RE: “As the ivory tower tumbles” Nov. 25-Dec. 1, 2010
The notion that universities are crumbling and declining because students might actually think their degree will help them get a decent career or job is excessively rhetorical.
Many universities were established precisely to educate people for careers and jobs in a changing economy.
Carleton University is one of those, established by the Ottawa community during the late 1940s to educate those emerging from the war economy and seeking productive roles in the post-war economy.
Lamenting the “good old days” is not a new phenomenon in the academy.
If those days ever existed, they did so because the role of universities in society was to educate a small section of the population so they could either proceed to graduate studies (and eventually a career in the academy) or into the limited number of careers that required a university education.
It is not surprising that a system designed to educate 3 per cent of the population does not easily adjust to educating 30 to 40 per cent (or more).
Yet, despite their reputation for tradition and resistance to change, universities have been extraordinarily capable of changing to meet new demands from society.
All too often change is associated with lower quality, but students today get a high quality of education at Canadian universities overall, and if they know how to make the most of their experience they can get a very high quality of education.
The vast majority of students consistently rate their experiences at Canadian universities as meeting or exceeding their expectations (88 per cent for Carleton first-year students in the latest 2010 Canadian University Survey Consortium).
They also express satisfaction with the quality of their educational experience (92 per cent for Carleton graduating students in the 2009 survey).
Many who decry the “decline” in the quality of university education do so without appropriate consideration of how universities have changed over time.
In the “good old days,” Canadian universities were too small to produce enough doctoral graduates to supply the needs of the academy, let alone the needs of industry.
During the 1950s, 60s and 70s, most faculty appointments in Canada came from Britain and the U.S.
It is only with the rapid expansion of Canadian universities over the past 25 years that Canada has started to supply its own doctoral graduates for faculty positions, as well as attracting back the many doctoral graduates who moved south of the border when there were few career opportunities in Canada.
Newer faculty members are the beneficiaries of this expanded role of universities, with many being first-generation graduates who would not have had the opportunity to go to university in the “good old days,” let alone the opportunity to get doctoral degrees.
Universities will always be very special places where faculty and students can engage in intellectual discourse and expand the boundaries of knowledge without direction from the forces that drive society.
Those forces have always influenced scholarly endeavours.
The education of highly qualified personnel is still the central mission of the university.
To that extent the pursuit of both curiosity-driven and applied research and study still define the context of the “ivory tower.”
However, we should not be so naive as to think that we exist in a vacuum.
The degree to which universities can inform, enrich and influence society is a powerful aspect of our existence, but it is not a one-way street and the influences society has on the academy are critically important as well.