This is the famous beach at Cannes where Bardot and other starlets once shed their bikinis for the adoring fans and photographers. Such stunts are passé here. Nothing shocks. The annual film festival gathers thousands of people in the industry who have the jaded look of too many action films that died at the box office. Still, shock-free though it is, Cannes is still a real kick and one would be a fool not to sample the huge menu of offerings. Already I have seen superb film, locked hands with one of my idols, Jane Campion, lined up for eternity and been denied a seat at the last minute, secured a prime seat for another screening, and gawked long and hard at the throngs of humanity who have descended to this fair of vanities.

At the moment I am eavesdropping on a deal going down at the next table. They’re speaking English, but I can’t quite make out what kind of film they’re partnering on. The cliches abound, though: “the structure is solid and the script is very tight,” he says. When has anyone said anything  less?

I am planted at the Argentinian booth, waiting my own meeting with a lively distributor of films, eager to hear what she is promoting. This is the nature of the Cannes market, everyone selling or buying something, looking for the best deal or angle. Spanish is rolling off the tongue here, a little microcosm of South America. There are multitudes of microcosms, but we are bound here by the same love or interest in film, to be sure.

Anyhow, I have my own deals to make and hustles to manage and so I’m out of here for this week. A dirty job but…

Allan Rock rocks. He did, at least, this week in a speech to the Canadian Club in Ottawa: “The ‘Skills Mismatch’ and the Myth of the Irrelevant University.” I love it when university presidents speak their minds. In my view they just don’t do it enough. A former Federal Liberal Cabinet member, Rock has a natural aversion to this present government’s approach to supporting higher education, and so you have to start with that, sure.  But he took the opportunity to speak boldly and honestly to a group of Canadian mandarins about representation and misrepresentation of academia, putting the case squarely before their hooded eyes.

Rock focused on all the bad ink over the value of an undergraduate education, but his defense extends to university education at every level. He listed the central themes of complaint: professors are fusty and out of touch with the Real World; anything but a job in an applied area is worthless and leads to unemployment; the arts and Humanities are especially vulnerable because they have nothing practical to offer today’s student; colleges do a better job of training students for that Real World. We’ve heard and I have written about some of this stuff before.  It’s astonishing that we still need to challenge these clichés, but we do.

I won’t rehearse his whole speech. It’s widely available now. I just wish we had more of this kind of high-level talk in the public sphere. He is in good company down south, at least. This week the former president of the Us National Endowment of the Humanities, Jim Leach, spoke to the same topic, arguing that more than ever we need the humanities to help us prevent the annihilation of the planet, which we seem, for the first time, to have finally figured out how to do. If we lose the humanities, he argued, we lose the ability lead the world. Not sure who the we is but I take it to be the human race, period, and not just Americans.

One excuse for Canadian university presidents not being vocal enough about what we’re all facing is that we have no national education policy, no unifying national vision of higher education whatsoever. Presidents are focused on their provincial structures and not on the national big picture, and therefore they keep their audiences small and their interests in line with their provincial government mandates. As University of Alberta Provost Carl Amrhein also said this week, this national policy lack really undermines our ability to recruit and compete internationally. We have, for example, a strong sense of how Australia, the UK, and China are investing—or not—in higher ed, but ask anyone out there what Canada is doing and you’ll draw a blank. We see this when we attend international conferences and recruitment fares, where provincial universities are competing against each other. We are in no position to present ourselves as a Canada brand, that’s for sure.

Anyhow, the point is that when a Canadian university president pulls a few things together and takes the pulse of trends in higher education, and the myths and false narratives that attend to it, it’s news. Not exactly man bites dog news, but news.

NG

Normally, on this blogspot I resist wading into the very shallow waters of political rhetoric but this week’s events compelled me to don my nose plugs. Those of us who work in education know well just how much Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s ongoing assault on Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau is revealing about himself. After the thwarted attempt by, allegedly, a graduate student and his pals to blow up a VIA Rail train, and alluding to Trudeau’s earlier comments about understanding the “root causes” of terrorism, Harper declared that now is not the time to “commit sociology.” This tasty sound byte has extended well beyond the typical 21st century news cycle. It’s just too irresistibly chewy—especially for us hungry academics who understand how the social sciences and humanities are being steadily starved.

That paragraph packs a lot of strained metaphors, and for that I apologize, but when your First Leader coins a phrase like commit sociology you just have to play in the word kit a bit. Everyone else is doing it. The freshly manufactured buttons you see above were produced just in time for a large conference on the media representation of education issues. All the participants will proudly commit sociology throughout. Yesterday, Environics Institute president Michael Adams wrote a smart, wry essay for the Globe and Mail in which he confesses that he does not intend to stop committing sociology. And there have been many tweets, jokes, and, yes, now, even those buttons dedicated to mocking Harper’s telling turn of phrase.

