Sam Routley: With DEI dustups and growing funding uncertainties, it’s fair to ask: what are universities for anymore?

American academic institutions are once again in the news, this time grabbing headlines following the Trump administration’s crackdown on a roster of Ivy League universities.

Citing concerns over the failure to combat antisemitism following persistent pro-Palestinian protests on campuses, as well as the proliferation of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) policies being enacted by school administrations, the president aims to not only reduce the overall amount of funds invested in universities, but has increasingly leveraged the power of the federal government to gain direct control over university policy. Continuing to face highly publicized resistance from Harvard University towards their desired change in curriculum, hiring, and admissions, the administration has frozen billions in federal grants and has now targeted the institution’s ability to host international students.

How that drama plays out remains to be seen. What is clear is that, beyond the particulars of that conflict, the foundations of the post-secondary project writ large are beginning to wobble.

Although not as severe, Canada’s public universities are likewise facing turbulent times of their own. Having been reliant on international student tuition as a main source of revenue, the federal government’s cap on these study permits has opened a precipitous budget shortfall. It has again brought to the fore much more long-standing challenges shaped by a combination of stagnant provincial funding, tuition caps, and ever-growing administrative costs. The international student cash cow had, until now, provided both universities and governments a way to avoid confronting this deeper challenge.

Different cases can be made about the best path towards financial solvency. Universities can certainly go a long way towards decreasing their own spending, particularly by targeting their ballooning administrative expenses. Generally, however, most stakeholders continue to focus on the need for increased government funding. As things stand, many universities cannot remain viable, nor particularly effective, in the absence of further support, without compromising the delivery of their academic programs or producing sustained labour disruptions.

And yet, this ask for further taxpayer funding comes precisely at a point when universities have lost a great deal of their public legitimacy. If anything, political momentum outside of the academy suggests that public universities are set to receive even less funding alongside much greater oversight.

The problem facing universities amounts to much more than a financial squeeze. This is, instead, only one part of a deeper existential predicament, as the institution’s advocates have been unable to make a compelling public case for what makes it a valuable investment. In the midst of widespread public distrust, our challenge is not only about coming to terms with the endemic shortcomings of the university in its current form, but establishing for the future a clearer and more grounded answer to the fundamental question of what the university is actually for.

The purpose of advanced education

To most advocates, the public university is valuable because it produces two main common goods. The first is the steady production of scientific knowledge and technological innovation, seen as eminently useful—even necessary—for ongoing societal improvement and economic growth. The second is the benefit of widespread and easily accessible higher education. It is this evolving, if often tense, relationship between research and teaching that defines what we know as the modern university. It provides the main justification for taxpayer funding of a permanent class of full-time researchers and a surrounding administrative stratum.

At minimum, the successful creation and perpetuation of useful scientific knowledge through original research or education is enough to support these institutions in and of themselves. Universities provide some students with the skills necessary to succeed in important but specialized fields, whether tech, engineering, or law. Although they are not the only institutions capable of original research, they can still serve as an important tool in developing the rate of innovation necessary to address Canada’s productivity problems.

The current crisis

Still, looking at how today’s universities operate with these ends in mind leaves a lot to be desired. The fact is that, even though advocates can continue to point towards the valuable things that universities can do, they often fail to demonstrate to a skeptical public that universities are actually doing these things on a wide scale.

Take, for example, the value of knowledge production. Even with all the time-consuming administrative work now required for contemporary research, the evidence (as measured by citation counts and the number of papers published) shows that university researchers are as productive as ever. Yet, questions can be raised as to their actual quality and impact. The emphasis on the sheer quantity of research towards career success has often incentivized incrementalism, risk-aversion, social-desirability bias, surface-level thinking, and—as demonstrated by the now two-decade-old “reproducibility crisis”—outright fraud.

And, although specialization is an inevitable result of scientific development, many disciplines lack the kinds of relationships with civil society or the private sector that can spread breakthroughs beyond parochial sub-sub-disciplines. The existing patent model, for example, not only slows down research but has often failed to keep the benefits of taxpayer investments in Canada. Making a case for usefulness is particularly challenging for much of the research produced in the humanities and “softer” social sciences. Just try to defend to a skeptical public some of these more questionable recipients of federal funding as a good use of taxpayer money.

