Noah D. Arney

Author: Noah Arney

  • “A Stark Warning” on Ideological Control of Universities

    It’s been a while since I did one of these long replies to an editorial, but this one needs a response. The other week I was reading Peter MacKinnon’s “A stark warning about the state of Canadian academia: Universities are ostracizing monocultures that need reform“

    Peter MacKinnon often has interesting things to talk about, and I appreciate hearing his perspective, much as I often disagree with his solutions. So lets look at his evidence and solutions

    The Evidence

    The starting point to this editorial is a quote from Dr. Yuan Yi Zhu when speaking to the Canadian House of Commons Standing Committee on Science and Research. I’ll give you the long version:

    However, I think it is fair to say that within Canadian academia, there is a monoculture where, if you deviate even very slightly from what is fashionable and what is commonly accepted by your peers, not only will you be ostracized, but often you will not be able to have an academic career in the first place.

    Unfortunately, when I advise my students, I have to tell them, “You know, if you are in any way not progressive, you have to hide your views until you actually have at least a dissertation accepted, because otherwise you will never get ahead.”

    https://openparliament.ca/committees/science-and-research/44-1/111/dr-yuan-yi-zhu-2

    This was said in the context of concerns being raised regarding the use of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion requirements in applications for federal research funding. Dr. Yuan also had concerns that the approval of funding applications was often tied to the use of specific buzzwords rather than the strength of the research proposal. He proposes that both the requirement to speak to EDI and the preference given to buzzwords means that federal research funding tends to follow ideological trends.

    I think it’s important to point out that Dr. Yuan’s perspective here is that the funding awarding needs to be non-ideological, because that is not what MacKinnon takes away from it. Instead his reading of it is influenced primarily by the other presenters at the same committee session, Eric Kaufmann and Christopher Dummitt.

    Although Mr. Kaufmann tried to connect his perspective with Dr. Yuan’s, his perspective was that the problem is not lack of neutrality, but rather that the reviewers are politically left leaning and the political perspectives of the granting council need to be balanced

    I think that the values of the general public that supports research are what should prevail, not the values of academics, I’m afraid—or at least the vocal academics who wind up participating in these committees.

    I disagree with Mr. Kaufmann here that his perspective is the same as what Dr. Yuan stated. It may align with what Dr. Yuan believes and has said elsewhere, but it does not align with what he said in this case and so I have no interest in trying to attach Kaufmann’s perspective to Dr. Yuan, unfortunately, this is exactly what MacKinnon does.

    MacKinnon links in an editorial to support him written by Jamie Sarkonak, which is focused more on what Dr. Christopher Dummitt discussed at the committee, around a lack of “viewpoint diversity” in academia and that this leads to conservative academics “self-censoring” which, he says, damages any attempt to have universities be a “truth-seeking and truth-validating research enterprise”.

    Sarkonak condenses all of this into the declaration

    Together, they described an environment of injustice and conformity — cultivated in part by the ideologically guided hand of the federal government through its research funding agencies. It’s just not fair.

    Although beginning with the quote from Dr. Yuan, the true starting point for MacKinnon is that the combination of DEI statement requirements as well as the lack of politically conservative members of the decision panels means that access to federal research funding is not a level playing field and leads to a lack of viewpoint diversity. That term is important because it is a term that is never mentioned by MacKinnon, but is in the title of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute study (“The viewpoint diversity crisis at Canadian universities” by lead researcher Dr. Dummitt who I previously mentioned) that he uses to transition from talking about federal research funding to the actions of professors collectively, and to bring up his concerns with the the political beliefs of professors.

    MacKinnon continues by citing the Liberal Party of Canada’s 2021 political platform encouraging diversity in various areas. Of note, from what I can tell, the result of this platform four years later is the creation of a leadership development initiative and the hiring of less than two dozen “culturally competent and trauma-informed” counsellors.

    These three points, MacKinnon, contends, have led to a situation where “students fall silent rather than challenge orthodoxies presented to them in classes”.

    This provides the background to the rest of his editorial. His evidence then is:

    1. Dr. Yuan’s statements about how Canada has gone too far toward trying to use federal research funding to encourage Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion and instead the funding should be ideologically neutral.
    2. There is a lack of conservative viewpoints among federal research funding reviewers.
    3. The current government party talks about wanting to increase diversity across Canada.
    4. There is a lack of conservative viewpoints among professors in Academia.
    5. The lack of conservative viewpoints among professors discourages conservative students from expressing themselves.

    Unfortunately MacKinnon does not directly connect from the first three points to the final two, allowing the reader to make their own connection, but as I see it, the argument is that the Liberals have imposed their view (evidence point 3) on the granting councils (point 2) which can now be seen in Dr. Yuan’s perspective (point 1) and because they have done this it has changed the political ideology of professors (point 4) and that is impacting students (point 5) and is further changing the makeup of granting councils (point 2). The implicit argument is that this is a cyclical problem which would make things worse eventually for those who are not left leaning.