Just what does it tell? That to Harper and his supporters sociology is something you commit, like a crime. And that committing it is frivolous, an indulgence, something you do in your own time but not in the public sphere—not now when we all need to stop analyzing, questioning, interrogating, reflecting, and maybe even thinking. What does that leave? Just feeling sad? Hating?

Naturally, any self-respecting citizen is going to identify the root causes of Harper’s phrasing—a profound anti-intellectualism, a deep-seated suspicion of critical thinking, an ideological aversion to social theory—the very analysis that might lead to exposing the root causes of a phrase like commit sociology! There might be even deeper roots, of course, something having to do with Harper’s childhood or primal playground insecurities. But for such explanations we would be committing psychoanalysis, and I don’t want to go there anyway. Let’s leave it for the biographers.

What is threatening the Prime Minister? The Leader of the Opposition, Tom Mulcair, has advanced professional degrees from McGill and Trudeau was on track in an MA program in Environmental Geography at McGill before throwing his hat into the political arena. As we all know now from those embarrassingly juvenile Conservative Party attack ads, Justin Trudeau is, horror of horrors, a teacher!  The ads brilliantly raised the ire of thousands of educators across the country who would prefer not to have their profession demonized, thank you very much.

Mulcair and Trudeau are solidly educated and comfortable in their heads when they commit sociology. Trudeau’s comment about looking into the root causes of radicalization, particularly regarding the Boston bombers, might have been an honest and widely shared response to the event, but it also at once reflected his inexperience and candor—two qualities that just might serve him well over the fiercely tactical, cynicism-inducing Prime Minister. Harper probably prefers to treat Canadians like infants, incapable of thinking for ourselves or reflecting more deeply on what is sadly becoming the common horror of terrorism in this century. More to the point, he would have us see the world as a battle of good and evil, the two spheres being, to his way of thinking, transparently obvious. Sociology tends to blur those divisions, making the world a lot more complicated, more like the world we actually inhabit and not some child’s fairy tale version of the world.

This whole ongoing episode does underscore the fact that words really do matter. I bet Harper thought he was being right clever tossing out that phrase, feeding the deeply conservative anti-intellectual base of his party. It’s even possible that attack ads, pathetic as they are, just might not work anymore, not when you start turning teachers into idiots, or questioning our right to ask probing questions.
Wonder if the Prime Minister is eating his words right now with a side order of humble pie. Somehow, I doubt it.

NG

You wouldn’t know that the picture above is of an 800-room resort. I was in the Dominican Republic last week, a “destination” for a family wedding. I took this shot early morning, before people started moving like sleepwalkers towards the cavernous hall where breakfast was being served. This was one of those all-inclusive spots where you pay for flights, meals, and drinks in advance, and then show up with nothing but money for tips for the staff. It seems as if the whole world partakes of these vacation spots. The 800 rooms were fully booked and there was absolutely no chance of getting a late check out because plane loads of tourists were lining up to check in while we were thinking of shaking the sand out of our suitcases.

The whole time I was there I thought of the late great American novelists David Foster Wallace and his famous essay, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” Wallace went on a one-week cruise ship and ended up describing the “supposedly fun” experience as utterly despair-inducing. I can’t say I was really ever in despair in the DR but Wallace’s account of the cruise was uncannily similar to the all-inclusive experience. In a word, that experience is marked by excess—excess of food, drink, sun, beach, sloth, people, you name it. It’s hard to complain when you’re steps away from a stunning white sandy beach in the middle of a chilly Canadian April, but then it’s hard not to reflect on this strange construct of a vacation, one in which almost all decisions have been taken away from you. Perhaps it is that very fact that’s so appealing to so many. After slogging it out in the work-a-day world, it’s probably comforting to many people to not have to think about what the next moment might bring. Everything has been arranged and ordered for indulgence, from the native jungle to the buffet lines. To parasail or not to parasail: that really is the only question.

The picture above shows just how well manicured that jungle forest has become.  One can only imagine the labour involved in sectioning out such a large parcel of land for human habitation—villas and walkways and pools, gardens and restaurants, all carved out of a very wild landscape.  The resort planners saved a swath of the original natural environment and put up signs informing the vacationers that there was a “natural conservatory” on the premises. So it is that nature has become part of the spectacle for the ambulatory tourist. One day a couple of guys were roaming around one of the gajillion pools with a camera and a large boa constrictor. They were intent on draping the snake around the necks of the eager and fearless and taking some well composed tourist pictures. They found a remarkably high number of willing participants, especially little kids whose parents encouraged them to smile for the camera: nature at once personified and commodified.

