The Universities: Who Guides Their Response to Changing Needs?

In the fiscal sense accountability means that recipients of public funds must satisfy the public that the funds have actually been spent for the purpose for which they were

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*Porter, Blishen et al., Towards 2000. The Future of PostSecondary Education in Ontario. McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 1971.

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voted. There is no conceivable quarrel with this requirement and I understand, for example, that the financial statements and auditors' reports of the University of Toronto have been tabled in the Legislature of Ontario since before 1906. Moreover, the operations underlying those financial reports, such as the reporting of enrolments which determine by formula the operating grants, and the classification of capital needs and entitlements, have taken place for some time under microscopic governmental scrutiny.

The Wright Report, however, in its treatment of public accountability asks for more than validation of the financial affairs of the University. Specifically, it says: "Considerations of public accountability require that government be assured that public funds for post-secondary education are being spent efficiently and effectively." There is no quarrel with efficiency and effectiveness as such: those goals are cherished by all administrators. But the proving of our efficiency and effectiveness involves our being accountable to a government department for academic as well as financial practices. Much depends on the monitoring mechanisms the government creates. They may be Parkinsonian. Already man-years of high-level brain-power and the efforts of an army of clerical staff are expended annually on the filling out of forms and the answering of questionnaires for the government bureaucracy. I am told, for instance, that at the University of Toronto the reporting to government of the number of students that are registered in the various courses and divisions on one particular date in December each year requires the filling out of 1100 separate government forms! An even more unpalatable possibility is that the government's mechanisms will be so detailed and their rules, procedures and categories so rigid that innovation in academic programs will be inhibited and we shall be unable to respond effectively to the changing needs of the society we seek to serve.

Setting aside these universal complaints, however, if we face squarely the subject of accountability of universities for their subsidy from public funds, we must feel compelled to justify our existence, our method of operation, in comparison with any other means that have been or may be thought of for producing the same results. Here we are handicapped by the difficulty of measurement. It is not enough to count the number of students "processed" and the percentage of examinations passed. We must also develop measures of the quality and depth of the individual student's experience and the benefit which society may expect from the investment. Our subjective impressions relate primarily to what we have believed to be valid in the past but in an era of change we cannot be sure that this validity carries forward.

Accountability, then, involves justification of formal post-secondary education in comparison with other alternatives. The Wright Report lays great stress upon alternatives for young people who do not readily find themselves a place in today's labour market, and it mentions some of these alternatives in its first recommendation: Canadian University Service Overseas, Frontier College and Opportunities for Youth. We might add Winter Works and Local Initiative Programs. I respect the need for alternatives, with the corollary of greater choice and greater range of life styles for the young people involved. At the same time when considering accountability and justification, it is necessary to point out that the costs of the alternatives may be equal to or far greater than the costs of formal education and there is no evidence yet that the benefits either to the individual or to society, particularly the longer range benefits, can match those conferred by formal education.

The latest annual report of the Carnegie Corporation deals with this same issue in the United States and strikes a note of caution. Mr. Pifer, President of Carnegie, comments

"Moreover, there is the question of cost, a question which those who express concern over the tax burden of higher education would do well to remember. While the average annual real cost of having a student in college at the undergraduate level, including educational and general costs and board and lodging, is not more than $4,000 (perhaps $6,000 if foregone earnings are included), the cost of having the same person serve as a recruit in military service is $7,500, as a Peace Corps volunteer nearly $10,000, and as a VISTA volunteer $7,800. It should also be remembered that of the total annual expenditure on higher education [not all] comes from public tax sources whereas in military and other national service programs the entire burden falls on the taxpayer."

As this quotation indicates and as the Wright Commission recognizes in its second recommendation, alternatives to post-secondary education will not be cheap. The same applies to the version of the British open university which the Commission recommends. These alternatives should be explored, but they should be subjected to the same scrutiny of justification, cost effectiveness and cost benefit as the formal programs of post-secondary education.

The accountability that is required of universities must embrace our research as well as our educational programs, and once again we are handicapped by the lack of objective means of evaluating the worth of our research efforts. One of the difficulties with evaluation of research is that the long term view is essential. Fifty years ago a young physician and his student research assistant at the University of Toronto were tying off the main duct of the pancreatic gland in dogs in order to produce atrophy of that gland. A year later, insulin was at hand. About fifteen years ago a young assistant professor of economics was working on a research project in which no one else was interested, which would certainly have been called "useless". His subject was foreign control of Canadian corporations. The writings of an English professor at St. Michael's College have conditioned all of us--a whole generation--to be receptive to new ideas. How can we measure the importance of such research, and such people, in anticipating and reacting to change? This is an area where university initiative, as well as public accountability, must be very carefully safeguarded.

