Emphasis on the Impact

In these uncertain times for post-secondary education in Nova Scotia, Dalhousie University recently unveiled its new strategic direction.

President Florizone spent 100 days listening. He consulted thousands students, staff, and community stakeholders. He summarized his findings into a 196-page report. Now, he and his team have condensed all of this input into a new strategic vision for the future of our university – a document that sports a title as bold and captivating as the process that led to its creation.

“Inspiration and Impact: Dalhousie Strategic Direction 2014- 2018″

Whoa. The title is nothing if not honest. The decisions made over the next few years are going to impact students in a huge way. The impact won’t necessarily be POSITIVE, mind you, but they didn’t say anything about that, now did they?

I know that came across as terribly cynical. I’m sorry. I wish I could read this delightfully generic four-page document and let out a sigh of relief, confident that Dal was about to become a dynamic educational power-house propelled to glory by its new threefold mission statement that compels us to pursue teaching excellence, world-leading research, and community service on a global scale.

The thing is, this isn’t my first degree here at Dal. Unfortunately, the last of my optimism was frozen in carbonite around the time the NDP pulled a Lando Calrissian-style betrayal on students back in 2010.

This isn’t the first time the university has laid out a vision since I’ve been here, and the administration hasn’t exactly succeeded at its previous attempts to inspire.

According to a report released last year by the Dalhousie Faculty Association, administrative spending increased 98 per cent between 2002 and 2012, while “academic” spending increased only 48 per cent over that same period. This administrative crowd – the group that deemed it wise to increase its own budget at twice the rate of the academic budget— are the ones we must trust to trim the fat and find a way to guide us through the troubled financial seas ahead.

I’m sure we’ll be okay – it’s not like academics are that important to a university, right?

Again, sorry for the snark. I know it’s not polite, respectful, or remotely constructive. It just slips out sometimes.

The thing is, aside from the general bloat, those of us who have been around long enough have seen the administration make some questionable calls during previous attempts to pursue bold ambitions.

The last half-decade or so has witnessed dramatic cutbacks in government funding of post-secondary education, and yet Dal has gone full steam ahead with a number of major new construction projects. These projects are part of something called the Campus Master Plan, an ambitious vision that calls for $600 million in campus development.

The administration justifies these expenditures by pointing to predicted enrolment increases.

Troublingly though, the university’s own reports on the 2011-2012 budget cautioned that increased competition for international students and Nova Scotia’s declining high school student population mean that enrolment might not keep pace with the growth we’ve seen over the past decade.

This isn’t some purely theoretical concern either – one of our fellow Haligonian universities provides a sobering reminder of the catastrophic possibilities inherent in of this sort of bold, hold-our-breath-and-hope-for-the-best planning.

In the mid 2000s, NSCAD went ahead with plans to build its beautiful new Waterfront Campus, assuming that such a move was necessary to accommodate growth. Unfortunately, they pulled the trigger without first securing all of the necessary external funding for the project. The Wilson Report (2011) described this hugely expensive project as the key factor in NSCAD’s (still ongoing) financial crisis, noting that their enrolment objectives were wildly overoptimistic given Nova Scotia’s declining high school population.

So NSCAD followed a similar route, and they are now about two years away from being renamed the Dalhousie School of Crafts and Crayons. You can see how this might leave one a little skeptical about our current course.

Let’s be optimists though. We’ll assume that Dal’s gamble pays off better than NSCAD’s, and that our swashbuckling new president slashes administrative bloat. We’ll even ignore the host of other problems that I haven’t dared bring up, like the university’s enormous pension shortfall, or the fact that the highest paid professors at the top of the faculty food chain are unlikely to accept any sort of wage freeze to help control expenditures.

It doesn’t matter—we’re still due for a shakedown.

Back in October, Minister of Labour and Advanced Education Kelly Regan announced that by 2018, Nova Scotian universities will face a $50 million annual gap between what they require, and what the government is able to pay. The only way to avert this dire future is to take drastic steps to cut costs and/or increase revenue.

Anyone want to throw out a guess as to where the bulk of the funds necessary to meet that deficit will come from?

So there you have it. Cynicism explained. It’s hard to envision how the university plans to follow through with this new strategic direction—to pay for both “excellence in teaching” and “world-leading research” in a way that doesn’t end painfully for students.

It’s even harder to imagine them pulling this off while simultaneously funding flashy new construction projects to accommodate students who may or may not be coming, in an environment in which the government has already told us that we’re on track for massive funding shortfalls.

The final page of the “Inspiration and Impact” document features a chart purporting to show the steps required on “our way forward”. Interestingly, this process is structured as a circle, so after completing each step along the way forward … you end up right back where you started.

You know where I’m going with this. Honestly though, there’s still a small part of me that desperately wants this chart to represent a rolling wheel of change, not a spin-cycle set to futility.

As I’ve said, this hope is still trapped deep within that carbonite shell – and if you’ve watched Return of the Jedi, you know that only a sassy, rebellious young administrator has the power to set it free.

President Florizone, will you be my Princess Leia?