This seems to be making the rounds. I think it's pretty much on the money, but a couple of quick points worth amplifying. universityaffairs.ca/opinion/in-my-…
1/ Canadian institutions have an enormous amount of autonomy. With possible exception of Australia, you would be hard-pressed to find another system in the world with the degree of autonomy over finances, human resources, curriculum and selection of students than Canada's.
2/ I think it might be worth making a distinction between "having to deal with more regulation" and "losing autonomy". It does not, for instance, impinge on institutional autonomy to be required to report information to government or publicly.
3/ Julia is right that globally systems are converging but I think Canadian governments are having a hard time getting the "steering" part of the equation right. The balance between doing nothing and micromanaging is all over the place even within individual provinces.
4/ Canadian provincial governments, compared to others abroad, seem to have enormous difficulty enunciating the *purpose* of public funding for higher education. As in, why are we paying for this? What are the expected outputs/outcomes?
5/ And it's tough to have actual accountability and appropriate steering mechanisms if you can't enunciate things. Result: "accountability" means unis get to do what they want until there are bad headlines, at which point government comes down like a ton of bricks.
6/ This is not, needless to say, conducive to either proper public accountability or to institutional autonomy. fin.