    In support of his point is Drs. Dummitt and Patterson’s research that 88 percent of professors identify as voting for left leaning parties and only 9 percent for right leaning parties. Now, if this is a cyclical problem advanced by the ideology of the Liberal Party it means that it must have something to do with the ascent of the Liberal Party ten years ago. Thankfully we don’t have to take their word for it, we can look at previous research such as that published by Nakhaie and Adam in the Canadian Journal of Sociology in 2008 (PDF) which helped form the foundation of Dummitt & Patterson’s. As seen in these tables, although the headline of Dummitt & Patterson’s research is what political direction they claim to lean (88/9), the research on how they voted is different.

    Self-reported voted for1993199720002021
    Right leaning1311118
    Left leaning80837877
    Professors
    Self-reported voted for1993199720002021
    Right leaning35383837
    Left leaning62606060
    General Population

    As you can see from these comparisons there is very little change over time for the general population in Canada. Just under 40% of the population votes for right leaning parties while around 60% votes for left leaning parties. And there is a noticeable change for professors, but the biggest change for professors is actually an increase in voting for non-major parties, which moved from 2.7% to 7.4% between 1993 and 2021.

    Unfortunately this leaves the evidence rather shaky. If the proportion of left/right hasn’t changed much in thirty years, then this is not a new problem, rather this is something that is simply reflective of who decides to work in academia. The political ideology of professors has not substantially changed (if using who they vote for as the assessment) since 1993. Which means that the makeup of granting councils is unlikely to have changed. And since there was no actual material changes made by the Liberals in their push for diversity with the exception of adding the EDI statements, points 2, 3, and 4 are flimsy, but point 1 still stands. Point 5 was an extrapolation by MacKinnon from the first four, which without further evidence seems unsupported.

    Unfortunately this leaves us where we started, with Dr. Yuan’s statement on the importance of research funding being independent from ideology being the only evidence we have going into MacKinnon’s solutions.

    The Problem and Solution

    This problem, according to MacKinnon is best seen by his first solution:

    What is to be done? There is a short-term and long-term answer to this question. A prospective change of government in Ottawa should reverse the present government’s agenda that has been imposed on the sector, and provincial governments should insist that their universities focus on excellence and the search for truth, not on progressive or social justice goals. Failure of any institutions to do so should be reflected in funding decisions.

    The problem represented here is that the government’s focus on and requirements around diversity distracts from, or harms, a “focus on excellence and the search for truth”.

    That would line up well with Dr. Yuan’s perspective that mandating diversity statements is harmful to research independence. However, the final line of the proposal is not about government, but rather about institutions needing to abandon “progressive or social justice goals” and that the government should cut their funding if they don’t. Because some research is directly and intentionally about progressive goals or social justice goals, this means that MacKinnon is not advocating neutrality in funding allocation, but rather is advocating replacing the Liberal Party of Canada’s ideology with another party’s ideology.

    Although this does not align with Dr. Yuan’s words, it does align with Dr. Dummitt’s and Mr. Kaufmann’s. The problem for them is not that the government needs to get out of the role of imposing their ideology, but rather that other ideologies should be able to be imposed.

    MacKinnon then continues into his longer term proposal, which is governance reform. Here he identifies several threats to good university governance.

    1. Substantial institutional growth
    2. Faculty unionization leading to Senate dysfunction
    3. Student councils using member fees for causes students don’t support
    4. Flawed Board appointment processes and dysfunction

    His questions then are:

    how do we strengthen statutory governance bodies, boards and senates? How do we ensure that freedom of expression and academic freedom prevail over institutional and personal politics? Should we insist that fees collected by students or on their behalf be used for student services, and not for political causes inimical to the interests of some that pay them?

    I agree with MacKinnon that Senates and Boards need to be focused, strong, and know what their roles, goals, and objectives are. Further, I think he may be correct that substantial institutional growth and changes in faculty labour relations have caused some of the lack of focus and unclear roles in governance. I probably disagree with him on how to solve that however, because although MacKinnon doesn’t present any full solutions, he does hint that one solution is more oversight through external board appointees who are more in line with the public interest as determined by the government. Or to put it another way, more in line with the ideology of governments. And as mentioned in his short term solutions, a government without a left-wing ideology.

    It’s the final two questions that make me raise an eyebrow. He advocates for freedom of expression and for academic freedom (two separate things). But he also has concerns with how student councils operate. He earlier states that “student councils use member fees to support causes that are an affront to some of those obliged to pay them”. Student councils are elected by other students. He seems to be advocating for universities to mandate how these councils may operate. But that would indeed be the institution rejecting the freedom of expression of students, as displayed by their choices in a student council election.

    My worry here then is that his short term solution is not independence, but rather requiring adherence of universities to a government ideology (just a different one than currently), and his long term solution is not freedom of expression, but limiting expression to ideology approved by the university.

