Universities: What's wrong with them?

An article here questions the wisdom of the University system in the modern world. It approaches the question from a historical and Catholic slant, given the importance of the University system of the Middle Ages, adding the question of what happened to them.

Today I would like to use some of my previous experiences in the university system as instructor, TA, grad student, (and undergrad) to discuss the reason that universities no longer perform as they used to. My experiences are coloured by my Canadian experience, and some of my observations may not necessarily apply to universities in the US or other countries.

I believe that the fundamental change in universities occurred when they became State-funded institutions.

When the university system began, its only objective was to train priests. Apparently, it did so very well. Over the last several hundred years, universities began to train other types of professionals, and currently some professions require a tremendous level of technical sophistication. Interestingly, despite the concentration and specialization that now occurs in technical training, university graduates are surprisingly useless in the business and technical world. How can this be?

I would submit that in the early days of training priests, the students were taught to read and write, and debate (or comment on) articles of history, philosophy. The trainees obtained a deep knowledge of their subject matter, and debates and commentaries made them proficient in writing, extemporized discussion, argument, and rhetoric.

One of the defining conditions of the early universities was their independence of local and papal authority. This concept is continued today in the institution of tenure, as well as the general belief that universities, despite being funded by the State, should not be controlled by it.

Tenure is a topic that has generated a great deal of debate. In principle, it is intended to broaden academic freedom by protecting professors from dismissal if they pursue unpopular forms of research. There are those who protest that it can lead to laziness on the part of professors who achieve it (a risk taken by the research institution); also those who protest that tenure has actually narrowed academic freedom, as young researchers must adhere closely to the norms of their field in order to survive their tenure hearings (Michaels, 2004).

(The same may be said about government grant applications).

New ideas emerged during the period from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment, one of the most important of which was the notion that the world could be investigated using the tools of observation and reason; furthermore, natural phenomena could be understood and explained purely in terms of material causes (i.e., no longer necessary to describe occurrences as "the work of God"). Simultaneously, the currently accepted "scientific method" came to be selected as the preeminent technique for understanding natural phenomena.

Where should these new practitioners of science work and teach? They naturally gravitated to the universities, as that was where most of them had been educated. Indeed, much of what we now call science was developed by individuals training for religious purposes, and there was an underlying philosophy suggesting that Honour was done to God by learning as much as possible about His Gift of the World.

Unfortunately, politics entered the academic world as soon as there were academic honours to be had. For instance, the Royal Society came down hard on Liebniz for daring to publish on calculus before the great Newton, which greatly influenced our thinking about the nature of the Universe (part of which I have discussed here).

The addition of a secular approach to science to the place of religious training did not significantly set back the university system. When I look at the problems that universities have today, they mostly come down to one thing.

Money.

Why didn't universities in the Middle Ages have the kind of cash flow problems that modern universities have? Firstly, they were financed differently. There was some money that may have come from the early State, but most money came from parishes (i.e., donations) or from fees and tithes paid by the students themselves. Nowadays, most universities receive operating funds from the State. Research money is also granted to individual faculty by the State, sometimes with unfortunate consequences.

Today, universities have three functions, each of which interferes with the others.

Firstly, they are there to provide instruction. Obviously. They are presented as such to taxpayers, who are responsible for the bulk of their funding. This funding will only be willingly provided so long as middle-class parents are convinced that their children will receive a good and useful education there. If fees rise too much, or if there is a sense that the universities are not there primarily for the education of students, there will be a backlash against them.

Secondly, they are to be centres of academic research. Here is the first problem: in my time as a grad student at the University of Toronto and at Memorial University of Newfoundland, it was abundantly clear that as far as the university and faculty were concerned, academic research was the sole purpose of the university. The teaching of students was something to be avoided (and which could definitely be avoided by the more important faculty). Unfortunately, the middle-class taxpayers who fund the university are under the delusion that the academic research at the university is a secondary priority which is only carried out insofar as it leads to improving the quality of education received by the students at the school.

