Our universities are in serious trouble, and, regrettably, there are multiple causes of that trouble. Societal changes, poor leadership, failure to adapt to change, and a bizarre mixing of political goals with educational and research goals are all implicated.
Ideally, universities are designed to host controversy. It’s actually part of their job. And, yes, some denizens of the universities are pretty eccentric. After all, if you can’t have eccentrics in the universities, where can you have them? But, while the post-1960 university world has usually been a roiling mass of enthusiasms, interests, oddities, discoveries, controversies and biases, it does have a pattern. If we take it that the dual purpose of the modern university is both the teaching of the knowledge of humankind and the creation/discovery of additional new knowledge, then we can imagine a sort of overall scorecard.
Over the period since the end of the Second World War, my sense is that the pattern has been something of an asymmetric arc. The North American universities got better and better for quite a while, but then experienced a fairly flat, long apogee, before beginning to decline. The decline affects some disciplines more than others, and impacts undergraduate study more than it does the advanced degrees. Initially the decline was rather gentle, but there have been some disturbing indications of more profound difficulties of late.
The universities of the developed world have been the epicentre of knowledge generation since the Second World War, and so have been instrumental in the dramatic improvement in wellbeing and standard of living experienced by the citizens of those lands, as well as considerable spillover effects on much of the rest of the world. If they are in trouble, we are all in trouble.
I think that I know the university world fairly well. I have had more than 60 years of exposure to universities, and drew university pay for some 43 years, I was a professor, department chair, VP and university principal. During the 1990’s, in a peculiar national role, I advised more than a score of universities in crisis across Canada. I feel at home in the university world and have had a ring-side seat at most of the evolution of the North American universities over the last few decades. I could, of course, be accused of being a nostalgic old coot who is woefully out of date. But let’s explore. I will now make a list of slightly outrageous statements, and then try to defend them.
1. Most students entering undergraduate programs are inadequately prepared.
2. As many as a third of them don’t want and don’t need a university program.
3. For those that should be in a university undergraduate program, a good undergraduate education is achievable at almost any accredited university, so elaborate concerns about choosing the right one are pointless.
4. Universities and many of their professors are inclined to resist modifications to their pre-Gutenberg methods of teaching and learning.
5. Threats to academic freedom may be limiting scholarship and the educational experience.
6. Many senior university administrators are inadequately prepared to lead, are often quite uncourageous, and fail to inspire.
Statement 1 is very possibly the least controversial of the six. The inadequate preparation of students leaving high school is due in part to the ideologies which now hold sway with respect to primary and secondary education in North America. A wag might joke that primary and secondary school students are now expected to get their socialization at school and their education at home. This is almost true. There is a huge emphasis in our schools on not harming the delicate psyches of students, so all are advanced and rewarded regardless of the true level of accomplishment. Few or none are held back to repeat a year. The more accomplished recognise that rewards for true excellence are minimal, and that they can get by with less effort. Many are often pleased to coast, or become bored and inattentive.
Furthermore, the current popular tool to combat boredom is the notion that to be interesting all education must be active learning, i.e. discovery by problem-solving. While there is no doubt that problem-solving and active learning have real uses, the technique has become so pervasive and all-enveloping that almost all of the knowledge that students acquire is expected to come via this route. Almost none is just learned in the traditional fashion, i.e. from books or by being taught. The problem with this is that it took humans a few thousand years to discover all of our current knowledge via the active learning or problem-solving route. Even in well stage-managed situations, our students will never live long enough to get a good bit of it all by experimentation and problem-solving. Hence the coverage must, perforce, be rather thin.
But the slowdown in acquiring knowledge due to using these “modern” learning techniques and the demotivation of good students by an undifferentiating reward system are only part of the story. It is compounded by the profound societal shift from emphasis on collective rights to emphasis on individual rights and a culture of grievance. Teachers in primary and secondary schools now wield very little authority, to the point where they are physically imperilled and deprived of most tools for keeping order in their classes and fostering the flow of work. Some of the changes that brought this situation about were needed, and no-one is advocating a return to an era when a teacher could be cruel or violent with impunity, but as with all swings of the pendulum, it may have gone rather too far before beginning to return to a logical middle ground.
All this to say that a non-trivial fraction of students leaving high school and expecting to attend a university cannot write a coherent paragraph, make a logical argument, carry out basic mathematical tasks, or analyze data, and are woefully unaware of the underpinnings of world culture.
Universities recognize that many bright and capable entrants have been let down by these preparatory systems, and have tried to remediate these lacunae with special classes which are, in effect, an accelerated version of what should have been done for those students during the decade before. But the quick fix is never going to be as good as doing it better in the first instance.
Statements 2 & 3 are related in an odd way. For many young people, the rite of passage of going away to university, of being away from parental supervision during that critical period of young adulthood, and of partying for four years in an environment of great freedom is a life objective in and of itself, with the educational aspect being entirely secondary or even irrelevant. Frankly, there is far too much going away to school, partly fostered by the notion that there are great universities, usually at some distance, that one must try to get in to.
The fact is, at the undergraduate level, one can get a perfectly good education at most universities. A case can be made, indeed, that there are actually no great universities. Universities are built one programme at a time, and there are many great university programmes. The universities we have come to think of as great may well have a higher ratio of great programmes than the others. But be assured that almost all universities have some great undergraduate programs, and even the so-called “great” universities have a few utterly weak undergraduate programmes. The majority of serious students who live in urban centres could save vast resources by doing a good undergraduate degree at their local university while living at home, using the resultant decrease in economic pressure to treat the study as the full-time occupation, and then, if they are so inclined, using the good result thereof to get into a good graduate programme. (I will concede that at the graduate studies level, choice of institution can be more important, especially if one is seeking a particular supervisor.) At the undergrad level, if the local university lacks a particular course that a student wants, a distance learning course from another institution, with credit applied to the home university degree program can easily fill the gap.
