Graduation Address

"The Governing of Universities" (8 October 1969). (UA Case 69, Box 1)

lf my fellow graduates of a few minutes ago will allow me, I should like to say for us all how greatly we value the honour given us by this University. A University venerable by Canadian standards, but marked by all the vigor of youth as it goes from strength to strength in the present. Speaking for myself only, this is a particularly moving occasion. By some curious chances, a few graduates of this University have been of central importance in my life over many years. To be mustered into the company which they have graced with their membership in it makes this for me a red-letter day.

I should like to congratulate the graduating class – those whose well-earned honours are being unreasonably deferred while I talk. You have jumped all the hurdles put in front of you and have crossed the finishing line, somewhat breathless no doubt, even perhaps a bit incredulous, but there you are. I wish you well as you leave this sanctuary and go out into the world.

It has been customary for speakers on occasions like this to give some wise and unwelcome advice to the graduating class. I relieve your mind on this at once. You will get no in loco parentis counsel from me.

Instead, I shall speak on what I hope will be equal terms to all present on the governing of universities, a subject which we have been debating strenuously in this country for the past few years. Many people think that Canadian universities have been governed on the wrong principle but they don't agree on the right principle. Some think they are governed too much; others are sure that they're not governed enough. In all this, almost nobody speaks up for the way they were governed, at least until yesterday. The formal structure of university government in the past was sufficiently autocratic in appearance to offend deeply the rising and vocal classes, the teaching staff and the students. They were right about this.

In most universities, until yesterday, all final legal authority rested with the Board of Governors on the model of the absolute monarch, or with the President and the Board on the model of the commercial corporation. In governing structures anywhere, the reality rarely follows the forms closely. The absolutism in this instance was much softened in practice by the convention observed in most places that in academic matters the Board either delegated authority to the President or acted only on his advice. He, in turn, usually, did not act or recommend until he was satisfied of pretty solid support in the teaching staff.

However, there was, in most universities, enough intervention by boards of governors in critically important academic matters to upset the teaching staff. They rightly objected to laymen intervening in issues which they had no competence to judge. Then, with some forensic license, they assembled their grievances, and laid them all at the door of a bungling, if not perverse, board of governors and a president thought always to be at the bidding of the board. This overstated the case considerably. On top of all this, the teaching staff asserted a principle. The university is essentially a community of scholars, equal in their concern for their common life as scholars, even if not quite equal in rank. This community, they said, should be a self-governing community. lf there are to be Boards of Governors at all they must either be controlled by scholars or limited to very narrow functions.

As this case was being developed by teaching staffs, the students were understandably finding defects in the service the university was giving them. They made no distinction between what could be cured quickly and what would have to be endured in a time of rapid expansion, cramped financing, critical shortage of competent staff, and so on. They laid all these things at the door of the so-called arbitrary government of the university.

The more radical of them added another count to the indictment. The university should be carrying the banner of general social reform. It was prevented from doing so by a reactionary board of governors who were grimly binding it to the service of the established status quo.

There is little evidence that the radical students who have lead this debate thought things would be much improved by giving power to the professors, but they did pick up the professors’ idea of a self governing community, proclaimed their membership in it, and then adapted the idea to their purposes. The students, they say, are the important members of the university community, the persons for whom the whole show is organized. It is, if you like, a consumer’s cooperative, and the producers should not dominate it. The scholar’s aristocratic republic is not for them. For the most part, the radical activist students do not think of themselves as scholars in embryo, but as men of action now, whose concerns go beyond scholarship, if not away from it. They want the university to be a popular democracy. In such a democracy, there is no place of special privilege for an elite board of governors or a haughty aristocracy of scholars. All there should be is participatory democracy by all members of the self-governing community.

The theoreticians in the activist student movement adopted for their purposes the rhetoric of democratic politics. They apply to the university all the arguments we accept for governing the Province of New Brunswick and for governing the Canadian federation. Everybody should share in the decisions that affect everybody. If everybody can’t be there in person, he should be there through his chosen representative. We haven’t yet heard the final argument of representative democratic government; namely, that each constituency should be represented according to population. If we are patient and wait, we will hear it.

