If you have been reading this blog over any period of time, you must acknowledge that I have gone out of my way not to embarrass my employers. The opinions expressed are my own; I never speak here for the university. The experiences I relate are things that have happened to me as a teacher and an administrator. But, over the past two weeks, there have been letters released publicly and meetings held throughout campus to spread the word. Like every postsecondary institution in the province of Alberta, we find ourselves short of money.
The recent budget instituted a funding freeze we had been told to expect. Unfortunately, this "frozen" amount brought with it the elimination of a number of other revenue streams upon which we had come to rely. Say, for example, that you held a salaried position but had the opportunity to work extra overtime on weekends. If, after years with this arrangement, your employers maintained your base pay but eliminated overtime, they could claim that there was no change to your salary, but your household would still have less money coming in. In this way, coupled with increases in costs, we here find ourselves looking to save $9 million within an overall budget of approximately $150 million.
Now, membership in any university community is a tremendous privilege, and I do not for a moment intend to suggest, with so many people suffering so much, that our struggles represent a tragedy to be compared with other hardships. But, as the old song used to lament, "They used to tell me I was building a dream, with peace and glory ahead." Yet, for the first time since I moved to Alberta nearly fifteen years ago, I must question genuinely my province's commitment to postsecondary education. I think if universities had been cut as part of an austere budget, that would be one thing. But, in fact, the budget had a lot of red ink, drew heavily on one-time "rainy day" money, and included a big funding increase to health care. Should our overall situation not improve and more "across the board" cutting become essential, what more could post-secondary education endure?
I have been criticized for discussing the business of running a university in "corporate" terms. (And, in fact, I hope to write more about this in the weeks ahead.) But the fact of the matter is that when you manage $150 million, and much of that money is public money, you can be sure that you will be held to account. What is clear to me is that universities are tremendously responsible stewards of those funds. What none of us are skilled at doing is responding nimbly to varied and changing demands. For example, as students have come over time to expect more flexibility -- more courses at different times in different semesters taught through different modes of delivery -- we have all had to spread out and carry a fair bit of extra capacity for the sake of choice. It is unfair to ask students, as you might expect "customers," to pay for all of that. (If you must fly at 2pm on a Friday, you will pay more than someone willing to fly at 6am. No such differential exists in education.) Insofar as some of those demands also represent government priorities -- think, for example, about small class sizes or more electronic delivery -- access to additional public funds is opportune. But the nature of university structures makes it difficult to contract, quickly, when those funds are then cut off.
Moving forward, it is possible to scale back contracts for sessional instructors and not hire replacements for people who depart, though these measures, themselves, cause great personal suffering. But those "savings" are always distributed unevenly. It might be, for example, that most of the retirements one sees come from two or three units. Should they suffer while others do not? A highly specialized work force necessary for a university -- there I go: that "corporate speak" again -- cannot be moved from department to department. So, in hard times, we reduce choice, sometimes disproportionally, increase class sizes, and make the kinds of tertiary cuts other "businesses" could never consider. When, at another university at which I taught, we experienced a budget shortfall, all contract instructors lost the use of the telephone! Imagine, if you will, giving a syllabus to students with a phone number that, suddenly, went out of service.
The elephants in the room here are, of course, tuition fees and faculty salaries.
As I said, students do not -- and cannot -- pay the full price of their education. Society benefits from the investment it makes in post-secondary education, and if you need evidence of the fact that governments and universities in this country will always be inextricably entwined, consider the fact that the former controls both main revenue streams for the latter: governments grant us taxpayers' money and decide what students are charged. That said, I believe student groups are preparing to fight back against demands that they pay more. They should fight back, especially in the absence of a system of loan repayment tied to income.
One gets the sense that governments, and perhaps you, too, dear reader, believe professors overpaid. I do important work, in preparation for which I attended university for nine years. Compared with other professionals, my salary is but competitive, I believe. When I was at school in England, the impression was that people who wanted to "get ahead" went to work in London. People with a commitment to education, first and foremost, stayed at university. I think something similar was true in Canada, too, and it is still the case that no one gets into this business for the money. What is clear is that faculty salaries are negotiated in a marketplace, and no ready mechanism exists for rolling back competitive salaries in an international industry. There are many examples, even in tough times, of universities losing good people to other institutions over salary disparities.
Still, when I visit other schools or attend conferences, there is the sense from the people I meet that money flows throughout Alberta, flows to everyone and everything. This was never the case, but since the widespread cuts throughout the province under Ralph Klein in the early 1990s, there has certainly been the sense that universities had become a priority for the people and its government, even if -- at times -- we have not done enough to explain to them fully the importance of what we do. There is reason to fear that this might no longer be the case. I have experienced post-secondary education as an afterthought, elsewhere, and I hope not to experience that here.
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