original French term referred to a small group of soldiers dispatched to explore the terrain ahead so as to test the enemy. You could stay put and remain ignorant, or go too far and get killed. Alternatively, you might go just far enough to learn something and come back to describe what you’d witnessed. It’s a simple idea, part of every vision quest, and filled with deep uncertainty.”
Shared Values and Community Boundaries: “Our shared values (the ‘cultures’ we think we know at the centre of the Petri dish) are always explicitly defined at the peripheries, where we become more aware of our assumptions. And if there’s no wall or Petri dish to contain us, we need to have that umbilicus: because we need a device to measure how far is too far. This being the case, it follows that curiosity is critical to rethinking what we take for granted. It can make us better informed, but it can also get us into trouble. When will the umbilicus snap? How far is too far?”
Social Exchange and Hope: “Every time we look one another in the eye and nod affirmatively in a social setting, we create an informal contract with another person. Dozens, sometimes hundreds, of times a day, we affirm our trust in others by this simple act, masked or not. We do this as an act of extroversion, hoping that we can survive and grow through creative engagement with what we learn on the edges of our community, and, if not, that our resilience can be nourished by those with whom we share common purpose.”
Hope and Resilience: “But being hopeful also requires more than that. It requires a sense of deep time and an enduring willingness – a desire – to engage. For hope to proliferate, we need much more than endurance in the heroic, Darwinian sense. We need a willingness to accept the natural place of everyday uncertainty, and we need diversity – even redundancy – to make that possible.”
Read of the Week
This week’s read is a new one, recently ordered and not yet finished but worth the recommendation. The book is titled Be Kind, Be Calm, Be Safe and is authored by siblings Dr. Bonnie Henry and Lynn Henry. Dr. Bonnie Henry is British Columbia’s Provincial Health Officer. A more detailed biography can be found here.
The book takes a behind the scenes look into the mind, and thoughts of Dr. Bonnie Henry during the beginning months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The book is as much a reflection and memoir as it is a case study in crisis communication, effective governance, and public health management.
“On Mondays, the minister [BC Minister of Health Adrian Dix] and I held our media brief early in the day so that we’d be reporting on the cases over just two periods (the numbers from Saturday and Sunday). The tally seemed less daunting that way. I was struck by the parallels in my life now to a book that had been influential in my thinking about human responses to crises. Albert Camus’ The Plague. In it, Camus describes how, as plague cases rose in his fictional world authorities started reporting numbers daily to reduce fear; the figures would seem smaller that way. When I mused on this aloud to Minister Dix, he immediately understood. He was very familiar with the novel, he told me, having read it many times in the original French while living in France years before. I was bemused to think this pandemic was exposing things we otherwise might never have known we had in common.”
Until next week, thank you for reading.
FK