    A Stark Warning

    Peter MacKinnon is indeed giving a stark warning. It’s a stark warning that when he looks at the problems in Canadian Academia he sees the problem is not that it is a “monoculture” but that it is the wrong “monoculture”. If we work from the short term solution to the long we see this:

    1. Replace a left-wing ideology in government with a right wing ideology
    2. Ensure that the new government ideology is reflected in funding decisions for research
    3. Reform University Governance to better align with and implement the new government ideology
    4. Limit student expression that does not align with the new government ideology

    I want to close off where MacKinnon does

    Everyone in our universities, and governments responsible for them, should be chilled by the diagnosis of Professor Yuan, and should ask themselves if there is truth in his words. If their answers are yes, as they should be, they must commit to reforms that are necessary for their institutions to survive and again command wide public support.

    I ask myself if there is truth in Professor Yuan’s words, and the answer is yes, on the concept that research funding should be ideologically neutral. MacKinnon then says that I must commit to reforms, but the reforms that MacKinnon proposes are not ideologically neutral, but rather are the opposite. What is proposed is not neutrality in the search for truth, it is adherence to the ideology brought in after “A prospective change of government in Ottawa”.

    MacKinnon is right, the idea of someone as well regarded as he is proposing more government control of research and university governance, and limitations on student speech should be a stark warning to everyone in Canadian academia.

  • Summer Reading Highlights

    One of the things I love about living in Kamloops is the Music in the Park event. It runs for two months and is free concerts every night at one of the major parks in town. Every year since we moved here we’ve spent at least one night a week there (unless we are smoked out by wildfires). They always have some great local and regional bands including some fantastic cover bands. We enjoy the music, but the best part of it is getting to lay on a blanket in the dusk reading.

    Yep, I go to concerts to read.

    What it means is that during the summer I end up reading a lot more books because I have a two hour chunk a few times a week set aside just to read instead of only having the last 45 minutes before I go to bed. This means that I go from taking a few months to get through a book to completing them in a week or so.

    Some books I read this summer that I’d recommend:

    • The Interdependency trilogy by John Scalzi
      • Interstellar politics with a lot of assassinations, machinations, and a threat only a physicist can save the empire from.
    • The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison
      • If you like the tone of the Gormenghast series but with a bit more hope and a bit more happening, this one’s for you.
    • Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree
      • Not every fantasy novel needs to be epic, sometimes they can just be about building and saving a coffee shop.
    • Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao
      • Bringing together some of the tropiest tropes in YA dystopia but subverting them in new and innovative ways, add in some strong Chinese inspiration, giant mechs, and social commentary.
    • The Sibyl’s War trilogy by Timothy Zahn
      • I haven’t read the third book yet, but I love the idea of a book where the main character doesn’t know and can’t know everything. It leads to some very human interactions in a fast paced sci-fi.

    I read a few other ones this summer, but those eight were the best.

  • This is how you get an academic survelence state.

    Sometimes great ideas start throwing up red flags very quickly.

    I love data. Data is my jam. It’s why I’m currently on the Strategic Enrolment Management group at my university and why I’ve been part of a similar group at two previous institutions. Data and assessment are a great way to enable us to make things better for students. So I’m coming at this as the type of person that the author of this piece want to recruit toward their way of thinking and I need to tell you OH HELL NO.

    Higher Education Needs Its Own Version of Moneyball

    Lets start with part 1 of the premise:

    Higher education needs its own version of moneyball—a set of active, predictive and creative measures that can be deployed to improve student outcomes and fulfill their promise of student success.

    Makes a lot of sense, and I fully agree. This is what a culture of assessment and SEM looks like. It’s amazing and I am here for it.

    And then in the next sentence the red flag gets waved high:

    Postsecondary institutions must be able to collect and instantaneously analyze student progress data and have intentional plans for adjusting in the moment to the needs of their learners.

    There’s the oh hell no moment. Moneyball style analysis uses publicly accessible and consensually given information and visible information to work. This asks us to tie every moment of a student into a machine.

    Ok, lets dig into the points that support the premise.

