Who's To Blame and How To Overcome MUN's Woes?

So, the titular question buzzes in the air around the Board of Regents election. Let's have a crack at it.

1) Depends On Who You Ask

I think if you asked anyone connected to MUN, from students & alumni, to faculty & staff, all the way up to the executive, you'd get very polarized answers. These are some that I have heard.

"Timmons and the executive are out of touch with students!" (I would say the executive is VERY aware of the number of students and how much they are paying to the university, based on my experiences as associate prof at a smaller Japanese university. However, frivolous lawsuits and misrepresentation show an entitled lack of understanding of social norms)

"Profs have cushy overpaid jobs and can't be fired because of tenure!" (As a former prof, I KNOW this to be BS)

"Staff are overpaid pencil pushers and many are unnecessary." (Maybe some are, but many saved my life as a student and made my teaching career easier)

"Alumni need to contribute more!" (This should never be a given, especially considering the current housing crisis and continued uncoupling of university degrees with higher salary. As Scott Seiss quips, "What happened to the $60, 000 I just gave you?")

"Students are spoiled, and should be grateful tuition is comparatively low." (Compared to what? MUN is $2650 to $6000, just slightly under McGill's $2797 to $8000, but with higher living costs due to transport of goods and food, but lower pay and a smaller chance of finding good employment to offset tuition while allowing students to balance study and work)

All these responses fall prey to the blame game, and miss the bigger picture.

2) The Blame Game

There are two extreme positions in the Blame Game:

Position 1 - My enemy is to blame

The problem with this viewpoint is that narrows the field of inquiry, obfuscating other factors that have contributed to the crisis, and thus also making solutions partial or inappropriate. Yes, we can justly blame the executive for frivolous lawsuits, but if we aren't looking at redundancies in staff (OCRO I'm looking at you), or professors who are uninspiring (very few in my experience, but there), or students with unrealistic expectations, then we only see part of the problem.

If we take ALL these portions of blame and craft a solution that addresses each of these, we can create a university that has a chance of working. For example, creating a strong and impartial oversight process would curb exec and staff overreach, while investing in job training and work creation initiatives would let students expect more tangible benefits from their studies.

A more insidious side of this position is that those with power will inevitably use it against those who are more vulnerable. When the president of a university allows lawsuits against a single student for voicing criticism, a huge power differential is taking place, one more in keeping to a banana republic than an institution of higher learning.

Position 2 - No one is to blame

The problem with the second position is that it leads to inaction and apathy. If that is just the way it is, people will vote with their feet and go elsewhere, reducing income for the institution. What's worse, the incompetent or unethical will be emboldened to get away with more knowing that perfidy goes unchecked.

You might add that people who have done visible damage to Memorial's reputation or its functioning have already gone unpunished.

I have neither the legal background nor knowledge of particulars to say whether Dr Timmons or any other member of the executive should face legal action. However, I would point out that a worker in a lower status and income job who misrepresented themselves to their employer would be summarily let go, and possibly face fraud charges.

Maybe it is time to cut our losses and (gasp) learn how to prevent them in future.

Finally, execs can't have unfettered control of university finances if incompetent people are getting 6 week paid leaves and golden parachutes for leaving in disgrace.

3) Ideological Problems, Structural Solutions

Memorial University, like many others worldwide, has what activists usually call structural problems. As a Discourse Analyst, I would instead call these problems of ideology. By ideology, I mean 'belief in a perfect world.' Regarding a university, there are basically two opposing ideological positions.

First, students ideally would like to get a university education that does not bankrupt them, and ensures them a job after graduation. This is the progressive ideology of university as a public good. Cuba infamously gives out free medical degrees, and benefits from a system of preventative medicine that is the opposite of American style reactive medicine. Dental tourism is even becoming a source of income as Americans fly south to get their teeth fixed affordably. Finland offers free PhDs, as well as living and research support, and it is still a country noted for investment and innovation, from the first wireless EKG heart monitor to the mobile game Angry Birds. These examples and others show that both rich and poor countries alike can engage in such philanthropy, and benefit from it.

Second, executives would ideally draw more profit out of the university year after year. This is the financial ideology of university as business. We can term this the neoliberal university, which since the 1970's has focused on austerity (for students and faculty, not for the executive) and financialization (putting money in hedge funds rather than back into research, wages, infrastructure or student support). In this context, expensive headhunting (59K for MUN's VP), ballooning exec pay, and the creation of shadowy new departments to protect the system is funded by increasing adjuntification (goodbye tenure), crumbling infrastructure (the tunnels), tuition hikes (nuff said) and disappearance of funding or support.