The second reason why many who attend undergraduate programs would be better off doing some occupational program at a community college or in an apprenticeship is that, as a society, we have somewhat lost the idea of the dignity of labour, which was a key touchstone of the old left. What is “respectable” now is to go to university after high school. Lesser tertiary education institutions are often viewed as the place for those who couldn’t qualify for university. Trades, even brainy ones, are viewed as second best, despite all the data that they may provide better incomes and may make a more substantial contribution to the society as a whole. Frankly, I would rate a good cabinetmaker, machinist, technologist or chef over a bad sociologist any day of the week. We have become too snobbish to respect and honour honest skilled work.
The third reason for the presence in universities of a certain number of undergraduates who will benefit little, and are just being “stored” there is essentially political, especially in Canada, where there are virtually no private universities, and all universities are heavily supported by the upper two levels of government. The political reason is that they keep a lot of the children of the influential middle and upper middle classes off the unemployment rolls, and thereby make the governments look good in terms of their economic policies. Thus, most government funding for universities uses a funding formula based on numbers of students, with some variation in the per capita values in some programs. The universities, therefore, can only make ends meet by continuing to grow enrollment, which suits the political aims of their paymasters exquisitely, but does not do much for their standards, their class sizes, or the ideals of the university.
Statement 4 is about university lectures. The vast majority of my colleagues seem to still teach as if the textbooks did not exist, and therefore they must deliver all the same material by speaking. Yes, I do understand that they can take the opportunity to clarify, but there is still a remarkable amount of recitation of the things which are available in the official textbooks for the courses.
I always felt uneasy about that model, and am reminded of what I used to do when teaching medical students. Back then, attendance at medical school lectures was compulsory. Furthermore, my colleagues and I taught blocks, rather than whole courses. For my blocks, I would meet briefly with a medical class weeks before my block was scheduled to begin and hand out detailed notes for my block, explaining that the notes contained everything they needed to pass the exam, but, if they did not already know everything in the notes when they came to my lectures, they would not understand the lectures. A minority in each class would disbelieve me, but only once. That left me free during the lecture time to tell them all about how the knowledge they had already learned was originally discovered, or what interesting things it could be used for, or might be used for in the future. They liked that approach very well, sometimes even yielding considerable applause. Many of them told me that it fixed the knowledge firmly in their memories in a way that conventional lecturing often would not.
There are so many better ways of utilizing lecture time than the traditional recitation of the basic course material. But often the lazy students and the dispirited profs tend to gravitate to the pre-1455 model in their discouraged slog through the course material. It need not be that way.
Statement 5 is the most self-evident these days. It has become ordinary to note that the low barrier for giving offence, or for accidentally creating a “microaggression” stifles debate and discussion in our universities. The impact of the new dogma on the university traditions of free speech and academic freedom is non-trivial. A more fulsome treatment of these issues can be found in “Free Speech and Academic Freedom in Universities: Challenges and a Solution”.
Statement 6 is, in part, my reaction to work that I did some years ago, when I held a national role in which I was called upon to manage 21 separate crises in 21 universities. The work led me to engage frequently at great length with senior university officers who failed to show administrative courage when faced with disruptors in the academy. There are good cultural reasons why this occurs with frightening regularity. The report that I wrote three decades ago on my inquiry into the Fabrikant case at Concordia contains some of the reasons.
That report touches upon one of the two key factors which hampers decisive action by senior university administrators, and that is that most of them have little training to administer. They frequently were elevated into their administrative roles for being fine scholars and teachers, and the above-mentioned report does set out why they sometimes do not acquire the skills, conditioning and ethos that they will need in their administrative roles. Despite their intelligence, integrity and good intentions, senior university administrators can sometimes look like the laboratory exercise for teaching the Peter Principle. No surprise, then, that many hesitate when faced with some problems on campus.
The second key factor is, regrettably, how university boards have been selecting university leaders of late. I’ve spent much of my career amongst university presidents and principals, and, while the group is blessed with plenty of extraordinary people, there has been a recent trend to select folk who have never offended or annoyed anyone. Interestingly, people fitting that description may either be highly articulate extraordinary peacemakers blessed with exceptional powers of persuasion, or folk who are uncourageous and determined to do nothing controversial. One always hopes to appoint people from the first bin, but the supply is limited, and sometimes those from the second bin are selected. Hence, today many of such senior administrative posts go to people who are determined to please everyone. It can’t be done. A determination to respect everyone would go further.
The good news is that correcting all these faults is moderately straightforward and might be done over a very few years. Provincial funding of universities needs to be adequate and decoupled from the perpetual drive to increase the head count. Students leaving high school need better and less snobbish advice on what to do next. The primary and secondary school systems need to rediscover the concept of actual learning and overcome their fears of conducting meaningful evaluation. The four-year drinking and sexual exploration vacation away from home needs to wait till after the university undergraduate experience. The universities need to rediscover the fact that their deliverables are education and knowledge generation, not just degrees, papers and books. The universities (and the broader society) must rediscover the joys of actual debate and respectful disagreement. And university presidents need to rediscover actual leadership and their real voices; their boards of governors need to back them up when they do.
The preceding article initially appeared as a chapter in the anthology entitled “Fulfilling the Promise of Canada”, published by Double Dagger, April 2026, and is reprinted here with permission.
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