    1. part time learners don’t complete their programs as often so they should be assessed more
      • But part time learners often have other things outside of school like work or family responsibilities, which normally means that they are more likely to be financially disadvantaged students. So you’re asking us to have more surveillance of those who we know are already over surveilled and over policed?
      • Also there are often reasons why students pick their course load. Supporting them in increasing that course load is a great idea, forcing them to increase their course load without supporting the reasons they didn’t think they could is awful.
    2. Productive credit hours as a measure – do students take more classes at certain times or days, or are there too many gateway classes preventing moving forward
      • This one makes sense and I’m here for it, but this is just proper scheduling and doesn’t require real-time analysis, just semester based analysis which is what SEM already does.
    3. Predictive metrics
      • There isn’t any information given for this one so I’ll have to make assumptions. “This planning starts with insights that enable institutions to identify opportunities for accelerating student progress and predict the efficacy of those interventions on retention and graduation rates.” Predictive metrics mean one of two things:
        • Constant surveillance of students (how often do they attend events, library use, computer on campus use, assignment submission times, in-semester grades) which is problematic and sounds like a surveillance state.
        • Assumptions of students based on statistical models which often break down when applied to the individual. For example, in the USA, ~1-5% of adults are diagnosed with ADHD, but ~25% of adults in prison in are diagnosed with ADHD. Does that mean ADHD is a predictor of crime, or that people who are institutionalized are more likely to receive a diagnosis? What about when you find out that ~20% of adults in post-secondary education have ADHD? Are the predictions based on data always reliable? They might be in aggregate, but the idea here is to take that aggregate and apply it to the individual. That’s like looking at a normal curve and saying “well, people over 7’4″ don’t exist” when we know for a fact that they do, but they are rare.
    4. Make the stats open to all
      • Again, statistics in aggregate about the student body, even when looking at relatively small groups, is a great idea. How many students take classed in X department, how many of them pass it, how many are International student, etc. This data is important for SEM to identify gateway classes, problem pathways, programs that are missing something, or departments that are under-enrolled. But using it in specific is dangerous.
      • Do we really want a professor to be able to know how long a student takes to complete an assignment in someone else’s class? What about whether or not they use the library? How much data do you need about the specifics of someone? I don’t even like that my LMS lets me know how long ago a student accessed the system.

    Where this article is right: SEM is the way forward. Data is important, and needs to be viewed by as many people as possible. Universities and Colleges are filled with brilliant people, getting more eyes on a problem with the relevant data means more potential solutions.

    Where this article is scary: implying that we need to feed all data about students in real time into a data analytics system, and then turning that into and using it as predictive metrics of success.

    It feels like an article written by someone who isn’t seeing students as people, but as bundles of data that they can access. That way lies teaching machines, but the way forward toward better developmental and lifelong learning outcomes for students (regardless of academic outcomes) is through relational connections on the individual level that are supported by using data on the macro level.

  • Ohio Micromanages PSE

    Ready for a wild ride?

    https://legiscan.com/OH/text/SB83/id/2745695

    Legislation in Ohio has passed the house to micromanage the public post-secondary system. It now goes to the senate. It is being opposed by nearly every post-secondary association and freedom of speech association and is generally a contradictory mess. Don’t believe me? Well here’s the best (worst) bits:

    Every institution must change its mission statement to affirm that it is committed to tolerating differences in opinion, but they must also allow students to formally evaluate professors on their ideology and require departments to teach controversial topics (being those that are believed by a substantial number of Americans).

    I’m sure the faculty of science will enjoy needing to include a class about how the moon landing was faked and the earth is flat (both believed by 10% of the US).

    They must both “Prohibit political and ideological litmus tests in all hiring, promotion, and admissions decisions” while also requiring that promotion decisions are based at least partially on student’s evaluation of the professor’s ideology.

    They must both treat all equally while being prohibited to provide the support required for those who were treated unequally by other levels of education. Essentially a return to the 1970s era post-secondary access.

    And strangest of all they will be mandated to collect and report on all demographic data including race and sex, and report publicly on academic achievement by those disaggregated demographics while at the same time are prohibited to have any policies that use any of the collected data for improving results. If information is mandated to be collected but not used by one group, then you can guarantee that it will be used by those mandating it. And since those mandating it has no way of actually using that data to improve things then the only thing I can see is that it’s being collected not for improvement but for something else.

    Finally, it bans all sex segregated extracurricular activities and residence housing. Which seems strange considering other things the republicans have been complaining about the last few years.

    I’m more than a little concerned at the US trying to burn down its post-secondary system, and very worried that the same ideas will come up here (some already are).

  • Youth Unemployment Issues

    A reminder that I love StatsCan data (yes, I’m a nerd). Well I was looking at unemployment and labour market participation over the last decades (1990-2022) averaged yearly and broken out by 15-64 and 15-24 groups in both Canada as a whole and just BC. I was hoping to see if BC was an outlier anywhere and we really aren’t. But I found something else very interesting.

    Three types of data tell us what’s going on: 1) unemployment rate (how many people in the workforce aren’t employed) 2) participation rate (how many people are in the workforce who could be) and 3) the difference between youth and all unemployment and participation.

    This gives us info like knowing that generally high unemployment aligns well with low labour market participation because people will self-select out of the labour market when it’s bad. We also see the shift over the 90s as more people under 24 are in post-secondary showing a substantial decline in their labour market participation but not a massive raise in unemployment (because they’re not unemployed, they’re in university. This info also tells us that the unemployment rate changing for youth but not for the whole labour market is an impact that only hits youth.

    So what happened during those 32 years? Well 1997-2004 was a bad time to be a youth looking for work. Youth labour market participation was going back up after the dip in the early 90s but the jobs weren’t there. Overall unemployment was fine, but if you were under 24 you were having a hard time. Then the strangeness that led me to writing this, 2005.

