John Robson: The Cascading Chain of Policy Disasters Hitting Universities

The main campus of McGill University is seen in Montreal on Nov. 4, 2018. Daniel Slim/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary

Universities increasingly furnish a worrying case study in the disintegration of the Canadian public sector. Including that instead of beacons of intelligent thought on this and other problems, they’ve become bastions of dogmatic ineptitude. And that we aren’t even vaguely surprised at the muddled incompetence.

Harsh words? Well, consider the facts, starting with this Toronto Sun story: “Cap on student visas could wreak financial havoc on Ontario universities, says rep.” The gist of which is that Canada’s collapsed immigration policy, which helped cause the collapse of our housing policy, is now causing a collapse of our post-secondary education policy and the proposed solution is more inept meddling.

People go about as if such chain-reaction policy disasters were perfectly natural. But they’re not. People with educations used to quote Orwell that “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that. No ordinary man could be such a fool.” But the intelligentsia have made great progress since in corrupting the populace, if nowhere else.

We do not, for instance, wonder why professors cannot make money selling knowledge to citizens of a fabulously wealthy country with universities world-famous in Canada. But isn’t higher education the key to personal growth and career success, making you smarter, wiser, and more employable? Oh dear.

Part of the problem is that the humanities passed into social studies and thence through grievance studies out at last into the complete void. Hard sciences can still make money, apparently, and even business schools. But not, oddly, the peddlers of ignorant resentment.

That three privileged Canadian academics are baffled at possible consequences if convicted of anti-Semitic vandalism gives a good idea how bad things have become. Normal people flee classrooms where tenured professors pocket $150k a year assuring a few bitter zealots they were right about everything when they enrolled.

As a Globe and Mail piece on that vandalism notes pointedly, “In Ontario, there was a 20-per-cent decline in undergraduate enrolments in the humanities between 2008 and 2017.” Yet the institutions demand vast subsidies to confirm these students’ presumption that capitalism is oppressive so children of well-off parents should get free money for a degree that cements their own high socioeconomic status.

This cozy cycle is called “social justice,” at least from inside. I too grew up in a family where humanities PhDs were common, including both parents, uncle, and grandfather, but at least recognize what a sweet deal it was. Especially as I actually learned a lot, thus baffling recent graduates with references I consider commonplace.

The solution is not to pile a Pelion of subsidy on an Ossa of error. (See what I mean?) As I’ve said before, it’s to privatize universities and tell them to find their own students and their own money. If they can’t, they’re deadweight deadbeats, and have no right to exist on our dime. And don’t go bleating about the externalities from educating people, like innovation. They are overwhelmingly captured by students and institutions (I also learned real economics somehow) and if they’re worth doing, someone else will do them if you don’t. As usual, subsidy-seeking is special pleading.

Including subsidies in the form of tuition caps. They are justified as promoting equity but the truth, speaking of real economics, is a great deal more sordid. Modern politicians are in the business not of protecting your life, liberty, and property, but of giving you stuff. As H.L. Mencken said, “every election is a sort of advance auction of the sale of stolen goods.” And (as usual here I recommend Anthony de Jasay’s “The State”), the better they get at trading money for votes the harder it becomes to find new money with which to outbid one’s partisan rivals, the more platforms converge, and the more politically lethal it gets to suggest even minor cutbacks.

Imagine someone running in any province on “I’ll make your kid pay the full cost of their college education.” Instant electoral death. Instead we make it impossible for universities to pay their bills from the revenue their students provide, and rather than going back and fixing the combined problems of price controls and lack of value even at bargain rates, we rip off a huge stream of foreign students to line our pockets.

We then totally fail to monitor whether they are even enrolled, let alone in a real institution and not some strip mall diploma mill, because the point wasn’t opportunity or education. It was a desperate lunge for revenue to sustain our chain of policy blunders, in turn causing a housing crisis in a domino effect.

Fixing the problems would cause a reverse domino effect. Making universities teach or perish would ease pressure on housing, reduce public spending and taxes, and improve our ability conceptually to unravel bad economic and social policy.

Can we moderns not even think about it?

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.