We shall hear more than that. If the university is really a political organization in which demands for democracy in the fullest political sense are appropriate, there are still other constituencies to be heard from. To be specific, every university has a sizeable operating staff that keeps up a flow of essential services of various kinds for students and scholars. For convenience of reference, I shall call them "housekeepers". Many of them give a lifetime of service to their university. If everybody who is affected by decisions should share in governing, it will be hard to find reasons for excluding the housekeepers. Students are here today and gone tomorrow. A significant proportion of the teaching staff is here today and gone the day after tomorrow. How can they claim a big share in governing while long-service servants of the university are denied it? This question is beginning to be asked.

If students and teaching staff have a democratic right to sit on the governing body, determining questions of finance and housekeeping, surely the housekeepers who have an interest in finance as well as housekeeping should be there, too. Equally, on democratic principle, housekeepers have as good a claim to share in academic decisions as have staff and students to share in housekeeping decisions.

A theory that does not keep power and authority closely tied to function should be looked at very carefully. Is the university really a political community to which the principles of democratic politics can be applied wholesale? This is what I want to examine.

First, a cautionary point more practical than theoretical. A community that proposes to govern its life – its own life - in a thorough-going way needs a very large control over the means required to sustain its life. If many of these means are in the hands of bodies outside itself, it is to that degree a subordinate dependent community. Insofar as it lacks self-sufficiency, limits - severe limits - are put on its self-governing capacity. For sheer self-preservation, it has to shape its government so that it always has friends in the courts of its patron, the government.

Universities are increasingly dependent on provincial governments. Most of the plans for drastic reform of university government have ignored this brute fact. The insistence on self-government has sharpened even as dependence on outside authorities has deepened. This is understandable as an emotional reflex as the lengthening shadow of governments darkens the sky. We would all like to escape into the light of freedom, but it is not a rational response when we must go on pressing governments for still larger means.

Second, and more fundamental to the theory I am examining, the university is a voluntary association. No one is required to belong to it or to give it his allegiance. He can leave it at a moment's notice and without penalty if he finds its yoke burdensome. The situation is far different with membership in the truly political community which we call the state.

No one can escape the clutches of the state merely by resigning or announcing that he quits. To escape, he must leave the country with all the tearing up of roots that will attend his leaving. And no matter where he goes, he will be at the mercy of another state. As long as he stays his resignation is ineffective. The state will impose taxes on him that he must pay, and enforce laws that he must obey on pain of punishment. The state has a monopoly coercive power which can break us utterly. Small wonder, then, that men have fought grimly for a share of power through representatives of their choosing for a voice in the levying of taxes and the making of laws!

Democratic theory and practice were fashioned for bringing the awesome coercive power of the state under control. The full logic of democracy is convincing only in the realm of the state, the truly political community. Transferring it to the realm of university government is a kind of hocus pocus dressing up a sheep in the skin of lion.

Third, democratic politics, wherever practised, exacts a price that we must pay. Where the representatives of divergent and conflicting interests meet and have to reach a decision by majority vote, the result is nearly always a compromise that almost nobody likes except the fellows who get their fun out of negotiating compromises. This is not the time or place to consider why this is so, and is likely to remain so for a long time. It will enforce the point enough if we remind ourselves that, while nearly everybody cheers for democracy almost nobody thinks very highly of the results. As Winston Churchill said, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others that have been tried". Nearly everybody reviles political parties, abuses politicians, speaks contemptuously of legislatures because what they do is nobody’s first best, but nearly always a second best, or a third best, or almost intolerable. That is to say, the decisions that come out of the democratic process of compromises are so often tainted with mediocrity. We accept them, pay the price for order and peace, but we should not use all this apparatus of representation, long discussion, voting and compromise where it is not needed. We ought to keep as many activities as we can free of compromise, where the persons involved are free to do their best in the way they think best, without everybody having to say something about everything.