    Suddenly youth unemployment across the country drops. It’s a small blip in Canada, but in BC it’s massive. Youth unemployment in BC goes from a high of 15% in 2002 to a slow drop to 13.5% in 2004, that’s normal. But in 2005 it’s 10% and by 2007 it’s at its lowest in the entire data set at 7.7%. It’s so sudden and impactful, and localized to only BC it must have some cause, but I don’t know what it is, and I was in that age range at the time. I remember a lot of help wanted signs, and I remember that for the first time in my adult life I could easily get a summer job or part time job.

    This should have been fantastic, but the 2008 financial crash and oil price crash ended it. Unemployment for youth shoots right back up to 13% by 2009. The 2009 issue is clear, but what caused the drop in the first place? It was noticeable that youth in BC rejoined the labour market because of it. And it is very clearly a youth phenomenon because the dip for the all ages unemployment is minor.

    Moving forward from that time though after the recovery from the financial crash the youth unemployment rate starts going down again, slowly this time, hitting 7.7 again in 2018, and then looking to stabilize in 2019 at 9%. I say stabilize because after the shock to the system from COVID it’s back to the 8-9% that seems to be a “normal” youth unemployment rate.

    So what did I learn from the data? Youth participation lags youth unemployment slightly, but more perceptibly than all ages. Perhaps that means that youth are more likely to leave the workforce for school and other reasons if they can’t find work? Also, something happened at the end of 2004 or early 2005 to change youth employment in BC and it was impactful until the 2008 crash.

    Finally I learned that the changes in the economy impact youth first and most. In every increase to total unemployment youth are impacted months before the general unemployment rate. The gap grows every time there’s a crisis and it always takes several months after the general unemployment goes down for the gap to begin shrinking.

  • More thoughts on business education

    I was thinking the other day about how many post-secondary programs in Business faculties are laid out as easily understood pathways to particular jobs (Management, HR, Finance, Accounting, Supply Chain, etc.). Degrees that have the same name as the future job. Which got me thinking about how business used to be more of an apprenticeship program, and I was considering what separates it from an apprenticeship program now.

    I’ll use SFU’s Bachelor of Business Administration in Accounting as an example. This is because it’s well regarded, was just updated last year, and includes all of the required courses to begin the CPA process.

    If you want to become a CPA and are at SFU’s BBA your program will look something like (I’m not an SFU academic advisor so it’s probably off by a few courses) this:

    • 100/200 Humanities (6)
    • 100/200 Science (6)
    • 100/200 Social Science (6)
    • BUS 100 – Professional Development – Launch (1)
    • ECON 103 – Principles of Microeconomics (4)
    • ECON 105 – Principles of Macroeconomics (4)
    • ENGL 199W – Writing to Persuade (3)
    • MATH 157 – Calculus I for the Social Sciences (3)
    • 100/200 electives (15)
    • BUS 201 – Introduction to Business (3)
    • BUS 217W – Critical Thinking in Business (3)
    • BUS 232 – Business Statistics (3)
    • BUS 237 – Introduction to Business Technology Management (3)
    • BUS 251 – Financial Accounting I (3)
    • BUS 254 – Managerial Accounting I (3)
    • BUS 272 – Behaviour in Organizations (3)
    • ECON 201 – Microeconomic Theory I: Competitive Behavior (4)
    • BUS 300 – Professional Development – Planning (1)
    • BUS 303 – Business, Society and Ethics (3)
    • BUS 312 – Introduction to Finance (3)
    • BUS 320 – Financial Accounting: Assets (3)
    • BUS 321 – Financial Accounting: Equities (3)
    • BUS 322 – Intermediate Managerial Accounting (3)
    • BUS 343 – Introduction to Marketing (3)
    • BUS 360W – Business Communication (4)
    • BUS 374 – Organization Theory (3)
    • BUS 393 – Commercial Law (3)
    • BUS 410 – Financial Institutions (3)
    • BUS 420 – Advanced Accounting (3)
    • BUS 421 – Accounting Theory (3)
    • BUS 424 – Advanced Managerial Accounting (3)
    • BUS 426 – Auditing and Assurance: Concepts and Methods (3)
    • BUS 478 – Strategy (3)
    • BUS 496 – Professional Development – Summit (1)

    For those keeping track at home that’s 48 credits of upper level business classes, 25 of second year business, and 9 of first year business, coming in at 82 credits of business classes. For non business you get 23 credits of breadth (including your math). Then you get 15 lower level credits of whatever you would like outside of business to round out your program.