Every morning upon walking out of our villa and moving towards the breakfast lines I felt as if I were on some large movie set—or, worse, a compound of zombies. We were all white, sleepy, self-satisfied, and way too many were grossly overweight. A bottomless supply of piña coladas didn’t help. Haiti, destitute and still recovering from the effects of the earthquake, was just on the other side of the island, so close and yet so different. I wondered: did Sean Penn ever come over to the DR to clean up and escape the rubble of Port-au-Prince?

It’s interesting how despite one’s best efforts it’s difficult not feeling like an elitist snob. Large crowds of obese automatons can do that to you. I am sure the tourism trade is doing good and necessary things for the island economy, but is this really the best way our civilization has of spending some hard-earned downtime?

The wedding, by the way, was lovely.

NG

This postcard comes to you from New Brunswick, New Jersey, where I am attending the annual meeting of the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools (NAGS). Rutgers University, the state university of NJ, is the host of the event.

The entire east coast is weather bound. Some participants only got here last night, stranded for hours in various airports. It took me a lot longer than scheduled to get here, as well, and now I am focusing on getting out smoothly on the weekend. That’s the way spring rolls these days. The appeal of being here, though, is that the trees are already well into first bloom. See above. This stand of trees is just across my hotel. This town is not exactly America the Beautiful but the sight of leaves and budding blossoms gives a certain lift to the day, grey as it is. And the Rutgers campus is itself a postcard of everything you imagine a US college campus to be.

So far the meetings have been lively, good speakers and presentations. One major focus is internationalization and the challenges of accommodation. A disturbing theme is the way US universities, some of them, anyway, are struggling inelegantly with orienting international students into the American way. What happens when collective-based practices clash with deeply entrenched beliefs in rugged individualism? It’s not always pretty. The Canadian contingent is typically shocked and appalled by some of the cultural assumptions floating around this room. That’s why NAGS is always so interesting. You get to mix it up with your neighbouring peers in ways that Canadian meetings just don’t allow.

Tomorrow I become president of this modestly robust association, and so am looking forward to hosting the meetings in Toronto next year. Flying to Newfoundland in the cruelest month of April just doesn’t seem like a likely or affordable option for many of these deans, especially those who come from small communities in Connecticut or Massachusetts. Toronto the Compromise it shall be. Best I can do is get the executive to St. John’s for a planning meeting in the fall.

Looking at a slide now that shows a whopping majority of students say that the benefits of a graduate education far outweigh the cost, although the satisfaction percentage declines significantly for minority and ethnic-identified students. Interesting. What does that speak to? Much narrower employment pathways for those groups following graduation? Probably. This fact contradicts yesterday’s overconfident boasts about the egalitarian principles of American life. Hard to believe that when you scan the profiles of the members of this conference. Not a lot of color in this room, although a lot on the streets of New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Ah, America, so full of contradictions. Great trees, though.

I am in jolly old London, except it is less than really jolly; it is unseasonably cold and everyone is huddling into scarves and sweaters, ducking snowflakes and wondering whether climate change has anything to do with it. Italian tourists look frustrated; the Germans are just getting on with it. Canadians like to say we are used to it, but truthfully it’s just too bloody cold here. The sky is as leaden as the pound and the air is grey with smog. Sounds like a nightmare, but to paraphrase the poet-scholar, when a man [sic] is tired of London he [sic] is tired of life. It’s true. This is one of the world’s most advanced built cultures and one could and should never ever tire of it. I can see the Thames from my hotel window and that goes a long way to warming me up for the day.

A bunch of colleagues and I are here this week, along with the university president and entourage, to celebrate our UK campus in Harlow, mingle with alumni, and dine at Parliament. Last night about 100 of us enjoyed a traditional English meal—Yorkshire pudding, rib roast—in the members’ dining room at Westminster. Above you can see a picture of the vast stone hall through which one enters before advancing into the smaller and more intimate spaces of the Parliament buildings. We entered the glorious golden gothic walls of the Palace of Westminster, as it is often referred to, through the Cromwell portal and then through some serious security checks before coming into this hall. As one colleague noted, it’s not hard to imagine heavily robed medieval noblemen milling about the vast spaces, waiting for some edict from an impatient king—perhaps Richard III whose remains were just discovered not too far from here across the river.