(If not for the problem of  money, the combination of teaching and research at one place works. I found that teaching could be a galvanizing influence on research and vice versa.)

The third function of universities arose once they became funded by the State. Once this happened they became an agent of State power, and a reflection of prominence of the State. Initially this wasn't so bad, as they were well-funded. But once funded by the State, universities fell into a trap--they were no longer free to set tuition as high as they would like.

In the past a university might charge enough for tuition to be able to afford the best teachers and the best research facilities. For a short time after the conversion to a State-funded enterprise, they were sufficiently funded to continue. But over the years, the State funding as a proportion of the university's total budget has declined; there is increasing political pressure against raising tuition (with the "everyone should be able to get a university education" mantra); and poor economic performance has shrunk endowments and pension funds--all of which has put severe pressure on the budget of the modern university.

So the third function of the university is to be a machine for raising money. In fact, this is now the highest purpose of the university. Of course, the university wishes to project the image that teaching is its highest purpose. To increase the university's coffers, it is necessary to lower costs wherever possible. As the principal cost to the university is the salaries of its faculty, the best way to lower costs is to find ways to reduce the pay of the highest salaried faculty, which may be done by reducing their teaching loads and increasing the number of courses which have large numbers of students serviced by a minimum of teaching resources.

For instance, in my last years teaching, I found myself teaching courses of 500 or more students, armed only with two TAs who were given a total of about 100 paid hours for all marking and course administration. The lack of TA hours meant that there was very little marking per student, a factor which lead to all evaluation to be via multiple-choice exams.

Multiple choice exams are just dandy for "testing" on the cheap, but they aren't helpful in determining whether the student has any depth of knowledge of a subject. These students could not be receiving a great education. What's worse is that the number of this type of course has only grown, for the simple reason that they only cost about $15,000 in human resources (plus a fixed cost for class space) in exchange for which the university receives $500,000 in tuition fees.

There was one semester where I taught two such courses as well as three smaller courses ("real" courses, including lab work or essay writing).

Now to be fair, there are real courses in the university. One course I particularly enjoyed teaching was a senior-level course in the philosophy of science, which was aimed at students who were planning to move on into graduate school. My own education lacked such a course, and it was only near the end of graduate school that I began to appreciate how much I could have used it. This course used nearly the same level of human resources as the 500+ student course, but this one only had about fifteen students. (My other favourite course from this time was about logic and formal systems).

Clearly the large courses are being used to subsidize the teaching of the smaller ones. But that isn't the only form of subsidization.

In Ontario universities in the 1990's, the amount of government funding for a graduate student was approximately five times that of an undergraduate. At the time, tuition might have been about $4000 Canadian for a full year, but the government funding for an undergraduate was about $6000 per year, but the university received over $30,000 per year for each registered graduate student. The funding disparity led to what appeared to be a cynical ploy to "harvest" graduate students for their grants.

The information below came to me during contract negotiations for an Ontario TA union in the 1990's and may not exactly reflect what is happening at present in Ontario or anywhere else.

There were restrictions placed on graduate students--any grad students gainfully employed for more than ten hours per week would not be funded--consequently the university placed restrictions on grad student employment, the key one being that they could not be paid for more than ten hours per week. The universities have always maintained that this policy (see section 1.3) is in place in order to ensure that the student would progress satisfactorily.

Since employment income was the only income for many graduate students, as teaching assistants they had to paid a very high hourly wage in order to get by. Any student caught working more than ten hours per week could be removed as a full-time student. Depending on the department, loss of full-time status could mean loss of office space and other departmental support.

Furthermore, the funding for graduate students had a limited duration--two years for Master's candidates and four years for doctoral candidates (IIRC). In some departments at one of my former universities, it was common for students who overran these time limits to suddenly lose most of their privileges, the end result being that such students were far less likely to succeed in acquiring their degree. From the department's perspective, such students were no longer a resource and it was necessary to remove them so that fresh graduate students could be planted. (For the record, the geology departments at my previous universities did not engage in such behaviour, but there were numerous other departments which did, particularly in the Arts).