    Comparing that to SFU’s Bachelor of Arts in English requires 32 credits of upper level English, 18 of lower level English, 22 of lower level arts, and 18 credits of breadth. Then you get 30 credits of whatever you would like to round out the program

    BBA AccountingBA English
    Lower Faculty/Dicipline34 (12 discipline)40 (18 discipline)
    Lower Breadth2318
    Lower Electives1517
    Upper Faculty/Dicipline48 (27 discipline)32 (all discipline)
    Upper Electives013

    That’s a rough approximate, but what really stands out to me is that after the mid point in the BBA Accounting all classes are essentially Business classes. For the Arts student they get to take some upper level classes outside of their field (though most will use that for a minor and will stay in the Humanities/Social Science/Fine & Performing Arts grouping). The accounting student has more classes that are business but not accounting than the English student has arts but not English.

    Which brings me back to apprenticeship. I like using Electrician as a strong equivalent to bachelors programs, it’s a four year program with similar entry requirements to many bachelors degrees. It also requires 1200 classroom hours. What does that look like in credit equivalents? Well most classes are 3 credits for 3 hours a week over 12 weeks. Which means you can easily work out that the electrician apprentice completes about 100 credits of discipline courses, which is actually more than either English or Accounting. Now, to be fair, most programs count the classroom credit hours for the full apprenticeship program at 80, so let’s use that.

    • Accounting 82 credits core plus 38 breadth/elective (often has 1-1.5 years of optional WIL)
    • English 72 credits core plus 48 breadth/elective (Sometimes has 1-1.5 years of optional WIL)
    • Electrician 80 credits core, no breadth/elective (Has 3 years of mandatory WIL)

    The reason I’m making these comparisons isn’t to say one of these three is better than the others. It’s to say that if we want programs like Accounting to be a bachelor’s program, the reason for that is the breath and elective courses, not the course courses.

    If you used the electrician model of apprenticeship for accounting where over the course of four years they did 80 credits of business and accounting courses in addition to 6,000 hours of work-integrated learning then I guarantee you that they would be stronger at the technical work of accounting than 80% of accounting graduates today. But we didn’t do that, and since we don’t see a huge cry by the accounting industry to move toward the apprenticeship model, so that tells me that those other classes matter as much if not more than the core course.

    Many people today are questioning whether to cut back on the elective or breadth courses in order to shorten the length of a bachelors degree. If you were to do that to accounting you would remove the reason that it is a bachelors degree as opposed to an apprenticeship.

    To try to close off this one, my thoughts on it are that we either believe that elective and breadth courses are an important part of the bachelors program, or it’s time to move the NOC targeted degrees into apprenticeships. Both of these options are good, both have strengths and weaknesses, but one requires a full re-creation of the Canadian post-secondary system while the other just requires better communication about the value of a degree.

  • When the opposing protest is the speech

    It was interesting to read this article in Inside Higher Ed today:

    Shouting Down Speakers Who Offend
    Over the course of a month, students on several college campuses shut down speakers they disagreed with. Why is it so hard to forge a consensus on what protecting free speech really means?

    https://www.insidehighered.com/news/students/free-speech/2023/04/13/shouting-down-speakers-who-offend

    The article portrays using crowds and shouting down speakers vs providing a platform for a speaker some consider controversial portrayed as a left-right division of free speech. The specific example is the SUNY Albany students protesting Ian Haworth at a Turning Points USA student event. To me this all seems more in line with the American understanding of free speech that loud group free speech is an appropriate response to something that is harmful (side note, I’ve seen similar confusion a lot from US academics as they conflate academic freedom and free speech in odd ways, I don’t know if that’s the case here).

    We see this when groups try to shout down a right wing speaker, we see this when groups try to protest an abortion clinic, we see it when groups try to shut down drag story time at a library. In all cases those protesting see the thing they are protesting as being harmful and therefore the protest is a legitimate display of free speech. In two of the cases it’s a matter of free speech vs free speech. In all cases those on the other side of the political spectrum see it as too likely that the protesters will resort to violence (as has recently happened in some of the library protests) and therefore consider it illegitimate protest. But that’s not what this article is critiquing. It seems to be saying that controversial (non-illegal) hate speech at an event is an exercise of free speech, but shouting down the speaker is not. And that seems strange because of how the US views protest on public property.

    In the US most state universities would be considered public property, so the bar for stopping these protests is very high (similar to trying to stop them in libraries, though because they are protesting events targeted to children instead of to adults there may be nuance I’m missing), which means that shouting down a speaker as long as you don’t bar them from accessing the venue (they didn’t in the main case used here) and you don’t stop them from speaking (they could speak but it would be hard to be heard over the crowd) would be legal. Of course when the event was moved to a private area of campus that disallowed the protestors the laws would have changed.

    That leaves us with a question, because if we put two events up against each other we have left and right both protesting in public buildings to stop events they feel includes harmful speech. My basic understanding of US law is that the government isn’t supposed to shut down a speaker just because the hecklers *might* get violent in response, neither are they supposed to stop non-violent protestors in public spaces. However, at this point nearly everyone (though maybe not in a legal sense) has agreed that if the actions of the protestors include violence then that is a threat that prohibits the speech.