The interrelated problems of accountability and change lead me inevitably to the progressively tightening financial strait-jacket in which the universities find themselves at the present time. Legitimate new demands are being made on universities with increasing frequency and these new demands cannot be met without diversion of resources from existing commitments. In the 1960's the University of Toronto was able to adapt to the changing educational scene because it was in a period of growth. Now, however, its size is such that further growth is undesirable, and it has chosen voluntarily to exist in a steady state. So we are not talking about an "add-on" situation. If we add anything on we must subtract something else. Priorities must be set, and if new and important needs are to be met, low priority programs will have to be phased out with all the pain and sense of personal betrayal that that implies.

At the same time, a university cannot update its educational resources the way Eaton's and Simpson's dispose of excess inventory through a spring clearance sale. Our response to changing needs must be made having regard to the responsibilities of a corporation which is also an academic community, and with consideration of our role in relation to the other universities of the Ontario system and to the national scene.

At the University of Toronto after July 1st of this year we shall be approaching the task of setting priorities and responding to change through the mechanism of a new and unproven form of university government. The new Governing Council of the University meets the need for public accountability and at the same time provides for the internal resilience necessary to respond to change. Half of the members of the Governing Council will represent groups outside the University, being appointed by the government or else elected by the alumni. The other half will represent the students, teachers and employees of the University. Thus although the task that lies ahead is a difficult one, we shall have a responsible body that involves all the community affected by the decisions. This experiment will have significance for other institutions in the public sector of our society, and perhaps for those in the private sector as well.

The second theme is "participation", that is the involvement of those affected by decisions in the formulation or approval of these decisions. The Wright Commission on Post-Secondary Education puts great emphasis upon the individual man or woman, and rightly so. Depersonalization, they say, is destructive both to the individual and to society as a whole. The individual must be central and he must decide what educational experience is best for him. Increased participation of students and faculty in the decision-making bodies of existing colleges and universities is recommended. In fact, the Commission would make it mandatory to have students and faculty on the Boards and Senates of other governing bodies of colleges and universities.

It is paradoxical, however, that in the province as a whole at the interface of colleges and universities with the provincial government, the Commission recommends tighter and completely centralized governmental controls. The universities, for example, would come under a co-ordinating board appointed by the government with powers to determine admissions policy and to establish or abolish academic programs. This scheme would remove the individual student and the individual faculty member farther away from the locus of decisions about matters which affect the individual closely. Furthermore, with such direct government control there is always the anxiety if not the danger that political accountability may become more important than public accountability. This is of special significance in Ontario where almost all post-secondary educational institutions are provincial institutions and there are, therefore, no major private or national institutions independent of the provincial government to provide a yardstick for standards or a competitive stimulus to the provincially controlled sector.

Moreover, in spite of the Commission's emphasis on the co-ordination of all educational resources, the Wright Report proposes a separate co-ordinating board for each of the three sectors of post-secondary education--one for universities, one for Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology, and one for the informal agencies of education including museums, theatres and public libraries. Then the Report virtually ensures that all these sectors will be adversaries competing with one another for government funds by recommending a Senior Advisory Committee "to advise the Minister on allocation of funds between various sectors of post-secondary education upon receipt of requests from the three co-ordinating boards".

Instead of throwing the apple of discord among the three sectors in this fashion and attempting to centralize decisions on the post-secondary educational process for a population of over eight million with diverse needs, the Commission would have done well to consider some devolution on a regional basis.

While it may be advantageous for each sector of postsecondary education to have a distinctive role, the public in a geographic area of the province is likely to be best served if the institutions and informal agencies of that region work in close collaboration to achieve effective shared use of resources, to avoid duplication of programs and to facilitate transferability of experience. Rather than the addition of further central control mechanisms, I should like to see regional boards established, each with responsibility for co-ordinating all the post-secondary educational facilities as a regional educational resource. This arrangement would give room for diversity instead of tending towards conformity as invariably results from central control. Although decentralization involving real delegation of authority is administratively less tidy, it has certain advantages. It would bring about economies through the pooling of educational resources and would furnish motivation for such pooling. It would permit more direct participation of the citizens affected by the policy decisions and programs and would make the whole system more responsive to local needs. For example, it would facilitate very different approaches in the sparsely populated areas of Northern Ontario where the great distances and the high proportion of educationally disadvantaged people require different programs from those appropriate to the semi-urbanized Southwestern areas of the province. Laurentian University has made this point with striking force.

In keeping with the growing popular desire for involvement and participation, the recent trend in Ontario has been to decentralize authority to regional and/or district levels in publicly supported services such as education, health, and hospitals, which are of direct concern to the community. In the health field with which I am most familiar, such regional planning has been taking place in the province for five years with considerable success, in achieving functional co-operation at the operating level. Area-wide patterns of co-operation of universities, colleges of applied arts and technology, teaching hospitals and health agencies, are well established in Hamilton, Kingston, London and Ottawa. The Wright Commission seems for some reason to have overlooked this phenomenon in its survey of the province.