Such behaviour certainly gave the appearance that the university was interested merely in harvesting whatever funding the government granted for the students, but had little care whether there was a delivered product (in the form of a freshly minted M.Sc (or M.A.) or Ph.D.

Also, universities had an interest in increasing graduate student enrollment, possibly at the expense of undergraduate enrollment. As graduate students are involved in research, academic research becomes more important than undergraduate research. Again--the universities will tell you that this is not so, because the typical middle-classed parent is not as interested in graduate school for their kids as they are in undergraduate or professional school.

State funding and the poor economy (itself a reflection of State involvement) has made universities dependent on alternative methods of funding and has drawn so much of the university's efforts that its twin functions of teaching and research are significantly impaired.

References:

Michaels, P. J., 2004. Meltdown: the predictable distortion of global warming by scientists, politicians, and the media. The Cato Institute, Washington, D.C., 275 p.

How government funding corrupts scientific integrity

It is well known that industry money in support of research can corrupt the results. There have been a litany of stories in all aspects of scientific study from the pharmaceutical and food industries, to establishing liability from long-term use of hazardous industrial products to more recent allegations of tampering with the food pyramid. From the fight over aspartame as a sweetening agent to the latest pharmaceuticals, once significant amounts of money are involved there are frequently doubts as to the validity of the science.

For instance, at the GAC in Calgary in May, the session on Climate Change had a talk by one Mr. Norman Kalmanovitch concerning the impact on global warming of a doubling of atmospheric CO2. According to the paper, the effect would be negligible. The paper did cause something of a sensation, and there was a great deal of angry criticism directed at the speaker; unfortunately only a very limited amount of that criticism was directed at the science presented, and much more was directed at the funding sources of Mr. Kalmanovitch and their inferred ideological bent.

Now it may be true that Friends of Science  is an ideologically driven organization, but that should not be the basis of criticism of the paper as presented. Unfortunately, it was nearly impossible to critique the presented paper as there were far too many slides (I believe he said there were 96, which I thought was a joke until he tried to go through them all). There was legitimate criticism about the length and confusion of the presentation, which cast doubt on the professionalism of the speaker and made it difficult to evaluate the science. I suggested to Mr. Kalmanovitch that he attempt to publish in peer-reviewed journals--at least then the ideas could be evaluated or criticized in an appropriate forum. Unfortunately, Mr. Kalmanovitch was of the opinion that the work would be rejected out of hand, as the climate journals were (in his opinion) ideologically driven organizations and he also felt that his own lack of academic stature would preclude any publication. 

To the point--if a young researcher (just starting off in a tenure-track position at a Canadian university) found himself with an NSERC grant to study climate change, and obtained results through either observation or experimentation that falsified the global warming hypothesis, I submit that the announcement of said results would be a career-limiting move. Perhaps even a career-ending one.

There are a couple of issues here. One is that in many cases, the weight of corporate funds is designed to produce a scientific result in order to finesse an objective around government regulation. Without the high degree of government regulation around pharmaceuticals and food additives, it would not be necessary to obtain results favouring the project at any cost. And for those who ask whether we would be better off without government regulation--who is it that allowed Lipitor, aspartame, and other toxins to pollute our bodies. Has government regulation really kept toxins out of the food chain? Who has overseen the regulation of offshore? The stock market and the financial sector? Mortgage markets? Who was responsible for preventing Ponzi schemes like Madoff or Enron? We must ask ourselves--would we fire or would we promote an employee who allowed such mayhem into the various aspects of our lives? Why should we not do the same with the State? By continually increasing the funding for failure, we reward failure. We have rewarded failure to the point that society is now on the brink of destruction.

