Cooking to Death?

At a “Strategy Session for Senior Leaders,” held on May 29 in a packed Ban Righ Dining Hall, Principal Patrick Deane likened Queen’s to a frog being slowly boiled alive. The Principal acknowledged that he had been caught by surprise by the depth of the university’s current budgetary problems. Previously, he had understood our challenges to be cyclical, he said, but chronic provincial underfunding and dwindling international student enrolment have left Queen’s with “few to no levers to pull.” While Deane soon moved on to more optimistic territory, describing this as a “moment of great potential,” it was hard not to follow his amphibious apologue through to its familiar conclusion: not perceiving the gravity of the danger we are in, Queen’s might find itself cooked to death.   

The three-and-half-hour event left little time for such sober contemplation. With Provost Evans working the room with a humour that that one surprised colleague described as “less Darth Vader, more rizz-lord,” participants were asked to direct their imaginations toward a future in which Queen’s is “resilient,” “academically strong,” and not “blinkered to the increasing temperature of the water.” What would such a Queen’s look like? 

To provide context for the visioning exercise, Vice-Provost (Research) Nancy Ross and Vice-Provost and Dean of Student Affairs Ann Tierney made brief presentations on research funding and international student recruitment, respectively. Small group discussion then ensued. Seated at thirteen tables of ten, each of which included a mix of vice-provosts and vice-principals, deans and associate deans, department heads, and administrative directors, participants were tasked with answering a number of questions about resource allocation within the university and then reporting back on their conclusions to the larger group. 

On the positive side, the event brought together people from across the university to talk about strategies and visions for Queen’s as a whole. While it was challenging for some of the frontline educators in the room to navigate what felt like vastly different conceptions of the purpose of the university held by some of their upper- and mid-level administrator colleagues, it was clear that there was some benefit in conversing across this divide.” This was certainly valuable and something that we need more of,” said one department head, at the very least giving heads the opportunity to address a range of assumptions that are shared by some higher level administrators.

Some of the common misconceptions groups discussed included that industry, labour market, and international student traffic should dictate Queen’s’ priorities, that great researchers are de facto great teachers, that NousCubane will increase the university’s efficiency without damaging our academic mission, and that STEM graduates fare better than humanities graduates on the job market. It was also an opportunity to counter the instrumentalist focus on boosting international student enrollment, especially given  that the Principal had just told the audience that this strategy “won’t save us.” And, it gave people at all levels a chance to confirm that the budget model is not working and needs to be changed. 

That these were the themes that emerged as common talking points across tables reflects the more problematic aspects of how the session was organized, including that discussion was constrained to topics pre-determined by the Provost’s office and focused on dollars (of grant revenue, of student tuition, of resource allocation) as a primary metric for evaluation across all areas.

In the final activity, each group was given four plastic bins labelled “Science and Engineering”, “Social Sciences”, “Health”, and “Arts and Humanities,” with each bin containing a number of ping pong balls roughly corresponding to the share of all Queen’s students enrolled in these broad disciplinary categories. Groups were asked to re-allocate the ping pong balls to represent “the University 15 years from now” as they would like to see it. Quite aside from “number of students” being a terrible metric for how we prioritize or allocate resources across the University, this activity seems entirely at odds with the value of inter-, cross-, and transdisciplinary research that the administration so often champions in rhetoric, if not in the type of support and resources needed to make the undertaking of that research easier. 

Now that the frog knows the temperature of the water is rising, it would make sense to turn down the heat using the resources that we do have at our disposal to fund our collective aspirations. But university leadership gave no indication that they are directing their imaginations toward creative uses of Queen’s substantial investments, or that they are inclined toward institutional level strategies that don’t pit STEM against the humanities in a zero sum game. We certainly hope that the distribution of ping pong balls will not be used to make serious decisions about the future of Queen’s as a whole. 

Photo by Yamanaka Tamaki, “Frog,” Flickr. Available under a Creative Commons attribution license 2.0.