    Context is important

    This event didn’t happen in a vacuum. Although TPUSA is a big national organization it took about ten seconds to find that their last big event on campus brought in just under 30 students and no protestors, it was held in a closed room that wasn’t open to a public space. This second event then was in a larger room fitting over 100 people and directly connected to a public space, meaning two things: 1) they expected over three times the number of people from their prior event 2) they held this event specifically in a space that would be considered public property. Finally when they did move to a closed private space for the event, none of the media coverage or even their own comments, mention not fitting their attendees in, and all of the photos of the event show that the space was nearly entirely filled with protestors.

    The other thing to know is that the first event gathered no press at all, I didn’t even see something in the local paper. The second event had a week of national media coverage over it.

    Which implies to me that there was intent here. The meta speech of the event by the hosts *was* the protest. That is what publicized and amplified their speech, it’s what made people listen to them, see them, and pay attention to them. Thus there are three speech items at play, not two.

    • Group A held event (speech)
    • Group B peacefully protested event in a way that made the speech impossible to hear at the time (counter-speech)
    • Group A was able to have broader and louder speech because of the protest (counter-counter-speech)

    So if group A got what they wanted and intended out of the event then is this actually a crisis of free speech, or is it exactly how the US system of free speech operates? No one was directly violent, and the closest thing to violence reported is that someone destroyed a bible. Which brings me back to the beginning. How should universities respond to this?

    If the protest was prevented from happening not only would the speech of the protestors have been stopped by government actors, but the speech of the hosts would not have been as public as they wanted.

    I think I’ll end off here by bringing up the idea of violence. Violent acts change the equation, but legally violent implications without immediate action isn’t supposed to. However, in the US it is difficult because it is so easy for things to change from implication to action because of their lax firearms laws. At what point of the violent spectrum should we step in?

    • Violent potential (where this protest was)
    • Violent implication
    • Violent possibility
    • Violent threat (where most of the anti-drag protests are)
    • Violent past actions
    • Violent preparation
    • Violent action

    I think that’s a much more important discussion for us to have, and one that completely sidesteps any discussion of academic freedom but instead focuses on when we should shut competing speech down.

    Post event story changes

    In the immediate reporting by one of the hosts it’s clear that the event moved and proceeded. In the post event reporting it was said (by the same person) that the event had to be canceled. In addition, no one claimed the bible, which makes me unclear whether it was a protestor bringing it to destroy it, or a protestor taking it from an attendee and destroying it. Since grabbing a bible out of someone’s hand would clearly be something that would be reported in the media since it fits a certain narrative of the event I’m suspicious. Mostly it lends credence to the idea that the counter-counter-speech wasn’t only a benefit for Group A, but was in fact the point of the event.

  • Continuing Education

    Some thoughts I had while reading this report about Continuing Education offerings.

    Now, I’ve taken a lot of CE offerings through several different sources, and I’ve even taught others how to design CE, so I have a lot of thoughts about how it can be best. I’ll close off this post with how I would create my preferred model.

    First the assumptions.

    1. CE is revenue generating for the institution offering it
    2. It is easy to change offerings and responsive to learner and employer feedback
    3. It is short and fits into the schedule and budget of its audience
    4. The audience is
      • Retired people looking for interesting things to learn
      • New immigrants looking for connection of prior experience with the Canadian context
      • Individuals looking to upskill for their current or planned profession
      • Groups and individuals looking to learn something new and interesting
      • Company and organizations looking to train their employees
    5. Offerings end with some form of recognition of learning

    A lot of this can be reimagined differently into:

    • Learner needs
      • Lifelong learning
      • Formal requirements
      • Informal requirements
      • Job transition
    • Labour market demands
      • Skills development
      • Changing nature of work
    • Institutional governance
      • Revenue generation
      • Building paths for “non-traditional” students
      • Industry partnerships

    Now those assumptions are interesting because they also often line up with how we talk about micro-credentials. Which is of course why in Canada they are merging (a good idea in my opinion), something that Alex Usher over at HESA pointed out last week as well.

    A big discussion in CE and in micro-credentials is competency based vs time based. In practice time based always wins. This comes back to assumptions 1 and 3. If it’s truly competency based then you may have some people accomplish it quickly and others slowly, this makes scheduling and cohorting difficult, so it either needs to be a non-cohorted training (asynchronous online does this) or it will be very labour intensive. The flip side of scheduling is that if schedule overruns happen then it will either be longer or more expensive than assumption 3 allows. Finally, competency based means that the course ends up revolving around the assessment. Unfortunately a strong competency assessment is rarely flexible, adaptable, or budget friendly.

    Before you think I don’t like competency based education, please know that I feel competency based education is the best way to go. It is stronger, and when done right allows for progression in innovative ways. It is more akin to how humans actually learn and is flexible. However, it is also much much more expensive to do well than time based is, and I have no illusions around what wins between the B grade cheaper and A grade expensive options when brought before a government.