Uninhibited teaching, unhurried thought and reflection, undistracted probing of the mysteries on the frontiers of knowledge, the main work of a university, require freedom from compromise more almost than any other of our enterprises. We know this from long experience. Among those who have given their lives to it and know what they are talking about, there is little disagreement about the objectives of a university, although there are always some differences about priorities among these objectives. That is to say, there is much more unity on purposes in the university than there is among the voters in the Province of New Brunswick. There is much les diversity of clashing interests than there is in the Canadian federation.

Of course, there have to be some compromises in settling priorities in the university but the compromising will be greatly increased rather than eliminated by turning the university into a political arena where factions and organized parties contend for vote and majorities.

Log-rolling for the purpose of making majorities and others political manoeuvres, of course, are fun, and some people are better at it than others. There is no evidence that the best manoeuvres have the strongest grip on principle and overriding purpose. Anyway, zest for the game tends to obscure principle and purpose, and to make the game and end to itself.

Factions contending over the policy of a university will give governments and the public the impression that the university does not know how to run its affairs, and the temptation for governments to intervene and set policy would become almost irresistible. So the high-minded students who hate compromise are likely to incur the very thing they hate most. Applying the full logic of political democracy to the governing of a university must end by debasing the university.

Now, I add quickly that all the homely virtues of the democratic spirit have a vital place in the university. The procedure for hearing grievances, the most anxious attention given to representations put forward in a reasonable spirit, a scrupulously honoured practice of widespread consultation, will do more than anything else to make a harmonious community of students and scholars, and to I firm up a consensus which ostracizes those who will not play the game in this spirit.

Still, authority in the university must be shown to be a legitimate. Just because it has become suspect, it must show valid title deeds. The principle for making this display is easy enough: authority must be related to function. Functions must be defined, and competence for them must be manifest. This is the sure way to restore order and respect that are now threatened, and to show that there is no need for everybody to be involved in deciding everything.

The function of a board of governors is to conserve the property and enlarge the means of the university, to l oversee its financial operations and housekeeping, and to maintain liaison with governments and the general public. Indeed, its one indispensable function is to maintain the confidence of the public and the relevant governments in the way the university is run, and to defend in those quarters the essential freedom of the university in its work. It would be better if this body was called a board of trustees other than a board of governors because its job is to hold the university in trust rather than to govern its operations.

For these reasons, the board of trustees, as I shall now call them, should be a predominantly lay body. If some representation of staff and students will serve to allay fears and to scotch rumours of wicked doings in its councils, well and good. Putting the final authority in a board made up of staff and students would not maintain public confidence. For a long time yet, it must be recognized, in this country at any rate, that the large public (to which governments always respond in the long run) resents the privileged position of students and doubts the practical wisdom of professors (Enough evidence is always turning up somewhere to keep that doubt alive.)

Of course, the laymen on a board of trustees have no sure competence in academic matters that they can put up against the members of the academic staff. It must be made clear by law or settled understanding that they do not intervene in academic matters. Within the limits that finance makes possible, the Board must delegate to, or accept the recommendations of, the President.

Teaching staffs everywhere are now being confirmed in virtual control of academic matters. The Senate, which speaks for them, must co-ordinate and integrate academic policy, thus virtually compelling the Board and the President to accept its recommendations in all but the most unusual circumstances. These changes are now well advanced. They are right and proper. They will make the academic staff as much of a self-governing community as the world is likely to put up with.

Whatever part students are to have in governing must also be related to function and status, and to the legitimate interests that students have in the educational process. The small group of rebellious students are scornful of token representation. The political parallels they draw are designed to get them eventual control of the governing bodies. Nothing in the function, status or interests of the students entitle them to that power.