The Metro region represents a special problem and has come to be regarded as the exception to almost every rule in regional planning, not because its citizens have intrinsic claims to special treatment but because of the sheer size and complexity compared with any other region. It is one thing to sit down in Hamilton with representatives from Mohawk College of Applied Arts and Technology, McMaster University and four Hamilton hospitals. It is something else again to envisage a working level exchange of information and proposals at a meeting consisting of representatives of Toronto and York Universities, Glendon, Scarborough and Erindale Colleges, Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, Seneca, Humber, Centennial and George Brown Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Lakeshore and Toronto Teachers' Colleges, The Clarke Institute of Psychiatry and nine teaching hospitals affiliated with the University of Toronto, the fourteen Schools of Nursing, the Royal Ontario Museum, the Metro and Toronto Library Boards, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Ontario College of Art. Perhaps, the Empire Club should be included as well. The profusion of resources does not invalidate the regional approach. Indeed it reinforces the need for it but it calls for a variant of the all-inclusive regional board--perhaps functional sub-units emphasizing specific fields where the greatest benefit might be expected.

Reference to the size and complexity of Metro is a sobering reminder to me of the size and complexity of the University of Toronto itself. The University's total population including staff, students and employees is about the size of Peterborough or Guelph, and its operating budget approximates that of Goodyear Tire, Falconbridge or Canron; it used more kilowatts of electric power last year than Owen Sound. It includes over a hundred separate administrative units--colleges, faculties, centres, institutes, departments and so on--which in tradition, in interest, in size and in geographic location are about as diverse a collection of enterprises as are imaginable within a single organization. In such circumstances, there is an overwhelming urge to standardize and simplify. But at the same time, one is forced to recognize that in an institution of this size, diversity is a strength and undue centralization could undermine the objective of participation of students, faculty and staff on a human scale which the present system of colleges, etc., permits.

Participation is a major feature of the new Governing Council of the University of Toronto. This will be the first time that all the various estates of an Ontario university will have a duly constituted body in whose formation they have had a share and in whose deliberations they will have a voice. It is a courageous venture in participatory democracy, and will be a test of the responsibility of all concerned. Delay or obstruction by any special interest group could cause the governing process to grind to a halt; there is obviously a need for enormous good will, intelligence, and dedication to the institution and the community it serves. It will be essential to avoid subverting the decisions of the Governing Council by reacting to pressures brought to bear outside the governing structure. On the other hand, if the duly constituted body is not responsive to changing needs, it will become obsolete in short order. It cannot be used as an agent to preserve the status quo.

In this new development in university government it is appropriate for the University of Toronto to pioneer. Those of us working in other institutions in the province recognize the leadership given by the University of Toronto in introducing greater flexibility into its admission requirements and its teaching programs. Among the schools of the province it has the reputation of having tough standards, and yet the number of confirmed applications for freshman admission, as of this date, is up by more than a thousand over last year--this at a time when many institutions are short of students. Now it is about to embark upon another pioneering experiment--the new scheme of university governance that I have described.

This experiment has relevance, I suggest, far beyond the academic world. The ground-swell of participatory democracy, and the inevitability of change, are two factors that are not confined to educational institutions. They impinge on the affairs of practically every organization in today's society. There is "people involvement" in municipal affairs, in political parties, in professional associations, even in business and industry where the board-room decisions taken behind closed doors are no longer immune from challenge. With change as the order of the day, the response to change and the setting of new priorities have to be reached through wider consultation with those affected; and the indices of success are not simple ones. This is why I believe the experiment at the University of Toronto has wide implications. It deserves your interest, understanding and support.

Dr. Evans was thanked on behalf of The Empire Club of Canada by Mr. Donald W. Bath.

EDITOR'S NOTE: For some time there had been concern over the mounting cost of post-secondary education which in Ontario was costing approximately $771-million from public funds in 1972 compared with only $92-million a decade ago. In 1969, the then Minister of Education, The Honourable William Davis, appointed Dr. Douglas T. Wright head of the Province's Committee on University Affairs to chair a Commission on Post-Secondary Education in Ontario.

The highly controversial Wright Report recommended that all Ontario residents who had not received and did not wish to receive a university education, be eligible for a cash grant to buy their own alternative "educational or cultural services" as long as such expenditure was "socially useful". Tuition fees would be raised for all students except for those from the lower income groups. A number of government-appointed "co-ordinating boards" were to be set up which, according to most observers, would foreshadow greater Provincial control over the universities.

The Wright Report immediately ran into a good deal of criticism from many in the academic community. The President's Council of the University of Toronto described the Report as "anti-intellectual" and "entirely consistent with the conception that motivated the Cultural Revolution in China". Many felt that the autonomy of the universities was being threatened and that academic freedom long considered a cherished right was being challenged.

Proponents of the Wright Report, on the other hand, felt that academic freedom, taken to its extreme, could mean selfish professionalism and ma abolition of social responsibility, and at the administrative level, the right to spend public funds without accountability.

Dr. John Evans had only recently been appointed the new President of the University of Toronto and at the time o f this Address, had not yet assumed his new responsibilities. As President-Designate of Canada's largest University, his views on the Wright Report were anxiously awaited by those who were following the debate over the future of postsecondary education.