Leading the Pack

Time for a tidbit of self-promotion--on Friday, May 6, I was lucky enough to be a panelist in a "live" online discussion on the Guardian.co.uk site, which has a special section for postsecondary education. The topic of the day was "How do you promote female leadership in higher education?". You can check out the "Q&A best bits", which are a kind of summary of what each panelist contributed to the discussion. The full discussion with over 250 "comments" is available here.

Thankfully I can say that in sharing the links to our panel, I'm also promoting the other participants, all of whom were more experienced and knowledgeable than myself! Many thanks to Mary Churchill of University of Venus for "recruiting" me for the panel.

If you click through and take a look at the short version of the discussion, you'll notice that I made a point of highlighting the structural nature of women's work in the university, e.g. the fact that certain work tends to be recognised as more "feminine", including teaching and low-level "service"--a phenomenon not confined to the university. I also emphasised the historicity of the problem, that universities have for thousands of years been elite institutions operating in patriarchal societies.

I'm reminded of that last point as I research a presentation (and paper) I'm writing about gender, science, and meritocracy (using the Canadian CERC program as my example). It's a testament to the tenacity of gender norms/ideologies that we can still blame women for lacking "merit" when they "fail" to achieve high-ranking positions in scientific communities. To me it hardly seems like a matter of "excellence", when for so many centuries women have been excluded from participation in knowledge creation in its formal settings. Yet the arguments persist, as I've seen quite clearly in the news articles and comments I've been analysing.

Plus ça change...

[EDIT, June 6, 2011] Here's the link to the Prezi for my CERC talk on June 1st. I hope you enjoy it!

"Myths & Mismatches" Part 4: Structural Faults?

Continuing my weeklong blogging escapade of commentary, today's "Mismatch" from Jo and Julie is one that relates quite directly to my own research project on governance of universities...

"Mismatch #2: Mismatch of Structure"

Structure relates to the functioning and ultimately to the purpose of the university. Jo and Julie write that the purpose of the university is to "transmit the best that has been thought and spoken (i.e., maintain tradition) and advance the state of human knowledge through novel research (i.e., innovation)". And they rightly point out that there's something of an inherent contradiction between those two things, one that is dealt with in different ways depending on things like disciplinary context.

With the changing context of the university as institution comes changes to the way academics are expected to do their jobs, including how they work with colleagues, where their funding comes from and how it's allocated, how teaching appointments may work, what's expected in terms of research and "engagement" with scholarly work and life, and so on. Jo and Julie cite the example of interdisciplinary work and the (lack of) institutional structures designed to facilitate it, and one of the ways in which even the best candidates in graduate school can "fall through the structural cracks".

In spite of what looks like an obvious topic of study (post-secondary education), I've found that my own work seems to be pretty interdisciplinary--probably because of my background in multiple areas of study, which in turn is feeding (I think) an existing intellectual tendency. I follow paths that interest me and I'm usually focussed on some specific kind of "problem" or issue. If there's an answer to my questions in another discipline, then I tend to start extending myself and sniffing around that territory in search of something useful for my purposes. And in the process of this, I've realised that interdisciplinary/"innovative" work is or can be fairly unsafe, depending (again) on the environment in which you're working and on what your goals are. It's hard to build an academic career in an environment rooted in disciplinary distinctions when you're not sure which conferences to apply to, which scholarly associations to join, and (my own current problem) which journals would be appropriate venues for your research.

My tactic thus far has been to take "slices" of things and relate them to specific disciplinary areas, e.g. if a particular paper or presentation topic relates more heavily to Communication Studies, then I take that into account and try to tailor it to that perspective. It doesn't always work, but it gives me something to start with. My hope is that knowing the norms and expectations of this environment will help me to find ways to work within the existing/evolving structure, even as I'd like to be a part of changing it--though as Jo and Julie note, "the university has a lot more inertia than you do" so to expect to make your own "place" within it is to take on a complicated (though obviously not impossible) task.

You may not feel like you really "fit" anywhere, but this feeling can have different causes and implications. It could signify that you're on the "cutting edge" and doing work that will in time have an important place, but it'll be a place you'll have to carve out for yourself. Or it could just as easily mean that you should be looking for a career in some other arena that better accommodates your interests and needs--and as I've discussed previously in this series, there's no reason why academe needs to be the only environment in which you can write, think, and produce scholarly work.

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Previous posts in this series...
Part 1: "Myths and Mismatches", Oh My!
Part 2: "Mismatches": Time, Place, and Opportunity
Part 3: Assessing Your Qualifications

Interesting Critique...

...of the latest clutch of Higher Ed books to drop into the market. The "Failed University" is becoming the topic-du-jour for those looking for a fresh target on which to pin national and economic failure.

An interesting point here is the continuing segregation of colleges and universities into the "haves" and the "have-nots", with the student populations at these schools reflecting this divide in terms of their socio-economic status (for example). Underprivileged students are coming in to an "accessible" system where they find that not all "access" is equal, particularly at for-profit institutions that charge high tuition and enable students to rack up many thousands of dollars in debt (as we have seen recently in the U.S.).

This is an important point--and I agree with it. However, I think another important thing to remember is that "higher education", particularly the university, was an elite institution--more or less--for its entire history up until about 50 to 60 years ago. And structurally this is still the case today.

In Canada, this meant small institutions with religious affiliations, where funding came from student tuition and private donations. Not until the post-WWII period, with the Veterans' Rehabilitation Act, did Canadians see an accessibility initiative anything like what we have in place today; and in the period from the end of the 50s to the beginning of the 70s, enrolments tripled.

Have we really created planned/considered structural solutions that reflect these significant changes to enrolment, and the drive to "accessibility"? Or have we merely tried to extend the old, elite model to more people--negating its past function, without acknowledgment that we've done so? What will we substitute for this model--and why, after 50 years of increasing massification and its deep consequences, are we still asking?

We know there has been a change in signification--a Bachelor's degree simply doesn't "mean" what it used to in the past. Some people even talk about graduate market glut (another jobs/skills mismatch?), even as others build arguments about why a university degree is "still worth it". But as I argued in my previous posts about tenure, I'm not sure we're really acknowledging the extent of the changes that have occurred--or indeed the ways in which higher ed is repeating mistakes made in the past with the primary and secondary education systems. "Worth it for whom?" is only the first and most obvious question.

The critique of socio-economic class reproduction--one so frequently levelled at national, public school systems--is now being targeted at universities and colleges. I think we need to ask: why are the problems persisting and the same critiques being offered? Why have we not solved this problem in primary and secondary education? If we haven't "fixed" the first 12 years of education--can we expect to manage the postsecondary problem successfully? And is is really the best approach to simply attack the existing system--as we are seeing now with universities?