Their function in the university is to be learners, not operators, to learn in a few short years free of distractions what they can never learn anywhere else - and that's a full-time job. They are here to-day and gone tomorrow and they do not have enough knowledge and experience to justify the entrusting of power to transients. Even if King Solomon appeared himself as a visiting professor, the radical students themselves would object to his having power in university decisions. Then, aside altogether from status and function, their presence in any numbers on the Board of Trustees will not help to maintain the confidence of governments and the public - indeed the reverse. So it should be tokenism or nothing, as far as representation on Board and Senate are concerned.

Status and function do justify self-government by students of their extra-curricular activities, the control of all student discipline, except academic discipline. They can fairly claim to govern, and to run if they want to, the ancillary services they require and for which they pay. But nothing said so far provides for protection of the student's deepest interest - anxious attention by the university to the educational opportunities offered to him. However far student disaffection wanders off this issue at times, this is still its heart. The extremes of rebellion and violence would not have been tolerated by the moderate students if the universities had been doing their job of education well in this period of rapid expansion. Perhaps these extremes would not have emerged at all if the greater attention had been given by the university to these essential things.

The rebellion and the violence have emerged partly because most universities are engaged in some activities they should not be in at all, but mainly because some legitimate activities have been over-emphasized, allowing to take priority over teaching of high quality, teaching that does justice to broad general education as well as to abstruse specialties. There is no chance that rebellion and disaffection will end until the priorities have been overhauled. The members of the self-governing community of scholars will have to realize (many of them do now but not all of them by any means) that they are teachers first, abstruse specialists, researchers, and consultants afterwards.

Because most universities now have numbers of staff who give lip service to the priority I’m talking about but do not really honour it fully, student pressure on the universities should be continued, as no doubt it will. The proper channels for this pressure are organs of consultation, advisory committees, student membership on committees that consider curriculum, and access to committees that recommend on tenure and promotion. The places where those who know how the shoe pinches can be heard.

I have sketched the outlines of the model for university government that I would urge. The model tries to relate authority to function and I have concluded that the existing structure of two-tier government through Board of Trustees and Senate, with some modifications, will best serve the well-ordered university. This would make it unnecessary for everybody having a hand in deciding everything. However, the two-tier system is under very severe criticism just now, being blamed for most of our present troubles.

In fact, some universities are now thinking that these troubles call for drastic surgery, replacing the two-ventricle heart with a one-ventricle heart, a one-tier governing body consisting of roughly equal numbers of lay persons, academic staff, and students. There are significant differences between universities, and for some of them this may be the best solution. At the same time, there are dangers that should be looked at very carefully by any university that’s thinking about this issue. The experience with heart transplants isn’t all that good.

If the one-tier governing body is big enough to be genuinely representative of all constituencies, can it be kept small enough to be an effective body for debating high policy, instead of becoming a forum for haranguing the multitude? Authority, in this instance, voting power, will not be determined by function and status. Will the one-tier system allow enough influence in complex issues to those who are best informed about them?

Isn’t the one-tier structure likely to institutionalize the very things that the academics resent and fear, intrusion of lay members in academic decisions that they are not competent to make? Now this is not fanciful: it is a very real danger-in the short run. And it is the short run that matters when you are trying to establish the legitimacy of a new form of government.

Until the universities adjust some priorities more favourably to the teaching function, the tensions between academic staff and students will continue to rise. Students who are dissatisfied, but not openly rebellious (and I believe there are many more of these than we think), and finding out that the main obstacles to improvement and adjustments they want are not the lay board of governors, no the much reviled president and his senior officers, but the academic staff.

In the one-tier structure, they will quickly find out that the re-adjustments that are possible in finance, budgeting and housekeeping are relatively minor: minor at any rate until adjustments in academic policy are made. So the big contention will be over academic policy, with representatives of teachers and students on opposite sides on very important issues. In so far as these two groups are roughly equal in numbers, the balance of power will likely be held by the lay membership of this body. In these circumstances, how could the lay members avoid becoming the arbiters of academic policy? This would be a very strange finale for the movement that all began as the dream of a self-governing community of scholars!