Yet those who are quick to decry the influence of corporate interests either deny or ignore scientific bias in favour of state goals. If it is true that corporate interests fund science that supports their aims, is it logical to suppose that governments would not do the same? Have not the massive bailouts of the financial industry against the expressed wishes of the general population made it clear that States do not act in the best interests of their populations? What about the murders of tens of millions in the last century?

The ongoing furor over leaked emails from climate research in England (dubbed "Climategate") may be the beginning of this realization. The widespread perception of a possible conflict of interest has poisoned public opinion and is emblamatic of widespread distrust of government-funded science.

Another problem with government grants is more subtle. The existence of grants tends to force research in directions which are more likely to attract grants. This is not necessarily a direction that research should go. One of the original models of academia held that research should be driven by curiosity. Now, however, curiosity isn't enough.

For example, I was once interviewed for a position at a well-known university in the UK. As in all such interviews, the question of future research topics came up. I had industry money arranged for investigating the environmental impact of offshore aggregate mining in the North Sea, but I had ideas for other projects as well. One of  those was a continuation of my work on the dynamics of climate as determined from the geologic record. I wanted to pursue this as I saw what might be a short-lived lead in a field of endeavour that had great promise and could be done cheaply. Part of the promise was to deliver a methodology for testing climate models, and given the amount of money being spent on them, it seemed a good idea to evaluate them. Additionally, I knew that huge amounts of data were being collected at great expense, yet the methods of their analysis were primitive--and a small amount of money could greatly increase the value of what was being recovered at great expense. I was dismayed when the only question I received was how I would justify applying for a million-pound grant with such a project.

It was an aspect of research funding I had never really considered. Acquiring grant money for a young academic has always been necessary, but the amounts of money now being granted have attracted a new and unfortunate dynamic. The demand now is to design research projects which require large sums of money, which necessarily limits the types of proposals that can be formulated. For instance, in the field of paleoclimatology, the only types of projects that can justify grants of millions of dollars involve drilling holes somewhere remote (and crowd-pleasing). The resultant responsibility to ensure that the data obtained in such a project is thoroughly studied is ignored because of the need to obtain the next large grant (which usually involves more placing more holes somewhere else). Spending time contemplating the data obtained and attempting new methods of data processing in order to ensure that the best use is made of the data cannot compete with the drive to put new holes in distant places.

If you think that the funding agencies would be interested in granting relatively small amounts of money to  improve the use of the data from these expensive boreholes, you would be mistaken. For they also have an interest in ensuring that large research grants are made. If you are overseeing the disbursement of $50 million, it is a lot easier to give out 25 $2 million grants than to give out a thousand $50 thousand grants. Your own salary is only dependent on doling out the money, so it makes sense to create as little work for yourself as possible.

Moving up the chain, we come to the politicians, whose interests in these matters are complex and contradictory. It can be a good thing to be sure that science is funded, but it would be bad if publicity came out that you were funding studies on the World of Warcraft, for instance. They would like to know that the money is being used effectively, but they do not have the scientific background to evaluate the science; so they place the responsibility in the hands of the funding agencies above.

I submit that the system works very differently from the way it was intended. I have no doubt that at every step, individuals acted in a way that they thought would lead to the best use of scientific resources. How do we explain how the result has come to be at odds with the intent?

(added July 28)

Gary North has written on the differences between a job and a calling. A job is what you do to make money. A calling is the highest, best use of your time. Your goal in life should be to do less job and more calling. If you are very lucky, your calling will be your job, but this is rare.

For most people in academia, teaching is their job, but their calling is research. Actually, the way they are funded, they probably view the research as both their job and their calling--the teaching is some condition of their obtaining research space, and is to be avoided.



My proposal for the financing of scientific research is as follows--let it fund itself!

Academic positions should essentially be teaching positions. If the academic wishes to research as well, that becomes a personal decision. University education is failing, at least in part because the system is geared to reward research, and if the academic is particularly good at research, teaching may even be avoided. Make teaching the main job of academics. Universities already carrying research equipment may use that to attract researchers who are would like to use it to further their research. Government should get out of funding research.