The problem is that nether of these viewpoints is reality. They oppose their unrealistic ideas of what a university needs to do (support the community selflessly vs. make money selfishly) and ultimately go nowhere. We need to balance these two, to find a consensus that can help the university contribute to Newfoundland society and the economy  while paying fair wages and taking fair tuition fees.

The only way forward I see, then, is to get financial types on board of a long term vision for MUN, one that seeks to create a virtuous cycle of investment and innovation, a circular economy which is more and more accepted by organizations such as the EPA in America and the EU.

This is not easy medicine to swallow, but it is the only escape from the (profitable) endless crisis of neoliberal capitalism and its management style of boom (for some) and bust (for others).

4) Regents Is A Numbers Game

Which brings me to the reality of The Board of Regents - it is a numbers game. There are 31 members, only 10 of which are supposedly progressive due to their provenance from the alumni and current students. However, looking closer at candidate bios, one can see that fully a third of them come from finance or business backgrounds.

More of the same, in other words.

I haven't looked at the other 21 member bios (and am a bit scared to do so), but I would hazard a guess they overwhelmingly have financial or political backgrounds. This means the neoliberal bias of the regents is already baked in, as is their adherence to The Hegemony (sorry, looks better capitalized).

As a progressive academic who has worked at an economics faculty in Japan, I can see how Neoliberal Discourse does not live up to its promises, and is ultimately counter productive. I saw first hand how increased salaries among faculty eroded staff morale, and created a constant leak of talent whose replacement sucked away productivity, much as exec salary raises have plagued Memorial. I also saw how this eroded away ethics, leading to casino involvement schemes and a plagiarism incident due to pressure on a professor to get a student into a certain graduate school.

Neoliberal management is a dead end for Memorial.

Conclusion

Considering how neoliberalism has hollowed out the university through austerity and financialization, it is unsurprising that it has become de rigeur for financial types and disillusioned students to knock what the university has become. 

The controversial financial guru Nicolas Nassim Taleb states, 

“Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing”

Since Taleb worked in the financial market most of his life, where insider knowledge is the only thing valued, and only pursued an academic path for kicks and clicks later, he exemplifies the neoliberal scorn for the social value of a university and the 'suckers' who believe in it.

This is more evident in his book Antifragile, in which he continues

“Knowledge formation, even when theoretical, takes time, some boredom, and the freedom that comes from having another occupation, therefore allowing one to escape the journalistic-style pressure of modern publish-and-perish academia.... Commerce is fun, thrilling, lively, and natural; academia as currently professionalized is none of these."

Taleb has condensed the neoliberal view of university down to a simple binary equation - knowledge formation is snoring, making money is fun! One can't help but think that many of Memorial's exec share this point of view.

The university as a social institution is outdated and imperfect, but it is all we got, and could be made better if we believed in its value and invested in making this a reality. Doshisha University where I obtained my PhD and taught Media Studies is a top Japanese university precisely because it invests in liberal values, promoting internationalization in Japan as well as peace worldwide.

Some Practical Ideas

Some might say that my thoughts are all well and good, but what are some practical steps that can be taken? How about these?

1) Wage freeze for execs unless they secure external funding AND freeze or decrease tuition, OR increase infrastructure spending and R&D investment. This incites financial types to work harder to prime the pump of free thought and innovation which is the heart of a university.

2) Committee review of legal actions against students or other critical voices. Financial types cannot be expected to be the moral or ethical barometers of the university - this is exactly what career academics are designed to do.

3) Balanced Voting Blocks in Regents. As noted, financial and political types are a disproportionally large presence in the BoR. Although there are occasional symbolic members such as artists, the reduction of financial types to match the number of progressives means that, at the least, we can have more discussion and debate over the direction of the university behind those closed doors.

NB: I think this may be my last post on the BoR and Memorial. I am currently an unemployed single father of a special needs child, and navigating a social services system that, despite being criminally underfunded and understaffed, is still more helpful than what we left behind in Japan. And to me, the issue of putting our money where our mouth is, standing behind our values and making them viable, is what Canada and Newfoundland are all about.

Sources

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms.




Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile




PhD in Finland

https://roadtoabroad.co.in/phd-in-finland/




Cuban Medical Education

https://www.cubaheal.com/2021/09/01/cuban-medical-education-program-overview/




Iatridis DS. Cuba's health care policy: prevention and active community participation. Soc Work. 1990 Jan;35(1):29-35. PMID: 2315760.




The Neoliberal University

https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-the-university-became-neoliberal/?cid=gen_sign_in




Scott Seiss on alumni donations.

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=384037393648995




Tuition By University

https://www.univcan.ca/universities/facts-and-stats/tuition-fees-by-university/