Growth and Governance of Canadian Universities: An Insider's View (review)

A dozen years ago the public servant, academic, and poet Douglas V. LePan said to me, over lunch at Massey College, that he couldn't understand why people wanted to be university presidents any more. Since the early 1970s, he argued, the power available to presidents had declined, and about all they could do now was preside over meetings and help to apportion budget cuts: 'And where's the joy in that?'

Howard C. Clark, an eminent New Zealand-born chemist who served as the president of Dalhousie University from 1986 to 1995, sounds as though he might actually have enjoyed doing a bit of cutting. This book is part memoir, part description and analysis of the changes that have taken place in Canadian universities since his appointment, at age twenty-eight, to the University of British Columbia in 1957, and part polemic, attacking faculty unionization and advocating a return to the top-down management that characterized the institutions before the 1960s.

Clark comes across as able, self-assured, and idealistic, a man who thinks that other academics should live up to the high standards he has set for himself and has evidently met. He seems impatient with those who don't share his general outlook and rather naïve about the knotty issue of merit and how to reward it. And he shares with many academics a tendency to generalize from his own experiences about subjects in which he is not expert.

His image of pre-1960 Canadian universities is one of small, intimate, generally well governed, happy places, in which undergraduate teaching was taken seriously and faculty members pulled together loyally for the good of the institution. The 1960s brought rapid growth, producing institutions in which loyalty came to be focused on the faculty, the department, or the discipline, at the expense of institutional loyalty. Faculty members became increasingly critical of the way the institution was run, and with money in ample supply, they were able to devote time to increasing the power of faculty members. When money became harder to get, in the 1970s and 1980s, a desire for secure employment led to faculty unionization.

Unions are Clark's particular bugbear. Based mostly on his experiences at Dalhousie, the only unionized university he has worked at, he believes that faculty unions have rendered universities largely ungovernable, with cliques of faculty members able to use collective agreements to deny the rewards due to merit, to prevent the pruning of academic deadwood or the closing of weak or uneconomical units, and generally to frustrate efforts at reform. Legislative action is necessary, in his view, to reduce the power of the faculty and increase that of presidents and governing boards, thereby presumably restoring to universities the sense of unity and purpose that they need in order to meet the challenges of the present and the future.

There is truth in Clark's account, but it distorts both past and present, and sometimes it is simply wrong. For example, it has been years since legislation banning faculty unions in British Columbia was repealed, and the faculty of UBC is now unionized. More startling than this kind of oversight is Clark's failure to analyse the sources of unhappiness with the top-down form of management, and, in this context, to discuss the dismissal of the historian Harry Crowe from United College in 1958 and its crucial significance for the Canadian professoriate.

This book demonstrates clearly that generalizing about universities and their history is difficult and dangerous. Their origins and development continue to divide them, as Clark found in Nova Scotia. The fact of provincial jurisdiction has shaped them all and does so still. Clark fails to give adequate weight to this fact. He cites approvingly the harsh but presumably salutary way in which New Zealand has dealt with its universities, but he does not dwell on the differences between a centralized country and a federation and their effects on...