I would have taken a lot more pictures inside the corridors of the Palace and the dining room, but no photographs are allowed once one leaves the hall. Even gesturing towards one’s camera brings sharp scolding rebuke from the officials guarding the House of Commons. We loitered in a grand lobby, ringed with large portraits and busts of politicians and iconic leaders, before permission was granted to enter the dining room. It’s all awesome, of course, standing in the very bowels of Western history, imagining the thousands of famous people who have tread the stone floors beneath our feet. There is a strong smell of dust and history in the air, dampness over everything, and an unmistakable maleness to it all. English history has certainly been dominated by men, a few Elizabeths and Margaret Thatcher notwithstanding, and you can feel it in the dimly lit Palace corridors. I am sure the décor and lighting of the place would look and feel different if some strong-minded women architects had been invited to participate in the construction. Except for electricity there is nothing even vaguely twentieth-century about any of it, let alone this century. That said, we loved it.

Dinner was lively. A hundred Memorial enthusiasts make a lot of noise. The new Lt. Governor of the province gave a rousing, witty address, reminding the room of his own experience as Memorial student and the remarkable growth of the university since then. Applause was appreciative and extended. Among us were many Memorial graduates, Rhodes scholars, a former president, donors, alumni, and the Canadian High Commissioner and his wife. A young woman now living in the UK said her experience at Memorial had more than prepared her for employment and in general for life, and she insisted that the cocky graduates of Oxford or Cambridge whom she had met living here were no better prepared. In fact, she said many of them knew “rubbish.” Indeed, it was a night of boasts and shared confidences. Everyone was happy about the university and its evolution and we all emerged from the event under the looming Tower of Big Ben with full bellies and a pile of new business cards. Collaborations and support have always been borne out of shared meals and wine, conversation and laughs. Such has been the case for hundreds of years in that dining room, I am sure, and so it was again.

This postcard comes to you from Ottawa. Last week it was Toronto, this week the nation’s capital. I’m on the go again.  I took this shot a few hours ago. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty was in the House delivering the annual budget. You can see it’s a dreary grey winter day here, although technically it’s spring. Weather like this takes all the romance out of this iconic gothic landscape. Note the steel barrier. A police car was squatting just to the left of the frame. The cop at the wheel took note of my picture taking. It’s not exactly a White House security situation, but things have changed in Ottawa over the years. I have been coming here for one reason or another for most of my adult life and I have seen the steady increase in surveillance and security. Well, it’s budget day and so I suppose there was a certain stepped-up degree of vigilance, just in case anyone too disenfranchised or angry at government might sabotage activity on the Hill.

One of those people could be the young and unemployed. For weeks the government has been spinning the message that the country is severely short of killed trade workers.

March 28, 2013

That blog was rudely interrupted by something or another and here it is, a week later in St. John’s, with provincial budget fallout in the air. A lot of people have been laid off in the public sector. One wonders how any of that can be good for the economy, let alone the morale of anyone suddenly facing a mortgage and no income. The provincial budget did not, at least, echo the same skills-shortage rhetoric, or actions, of the federal one.  Millions of dollars are soon to be channeled towards a program that focuses on short-term skills training. Apparently we have a crisis in this country, or so the Harper Government wants us to believe—not enough welders, not enough young men with the hands-on abilities to serve the oil and gas and mining industries.  So it is that colleges and especially private career colleges will be receiving vats and vats of dollars to encourage the training of those skills. There are some big catches—provincial governments have to match the money along with potential employers. The program is called Canada Job Grant, soon to be commonly known as the CJG, no doubt.

Already the Quebec government has told the federal one that it can stick its CJG program where the sun don’t shine. Don’t tell us how to train young people, they are saying. The reaction from all other provinces has been deafeningly silent.  Out of the blue they are being pressured to cough up money targeted for other sectors. No wonder they are withholding their applause. There are serious flaws here. You can’t train people to become experts of anything in a short amount of time. The program also channels money away from public institutions and from universities that are struggling to keep their own programs afloat. Dedicating billions to encouraging private career colleges is a crazy narrow hair brained notion!

Perhaps the biggest problem here is the myth that we actually have a universal skills shortage crisis. Sure, one hears about this all the time anecdotally, but where did government get its hysteria from? There is a mountain of evidence to the contrary, and a lot of intelligent commentary in the blogosphere to set the matter right. No one asked me, but I would argue we have a real shortage of artists, filmmakers, and public intellectuals in Canada. That billions of dollars should be circulating in sectors where ideas matter, where creativity is fostered, and intelligence nurtured—where our reputation as a progressive, cool nation might be generated. Amazing how quickly we have moved from a so-called Knowledge Economy—one dependent on high-level professional skills—to a trade skills economy. It doesn’t inspire confidence in the Ottawa brains who are running this country, does it? Sure, we need skilled workers to harness the resources but a shortage crisis?