    With all those assumptions out of the way, let me build my preferred CE program for you.

    My goal is for it to focus on short run offerings that are targeted and flexible, and are stackable and transfer as credit when stacked. It’s that last one that makes the system require it to be a system.

    A three credit class takes generally about 35 in class hours plus 35-70 out of class hours to complete. Most CE classes have the total in class and expected out of class time listed as a component of it, making this a little easier. In my proposed model you would be able to take any 15 hours of cumulative courses within a broad discipline to apply as one credit. That does mean that it would generally take multiple CE classes to get the equivalent of a standard university class (3 credits).

    If all four of Targeted, Flexible, Stackable, Transferable are in place then not only can the system be built as a CE system, but they also fit into a micro-credentials framework.

    In essence the process goes like this:

    1. Identify a need
    2. Define the problem
    3. Research the context
    4. Develop a solution
    5. Map the solution
    6. Operationalize the solution

    Lets use Underwater Basketweaving as an example.

    1. Identify a need
      • In my fictional town there’s a great interest among retired people in underwater basketweaving
    2. Define the problem
      • UB is a difficult but rewarding hobby and art that has a fairly high level of skill required and specialized tools
      • It’s difficult to learn on your own and requires someone to guide the beginner through it
    3. Research the context
      • Space: needs to be physically located near a body of water or deep pool that is safe, controlled, and accessable.
      • Students: no prior experience required, recruited from the local region, primarily retired and looking for in person connection with others as well as learning a new skill
      • Staffing: moderate expertise required in the UB as well as strong safety understanding and certification
      • Content Development: contract development of content to first staff member in coordination with in-house course designer
      • Modality: in person facilitated with experiential component
    4. Develop a solution
      • Title: Underwater Basketweaving
      • Background & Context: context of institution, location, assumptions and constraints
      • Purpose: Provide training in the rewarding art and hobby of underwater basketweaving
      • Audience & Positioning: hobbyists in the local community, primarily retired, looking for in person classes with others who share their interests, as it is an expensive hobby the interested audience has less restricted income than some; no local competitors
      • Objectives & Deliverables: Creation of three classes in increasing difficulty to train the basics through intermediate skills of underwater basketweaving
      • Key Stakeholders: Community, practitioners of the hobby
      • Budget: First run recovers full content development costs, future runs based on the same cost per course, but with fewer development costs attached
    5. Map the solution
      • Three courses at level 1, three at level 2, and two courses at level 3
      • No requirements for level 1, level 2 requires experience or completion of level 1, level 3 requires completion of level 2 or completion of an assessment test that mimics course 2 outcomes
      • Time per course: 8 hours over two or three days, no out of class time expected
      • Completion of each class receives a recognition of completion (stackable micro-credential?)
      • Completion of the two level 3 courses receives an Underwater Basketweaving Certificate
      • Two transfer options for those who are then, or later, enrolled in a credit program at the university:
        • Those with the certificate can be transferred into the university credits as three credits of CON 1xxx (note, some students may have achieved levels 1 and 2 through competency assessment, so these three credits would be based on the credential not the hours)
        • Alternatively, because completing all courses would give 4 credits students could instead convert each fifteen hours worth of courses as one credit for each 15 hours as CON 1xxx
    6. Operationalize the solution
      • Determine full budget and timeline including space, staffing, supplies, and other requirements
      • Hire course developer/instructor
      • Collaborate with local underwater basketweaving community to drive interest and develop community connections
      • Develop assessment for those challenging levels 1 or 2
      • Begin marketing for the first courses

    Thus ends the fictional example. It’s a learning solution designed around a community need, that supports the community by offering a course of interest. If one of the students who took it later wants to come to the university for a credit program they can transfer in some of that as elective credit.

    What if instead of courses to meet a community need it’s to meet employment upskilling or employee training, for example Project Management. It requires more because it’s connected with an industry need, a personal interest from students, employees, and the community, and it is connected to a voluntary certification through the Project Management Institute. Only 35 hours of courses are required for the PMP designation, but more is normally taken.

    In that case the context and key stakeholders add in more things, but the structure of creation remains the same. As you add those stakeholders you also get to change the type of credit it grants. If someone takes only the minimum 35 hours they’ll still be able to convert it as a credit, but now since project management is something that aligns with other curriculum in University it isn’t a CON credit any more, it now becomes BUS credit. If someone were to take a substantial amount of classes in project management, like through Mount Royal University’s 115 hour program that could transfer in as perhaps 9 credits, or as the 15 hours per credit (so 7) method.

    Final thought: a good continuing education system is one that is Targeted, Flexible, Stackable, and Transferable. That requires a lot of pre-planning and organization from the institution offering it, but a well designed and responsive CE department isn’t just about revenue generation (though that is of course a key part of this), it’s an opportunity to build closer connections with local communities, industries, and groups.