A similar challenge concerns the value and sustainability of the university’s other main calling: undergraduate education. In large part, it is really this end, more than research, that accounts for the emergence and continuation of the institution in its contemporary form. Most of Canada’s public universities were established in order to serve the rapidly growing undergraduate enrolment of the post-war years, and tuition, whether international or domestic, remains a main revenue source for many of them. This grew as a response to the growing need for a more educated and specialized labour force.

But it was also driven by a novel increase in the emphasis placed on the value of a university education itself, regardless of one’s area of study. University education continues to be seen not only as an inherently worthwhile personal experience for a young adult, but as a straightforward means towards upward social prestige and economic mobility.

Today, however, one can a feel a clear disjunction between, on the one hand, those educators championing the institution’s ongoing vocation to “foster critical, creative, and well-rounded” students and, on the other, paying parents who are skeptical about the value of a four-year major in post-modern Marxist theory or underwater basket weaving. A clear chasm now exists between Canadians with and without university educations, having emerged (even with controls) as a strong predictor of an individual’s income, residency, issue stances, cultural attitudes, and issue positions.

The reality is that, even if one could make the (often true) case that the claims of censorship or indoctrination are exaggerations, students are, nevertheless, more often than not, likely to enter environments of partiality and ideological homogeneity. Public universities, despite being funded by all taxpayers, now largely hire, train, and speak for the aspiring elite of a particular progressive elite segment of Canadian society that is steeped in luxury beliefs.

More to the point, pressing questions can be raised about the inherent value and practical benefits of a university education itself. Although university graduates continue to make on average more than their non-educated peers, the wage premium received from post-secondary credentials has declined. As any graduate who is unable to get work in their desired field intuitively knows, Canadian universities now produce more bachelor’s degrees than jobs that really need them. The result has been both an over-credentialed working class and a further dilution of the value of post-secondary education. Even for those graduates who successfully receive degrees, broader challenges associated with debt, inflation, affordability, and the cost of living ensure that a university education in no way ensures a secure and comfortable middle-class status.

Here, a genuine case can be made that a large part of university education has value that is not reducible to crass economic metrics. This is, of course, the proud tradition of the humanities and liberal arts education, which does not focus on the labour market as much as it is about moral formation and the question of what it means to live life well. It would be remiss of me not to mention the promising revival of these kinds of programs throughout higher education.

But can we really provide the public with the confidence that Canada’s public universities are doing this effectively? While many programs certainly do and will always impart important skills, it seems that more and more students can succeed without having learned that much at all. Existing career incentives, namely the importance placed on student evaluations, have led instructors to dilute the rigour of their classes and evaluations, driving grade inflation and aggravating the already worrying trend of students who graduate despite struggling to read, focus, and construct sustained logical arguments. To this already unsustainable situation, the emergence of accessible AI writing tools that can increasingly mimic human writing has produced a full-blown crisis.

What is to be done?

The quite negative picture that has been presented here is not meant to delegitimize universities as a whole nor to suggest that they ought to be defunded. My byline betrays the fact that I have quite a lot of personal stake here: I have spent a good part of my adult life in the institution, sought after its credentials, and—I should be honest—leveraged its existing social legitimacy for my own personal exposure. I believe that universities are not only indispensable for the contemporary labour market, but that they can structure valuable and accessible communities of learning.

Instead, my purpose in saying all this has been to show how dire things actually are. While the university’s advocates are keen to point to the noble purposes of the university, they have failed to demonstrate the fact that existing universities are fulfilling these ends in a way that merits even more spending.

And although most academics genuinely believe in the value of their research, they can no longer afford to ignore a skeptical and distant public that fails to see the point of it all. They can’t remain defensive, insinuate the ignorance of the society, nor remain ensconced in their sub-sub-disciplinary silos.

In the coming years, the task for universities is not merely a matter of making the numbers work, but developing a more positive and proactive vision of what the university is now for.