It’s about as anti-intellectual a budget as we have ever had, although not surprising from a government that doesn’t actually believe in government spending in research or culture. The military and prisons—yes. Education—not so much. They believe we should all somehow be raising our own money to deliver programs that are not obviously applied or lead to a job in the Tar Sands. One thing I noticed in Ottawa after several meetings in and around the Hill is just how complicit we all are –university and education  leaders—with the government agenda. Experience has shown that speaking out or challenging that agenda gets you taken right off the list. Dissent—what universities should be encouraging, as with critical thinking,–has been taken hostage. History has shown time and again how entire societies tacitly comply with or stay silent about ignominious behaviour. I really get that because I feel as if I am living that out. No one is getting killed but it’s a matter of degree. Self-censorship is a strong survival reflex, however ineffective.

As I have said before, we are in much better shape living in this province, where tuition is low and where, for now, at least, government understands the value of investing in post-secondary education. That said, they have given notice that they will be looking for “operational efficiencies” in our system next year. Now there’s an odious term if ever there were one. For now, it’s situation stable. Stay tuned.

Two weeks way in the French West Indies sure is good for the soul. I highly recommend it. I took all my devices with me, of course, because a day without email is like a day without meaning. Returning to campus without having checked in and replied to various requests for this and that would have been unthinkable. As we all know, anything is possible if you’re connected to the Internet and so staying in touch with the home office is simply a fundamental part of a dean’s life these days. Most people I replied to had no clue I was sitting on a beach chair with a frozen margarita by my elbow. But I was.

While away I spent some time tracking the debate around MOOCs—Massive Open Online Courses—which is getting more dense and animated, now that these courses have been up and running for a while. I can’t really say with any certainty that I know where MOOCs are headed or whether they will significantly alter the experience of postsecondary learning but the topic is fascinating. Every day there is fresh commentary, especially generated in the USA where MOOCs are far more top of mind than here in Canada, at least so far. More to the point, the research on the actual benefits and effectiveness of MOOCs is just beginning. Until there is more evidence of the business and learning model, most universities will simply monitor their potential for now.

MOOCs, as I have written before in this space, have been acquiring student learners in staggering numbers. Stanford‘s MOOCS boast about 100,000 people a course.  That’s the massive part of the descriptor, for sure. A recent Chronicle of Higher Ed article updating readers on the state of MOOCs notes that dozens of universities worldwide are now delivering such courses, including McGill and the UoT. Are they or will they transform our institutions entirely? We probably need another five years of MOOCs delivery to figure that out, and to come up with appealing business models. Right now, the courses are all ‘free,’ except that they are being underwritten by huge providers.

Someone has come up with four categories of participants: lurkers, drop-ins, passive participants and active participants. Those could apply to just about anything on the web, surely. One widely reported factoid raises serious questions about how to measure the success of MOOCs. We are now hearing that only 10% of the hundreds of thousands who sign up for the free courses offered by some of the most prestigious institution in the world are completing them. This sounds like a crushingly low number until you consider that 10% of, say, a million new learners, is actually pretty high. They say that a lot of high school students are signing on to courses offered by MIT or Stanford, but a very small handful of them ever finish. This shouldn’t be surprising, either. It’s way too easy to sign up and so why wouldn’t you? They’re free, and so there’s no investment but time. If I had a dollar for every time I failed to follow up on a web-based lead or commitment I started I’d be able to finance my next Caribbean holiday.

Another recent development is that MOOCs are starting to acquire legit academic credentials, and so they are not simply for anyone in the universe who happens to be interested in a subject for its own sake. They will soon start to count towards degrees. But what about students who are getting degrees by paying a fortune in tuition? If you can get a degree someday from MIT for free then why would you bother paying $30,000 plus a year? Clearly a new business model needs to be thought through. No one has figured it out quite yet. Not even the geniuses at Harvard.

I love the argument that it’s impossible to assess what students are actually learning in MOOCs. Right, like it’s so easy to figure out otherwise.  I’ve been invited to a conference in the fall where the topic will have a lot to do with learning technologies trends and the whole MOOCs initiative. Perhaps by then there will be more research on the real effects of this wired phenomenon. Until then, and until charges start to apply, perhaps I really ought to sign up for a course whose contents I can understand.