Ivory Tower Blues: A University System in Crisis (review)

This useful book is part of the general class of books on ‘the idea of the university’ that begins with Cardinal Newman, though similar material can be found written by professors in the early Middle Ages at Oxford and Paris. A tendency among these books is to see the university system in some danger, usually in immediate crisis. Côté and Allahar have written such a book centrally in that tradition.

Their picture of the ideal university, their own ‘idea of the university,’ is one much like the university of the 1960s and 1970s when there were still standard entrance examinations enforced by the Canadian provinces that tended, so they believe, to guarantee high-quality high school graduates well-prepared for university studies – students just like themselves, in fact. When such students, about 2% of the population entering their first year, arrived at the university, they were treated to serious scholarship by professors with high standards of academic excellence. They graduated and found excellent jobs requiring their particular qualifications – jobs for which they were not overqualified. Indeed, at that time it was a university in which attendance was considered very much a privilege, not a right; professors had considerable status among their students and even the general public; students were charged only nominal fees at a time when the generous summer vacation –nearly five months – provided enough time for most students to earn enough money to put themselves through university by their summer work alone.

The story they tell is familiar to most university teachers in Canada and the United States – indeed, in Western Europe and most of the rest of the world at this time – the root cause of which is that the universities, even private universities, are now almost entirely dependent on the funding and hence the policies of the state. Today there are not always provincial examinations that maintain strict standards (as they are imagined still to do in Alberta) for university entrance. The number of students in the post-secondary system is no longer 2% of those entering the first year, but rather more like 20% or even higher, with governments encouraging the numbers to reach 50%. University fees are now too high for students to earn enough in the summer vacation to pay for their year, so nearly all students contract debt, which must be paid back shortly after graduation. As a result, students are an increasing burden to their parents. These new realities mean that professors tend to pass students whom they might have failed thirty years ago and give higher grades to the rest. Class sizes are larger than they once were and the personal distance between the student body and the professoriate is greater than in days of yore.

Yet many of us who have taught from the sixties to the present day at universities do not think our students are less well-prepared, write worse than they did in the past, or show less imagination. There are many more undergraduates, so the spectrum is wider. But the doctoral students we now see are as good as those we saw in the 1960s and 1970s, though there are ten times the number. And somehow such students, undergraduate and graduate, manage to work at their jobs and often with families on the side in a way that we would have found inconceivable. Many take advantage of the new ‘distributed education’ possibilities, taking degrees partly or wholly online. Somehow they manage both to hold down a job and study. Perhaps teaching and learning is worse as our authors say, but the students are even more remarkable. And the university teachers have for the most part adjusted well to the new teaching realities and somehow find time to publish even more than in the past. That said, this is a well-written and interesting book worth a read by aspiring students, by university teachers, and by parents. It would be a useful...