Association of Atlantic Universities Speech

As Canadian Universities seek to re-vitalize themselves for the next century, we should re-focus on the centrality and importance of the undergraduate experience.

Holding our conference on the undergraduate experience at Pier 21 offered a great framing metaphor.  Roberta Jamieson characterized it as the personification of the Canadian promise. Universities have been – and should continue to be – Pier 21s for Canadians.

The Grote Bier docked at Pier 21 in 1953 after a journey from Rotterdam. A Dutch family entered Canada with armfuls of blonde children. Neither parent had a university education. Nonetheless all seven of their children went to university. I was fortunate to marry one of them, who did a doctorate, wrote ten books, won a teaching award and a Governor General’s Prize, and entered the Royal Society. For the Verduyns, Pier 21 and Canadian universities provided a gateway to opportunity.

Like Pier 21, Canadian universities personify promise. Their graduates make enormous social contributions while generating few burdens. They add more to society than they take out of it, while strengthening Canada and its communities.

Canadian Universities are connected to Canadian communities in aspirational, experiential, and consequential ways. This need not be our narrative’s exclusive focus but its foundation. And this foundation rests on the quality of the undergraduate student experience.

Why does this need stating? The recent experiences of many university Presidents has been a frustrating one, when the collective university membership lost its way. There is a context:  massive enrolment pressures; cyclical waxing and waning of government support; revenues that have not kept pace with costs; deferred maintenance; and so on. As an administrator, I have mainly managed crises, juggled loaves and fishes, raised funds, and learned alchemy.

To be honest, I have assisted universities’ re-engineering to contain unit costs and to expand the research and graduate agendas. Governments’ PSE expectations focused on productivity, innovation, commercialization  – offering financial incentives for universities to embrace this agenda. Universities narrowed attention to policy and financial issues, to maximize revenues from research and related areas. This ‘cherry picked’ the university promise and experience, at the output end of the university funnel – at grad studies, R&D, big science – to the neglect of the upstream entrance of the funnel that feeds the high end outputs.

We lost the foundational narrative thread in this process – imploding vision and narrowing focus, while losing sight of the broader promise of the universities – particularly the undergraduate experience. We also lost connection with our broader communities.

The irony is that the quality of staff, infrastructure, and programming has improved. But the character of the undergraduate experience has deteriorated. This experience can and should be better. The overall size of many universities has become problematic, as has class size. There is increasing use of contract teaching and less personal interaction. There is too much emphasis on testing and not enough on writing and talking.

This reflects both financial necessities and internal institutional choices, where the resources assigned to undergraduate education became the dependent budget variable. The ‘high end’ envelopes are often cross-subsidized by the undergraduate envelope. We must confront an institutional context where many in our community may not actually see a problem.

The students’ role in this discussion is complicated by competing discourses, such as the student debt/tuition debate. As I joke to our student leaders, my job is to maximize revenues not minimize them – or how can we maintain quality? As the parent of four children, I am sympathetic to the jobs discourse. But I fear a potential ‘baby and the bathwater’ scenario here. We have to find a way to get equilibrium amongst a number of agendas to improve the undergraduate experience. We must also get parents and families on our side – their tolerance of the situation is surprising. They should be asking about the quality of their children’s undergraduate experience.

What is the operational agenda?

At the mouth of the funnel, we should emphasize access by re-connecting to our communities. We should increase accessibility for new Canadians, rural and small town areas, aboriginals, boys, and first-generation attendees – working with high schools to ensure skills/aspirational connectedness.

Within the funnel, we should maintain a quality experience, by ensuring the core ingredients of quality, and firewalling it through a financial sustainability model. We should not be afraid to differentiate ourselves.

At the funnel’s output, we should demonstrate community and social results, providing students with stepping stones for next steps, whether grad or professional schools, community engagement, employability, or research/knowledge – tracking, measuring, evaluating, and communicating this to our publics.

This is our story: we recruit, teach, and train young talent; we produce knowledge; we create opportunities and benefit the community; we are the site for major public discussions. This starts with quality undergraduate education. We should commit to this, do it, and tell it.

Robert M. Campbell is President and Vice Chancellor of Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick