Further Proposals from A Place of Liberty

I sent a message to the fish:

I told them “This is what I wish,

The little fishes of the sea

They sent an answer back to me. 

The little fishes’ answer was

“We cannot do it, Sir, because–”

University governments in Canada need to be much more strongly and continuously informed by academic judgment and academic experience than they have ever been in the past.  Strong academic representation is needed at every level, not least on the governing Boards.  Academic judgment is needed not because, in a political sense, academic staffs need more active representation, but because neither lay Boards nor university administrations will be able to govern effectively without it.  Since academic opinion has always been accessible but has by tradition been little used, it would be well if it were secured and endorsed by legal recognition, either in amendments to university charters or, where the charters are liberal enough, in by-laws passed within existing charters.  Here I am in a slight difficulty and must somehow make my argument at least acceptable, because lay Boards are by charter omnicompetent and largely self-perpetuating, and it is they who will have to initiate legislation to alter their habits and system of government.  Yet I am not without hope that the realities of our present university problems will induce even the existing governments of Canadian universities to consider that changes are needed. 

One of the strangest features of Canadian university government is that here, as opposed to any other country in the Commonwealth, the need for extensive academic representation has never been recognized.  Sir Eric Ashby, in his opening address to the Commonwealth Universities Congress in London in July 1963, gave rather prominent notice to this fact. 

For a century, the universities of Britain and India and Australia have made provision for members of the faculty to sit on their governing bodies, and this tradition has been adopted in New Zealand and Africa and Malaya and the West Indies.  In Adelaide, Ibadan or Hull, when an academic matter comes before the governing body, there are enough professorial members to interpret it but not enough to push it through against the better judgment of laymen.  Unless I am misinformed, this is not a common practice in Canadian universities.[1]

Canada, the oldest member of the Commonwealth, has had universities for more than a century and a half.  Yet the Canadian charters remain frozen, despite later amendments, in their original Victorian mould, and the charters of new Canadian universities continue to repeat the formulae which, unless tacitly modified from within by democratic restraint and mature civility, encourage the autocrat, enthrone the anti-intellectual, and canonize the amateur. 

Canadian university charters do in fact and in law assign virtually all decisive authority to governing Boards of non-academic persons.  In most cases even academic decisions are specifically within the competence of the Board.  In all but one or two instances, members of the academic staff are specifically forbidden to serve on the Board, and are therefore precluded from all the categories of decision in which the Board in practice indulges.  In many universities, and under certain conditions, depending upon the character of the participants, some of the authority granted by law is waived in practice.  Questions that are purely and obviously academic are left to the academic judgment of the professors, even though executive authority is normally withheld even from the academic areas.  Yet there is little enough in the charters or their amendments to prevent a Board from interfering, if it wished and if a President encouraged it to do so, in such academic matters as details of curriculum, admission standards, or standards for graduate and undergraduate degrees.  Such interference is not inconceivable, particularly under certain kinds of social or political pressure. 

Casual, uncodified representation, on advisory committees for example, is better than nothing, but it is a very sandy foundation to build on.  One is not encouraged by the records of the past to rely too implicitly upon continuous goodwill in high places.  Under the Canadian charters, members of the universities have few specific rights or inalienable privileges.  The United College affair, even though there are not many universities in the country in which it could have happened, is an ugly reminder of the extremes to which a Canadian university charter can be driven within the letter of the law.[2]  The moral was not missed by those members of the academic community who fought and suffered in that campaign; nor was it missed by administrators and governors in other universities.  Thereafter there were noticeable though subtle changes of alignment.  In some places, there was a closing of ranks against academic “intrusion,” a strengthening of the administration to make clearer the lines of demarcation between lay Board and professorial staff.  In other places, one is happy to note, the opposite reaction could be traced in various moves to civilize and delegate, and to include academic staff, even if only tentatively and informally, in the influential actions of the university.  The United College affair may well prove to have been a turning-point, not only in the history of academic freedom in Canada, but also in the history of Canadian university government. 

The government of Canadian universities has obscure and complicated origins.  Modelled variously in the beginning upon the universities of Paris, Oxford, Edinburgh, and London, Canadian universities have transcended their sources almost beyond recognition.  All have ended up with a form of the two-tier scheme of government which in one variant or another is found in every European university except Oxford and Cambridge, and in all American universities.  The scheme provides for a hierarchic structure, with a governing Board at the top and an academic Court or Senate below.  Ideally the professors look after the teaching; a Board of Governors from outside the university looks after all financial business and “the supreme government of the university.”

To discover the radical assumptions from which our principles of university government have grown is difficult.  Sir Eric Ashby has turned up a document of great interest, an essay published in 1835 by Henry Malden, then a professor in the new University of London.  This essay was intended as the prologue to a submission by the University to the Privy Council in applying for a Royal Charter.  The question of the form of government proper to a newly founded university had been given long and detailed consideration.  Malden’s statement is important because it evidently expresses views widely held in academic circles at that time and because these views have not been seriously challenged in Canada. 

If we were to imagine a university, in which the ordinary discipline, and the details inseparable from the business of education, should be entrusted to the body of professors; in which they should be entitled to tender their advice upon the election to vacant chairs, the institution of new professorships, and other graver matters, but without a final voice; in which all financial business, and the supreme government of the university, and the administration of its patronage, should be committed to a body of gentlemen … chosen expressly and solely for that purpose, responsible for the due discharge of their function and bound to make an annual report on their management; we should form the idea of a well-balanced constitution. 

As an abstract scheme, this is probably no more crack-brained than most other systems of government one could think of; what matters is how it actually works.  Within the one scheme, and even within the limits of one kind of charter, a wide range of difference in actual practice is to be noted, all the way from a tight-fisted and close-minded autocracy to a fully enlightened and civilized self-government in which the academic people play, though often by courtesy rather than by right, a vigorous and decisive part.  The variety depends much less upon any detailed differences in charters than upon the character of the governors and administrators, and upon the presence or absence of humane traditions. 

At its best, and as eventually stabilized at Manchester and from there exported to British and Commonwealth universities all over the world, the pattern consists, as Sir Eric Ashby describes it, “essentially of a supreme governing body predominantly of laymen, and an academic body (often called a Senate) to which is delegated, either formally or by convention, a great deal of responsibility and authority.”  But it is important to notice that Manchester did not come to this desirable state in one inspired step.  To begin with, Owens College, Manchester, was entirely within the authority of trustees who could, among other powers, dismiss professors “at their discretion.”  Not until 1870 did Manchester achieve a constitution with the limitation of responsibilities that Malden had suggested, and not until the turn of the century did the professors win their fight for control of academic matters. 

Canadian universities, however, did not experience this liberating line of development.  They were founded before the Manchester revolution had refashioned the university world.  In a different social setting, where many people had their doubts about the virtue and integrity of the academic life, they did not outgrow their autocratic beginnings.  As a result, although wisps of minutely modifying amendments and by-laws sometimes swirl in the wake of the original charters, the Canadian universities still cling to their high-minded but ill-conceived beginnings and have sanctified them, like the bones of saints, into ossified permanence.  Looking out across the whole complex of British and British-inspired universities, Sir Eric Ashby can say of the struggle for academic control that “that is all past history.”  For Canada, unfortunately, it is not yet even recorded as a serious possibility for the future. 

Our university tradition comes mainly from Britain where there is an ancient respect for learning and a well-established respect for the integrity of academic judgment.  In Canada we have not followed that tradition faithfully.  Transplant an idea from one country to another and it will quickly change under the influence of a different soil and climate.  A strong element in our Canadian tradition is the double myth born on the frontier and fostered in the stark novelty of the new industrial cities, that “men of affairs” are necessarily men of mercurial power and volcanic intellect, and that “intellectuals” and “professors” are vague, impractical, and incompetent.  Men of affairs have never discouraged this amiable fantasy.  It has established itself as part of the folklore of the country. 

I feel sure that the Canadian attitude towards prosperous and self-made men has driven the conception of university government a long way away from what Malden had in mind when he wrote his brief in 1835.  When Malden spoke of “gentlemen … chosen expressly and solely for that purpose,” (the conduct of financial business, the supreme government of the university, the administration of university patronage) and said that they should be “responsible for the due discharge of their functions, and bound to make an annual report on their management,” he cannot have intended that a Board of Governors would meet only two or three times a year; that it would sometimes be so large as to paralyse decision; that it would consist largely of people who had never been inside a university since taking a Bachelor’s degree, if that, many years before; that the governors would not be able to devote more than what little time they could spare from other primary concerns; or that, if they had plenty of time to give to the university, it would be because they had been superannuated from their primary business.  A university would be in a poor situation if it could not call upon the services of men expert in investment, collecting funds, exerting political influence, and offering the benison of worldly judgment; but there is no reason why a university should be governed by such persons unless, individually or as a group, they show outstanding capacity to govern a university.  I have little doubt that members of lay Boards would agree that it is beyond their ability and their trust to attempt to govern a university in the sense that a prime minister governs a country.  Yet the charters of Canadian universities imply that their Boards not only can but should, in the absolute sense, govern their universities. 

Who does in fact govern a Canadian university, and what is the function of a governing Board?  Turning back to Sir Eric Ashby again, we find a clear description of the way academic business is conducted in the British civic universities and in most Commonwealth universities–a pattern evolved from much the same beginnings as the Canadian system. 

Academic business … originates in departments or faculty boards; it seeps upwards as recommendations to the Senate.  If it is approved by Senate its financial implications may have to be examined by a Finance Committee.  Finally it comes to the Governing Body,   the Council, as a recommendation to be approved.  The Council may hold it up or refer it back; but it would be a grave breach of convention for the Council to change it.  For this pattern of government is a convention: you will not find it narrowly laid down in charters or statutes. 

The two-tier system rests on two assumptions: one is that academic business can without much difficulty be separated from other business, the other that business of major importance to the university will be steadily generated from inside the university itself, and in particular from the academic community.  It is in respect of these two issues that the Canadian university system is deficient.  It is clear that all financial decisions made on behalf of a university have important academic implications, whether or not they are originally academic in intention.  If the means of correlating academic and financial requirements are narrow or insensitive, the academic life of the university will quickly suffer.  If the senior administrators in a university are able to keep intimate contact with the academic staff, and if they continuously represent the view of the faculties to the Board, business will flow upwards, even though it may not all be generated among the academic people themselves.  But if, as is the case, whether by accident or design, in many Canadian universities, the Senate ceases to exert the full range of its academic authority or is misled into a warren of exacting but nugatory business, the senior administrators “lose their faculties” and business does not flow at all.  It is not so much that under these conditions business flows downwards as that business is not negotiated in the academic context.  Things are decided by the President and the Board; things happen to the academic body; and it is not always very clear who has made the decisions or why. 

The governing Boards of Canadian universities do not in fact govern.  Ideally, they “run interference” for the President and for the university at large; they provide the university as best they can with the resources it needs to carry on its work; and they exercise their special and professional experience on behalf of the university.  If they have any sense, they accept the President’s recommendations on those matters of major policy in which the Board might reasonably be thought to have some competence, and accept without question his recommendations on all academic matters, upon which the Board cannot be expected to know very much.  A sound Board will scrutinize a President’s recommendations with care, if only so that they may go before the world as well-informed and fully convinced advocates; but a lay Board, once a university is firmly established, should not expect to originate policy except as an extension of the President’s known wishes or recommendations.  The key figure in Canadian university government is not the governing Board but the President, and only when a President abdicates from his responsibilities is a governing Board in a position to initiate decisive action on behalf of the university.  This is not what the charters lead us to expect, but it is very much the way things happen. 

As in any loosely organized human group, except under ideal conditions, lines of division between “we” and “they” tend to establish themselves.  The lines shift with changes of emphasis, with changes in concern and crisis, and with changes in the influential persons in the group.  The most obvious line of division in a Canadian university is between academic staff and administrators.  If senior academic authorities, such as Deans or heads of large departments, identify themselves with the administration rather than with their academic colleagues, the first and most fruitful contact between the academic life of the university and its government is interrupted by undue formality and, under certain conditions, by hostility.  The administration and governing Board are usually thought of as forming a group distinct from the academics.  But another line of division, between academics and administration on the one hand and the governing Board on the other, may develop if the Board is aggressive, opinionated, and anti- academic.  When this happens it is time to get a new President or a new Board because the university is then ready to destroy itself. 

Under favourable conditions, the Canadian scheme turns in upon itself to concentrate its energy upon the President, identifying its fortunes very largely with him.  The structure of government is formally pyramidal but in strict fact is not hierarchic in as much as the governing Board is not in practice superior to the President except in certain limited and often ritual respects.  The fact that the Boards are deliberately non-academic and that the members of the Boards have no vigorous or continuing contact with the life of the university ensures their incapacity to govern the university and concentrates authority in the President.  This inverts the upper part of the structure of government so that in fact the figure of Canadian university government is not a pyramid but an hour-glass with the President at the waist.  As an energy system it is not easy to aim outwards because it is by nature self-enclosing and lends itself easily to frustration.  If on the one hand it is the duty of the President to keep the Board thoroughly informed about the academic needs of the university, it is also the duty of the President to protect the academic community (including himself) from a too intrusive interest on the part of a lay Board.  If there must be any line of division, it should be not inside the university at all but between the university as a whole and the rest of the community.  It is at least theoretically possible for a university to be an organic whole, from the trustees down to the lecturers and students, and upwards from the academic staff through the senior administrative officers to the Board.  But only an outstanding President could make this possible, and only with Deans of more than usual academic stature and a vigorous, highly responsible Senate. 

From the administrative point of view, the President is the central figure in a Canadian university; from the academic point of view, the professors and students are the central figures.  Whatever it is that brings a university into existence, a university is a centre for teaching and research, and its needs radiate outwards from what its inward nature demands.  If professors are notable for their detachment, it may be because they have developed the protective absent- mindedness of those who, from time to time and for their lives’ sake, have had to patch, bail, and jury-rig their ship under strange commands.  If we catch a sudden glimpse of the professors as the centre of a university, they assume monumental, even monolithic, dimensions.  They may in certain lights look like Easter Island figures, discouraged but noble, “the great stone men” stationed about the campuses of the imagination; and

            appropriately on the head of each is perched,

            as though forever, his appointed pigeon. 

No matter how indignant or disrespectful the pigeons, the silent men will have to stay: without them there are no universities.  Fortunately, in Canada, the tradition of Presidents is to stand among the stone men, or at very least to seem to do so.  Very few Canadian Presidents are unacademic by experience or instinct; and though their taste for authority varies, there is no longer any strong tradition of barbaric exercises in arbitrary power.  This is the redeeming virtue of an otherwise lop-sided university system. 

A university is a community of scholars, teachers, and students.  By tradition and practice, universities recognize certain obligations to the social groups in which they grow up, for they appreciate the fact that society depends upon them to sustain and cultivate certain intellectual, moral, and professional values.  But universities, as distinct from technical and professional institutes, meet their obligation to society in a rather fastidious and oblique manner.  Since it is their business to study values, they are not always eager to accept uncritically the values demanded by or reflected in society.  For this reason, a university, even when most deliberately trying to meet the needs of society, has the air of being most interested in realizing its own germinal and self-originating life.  The true “product” of a university is what happens to people within the university community.  In a mature university, teaching and learning are broad, subtle, and difficult activities that elude easy definition except at the most rudimentary level.  The difference between a good university and a poor one can be defined in terms of the kind of things that tend to happen to the people who live in the university as teachers and as students.  No government or governor can by an act of will or by any ordinance bring into existence the living values of the academic life, though a certain amount of money and some lucky acquaintances may set the thing going.  The first duty of Boards and government is to protect and foster university life wherever it emerges and to make it possible for professors and students to cherish and perpetuate that life.  The correct relation between academic persons and lay persons, and between academic persons and administrators, is a relation that will nourish the life of the university: the correct relation therefore is not that of governed and governors, nor of employees and employers, but whatever association will secure unity of purpose and a mutual regard for each other’s abilities, duties, and limitations. 

The form of life of a university is unlike any other form of life or association.  Just as it is the business of Art to be unlike Nature, so it is the business of a university to be a form of life unlike any family, society, business, industry, club, or government.  The great traditional value of a university is not so much the passing on of technical and professional expertise, as the simple declaration of a form of life nowhere else to be experienced.  As a social organism, arising in society and turning its fruits back into society, a university must take serious note of what is demanded of it.  But it must also consider what demands are proper to its nature and function; it must know itself well enough to know what it can do and what it cannot do, and it must know (like a good novelist) what things it may reasonably and properly attempt.  Above all, a university must know what things it alone can do, and, against all attacks and blandishments, it must preserve its ability to do those things well.  If the integrity of their nature and purpose is threatened, universities must be able to withstand demands made by society; they must be able, if it is for the good of their own health, to ignore threats by government, beguilings of industry and commerce, and the expostulations of ambitious and well-meaning citizens.  The best way for a university to fulfil its obligations to society is to insist upon being itself, by discovering and fulfilling the kind of life peculiar to its nature.  Like an artist, a university will always look a little strange in its self-possession.  But no matter how sensitive it may be to the needs of society, it will by its nature behave as though it had no concern beyond its own self-enclosing life. 

In a university, young persons are offered the privilege of discovering marvels and of discovering themselves.  They have the chance to find out how things hold together in terms of something other than utility or cost or profit, or even of logic ­– though they can learn about that too if they like.  They may learn emotional discipline and so discover emotional integrity.  They are offered, if they choose to take it, the privilege not only of learning to think but of thinking- for-their-lives, and if they can do that for long enough, they may be able to set up their own bulwarks against the parodies of thought and purpose which the mundane world admires under the names of realism and shrewdness.  What gives the best university graduates their distinction is not merely what they know, but their detachment from what they know.  The disinterestedness that Matthew Arnold used to praise is surely the greatest instinct a university can encourage and the greatest contribution it can make to society. 

Although part of the business of a university is to be rather unlike society, a university does not find “the world” alien or hostile.  It is not ignorance of the world that separates an academic from his commercial fellows: what makes him seem odd is his devotion to a life utterly unlike the commercial world, his genuine devotion to the values of disinterestedness, love of truth, and zest for discovery.  The world that stands over against a living university is also the world the university grows out of and the world it grows into; it is the same world which in an oblique way the university “expresses” since the university is in some sense a little picture of that world.  For although the university is at first sight very different from the world, it is, as its name implies, a universe, single, unified, containing and exerting its own energy, but stylized in terms of disciplined feeling and cultivated intelligence.  So it is that the universities, though separate, do not stand towards the world in an attitude of hostility.  Rather, being of the world and seeing the world clearly from the standpoint of disengagement, they look detachedly with delight and with passion and so are able to exert a powerful influence for fruitful change. 

But the academic life works its change upon people by indirect means as much as through express policy or the will to effect change.  That is another way of saying that a university is dedicated to truth rather than to realizing a succession of definable temporal ends.  This character of devotion is the most important to preserve, not least because it is the easiest to misunderstand and resent.  If a university becomes an instrument of government or allows itself to be made over into the patterns of power, it loses its distinctive nature and its value. 

It must be very difficult for those whose lives are set in the world of politics, industry, and commerce not to try to impose upon a university, if they have a chance, a pattern familiar to them in industrial or governmental organization.  The projection of a commercial-industrial structure into the Victorian university charters encourages an outsider to regard the government of a Canadian university as an inefficient example of industrial organization – which from an industrial point of view it is.  But a university is not an industry; nor is it a power complex.  From time to time within a university, as in any association of human beings, there may arise cross-currents of interest and ambition, but that is symptomatic of the incorrigibility of mankind rather than an essential feature of a university.  A university as a human organism seems to me to come as near as possible to a society freed from competition and the manipulation of power.  There will be conflict between various theories, philosophies, or interpretations, but this, if conducted in a mannerly way, leads not to overt struggle and mutual destruction, but to reflection, sustained thinking, and the heuristic and sensitive transfer of thought and feeling. 

Indeed a well-found university offers an admirable pattern for the rest of the world to consider, since it implies that it really is possible for reason and good humour to triumph.  Those who have never lived continuously in a university have difficulty recognizing this pattern.  What is distinctive about university life is that those who live that life regard truth as a value.  This means that knowledge becomes power only in an approximate and figurative sense because every extension of knowledge forces us to redefine our categories.  For practical purposes these continuous redefinitions may not be necessary; they may not even be advisable in the practical world.  But not all the functions and duties of a university are overtly practical.  A healthy university strives to become an organism of great complexity, genuinely self-organizing, not oriented on power or competition, scarcely hierarchical at all beyond what is needed for reasonable order and decorum, a community in which all members respect difference and are in the strictest sense equal, once they have been received into the community as full members. 

Men of affairs who serve on university Boards must find the climate of university business an invigorating change from the conflicts of power, wealth, and politics.  Yet it must also be difficult for them to refrain from trying to change the organization of universities into the patterns which command the world of affairs; and perhaps the more passionate their enthusiasm for the universities they serve, the stronger the temptation.  The tension that occurs between active minds in Socratic dialogue and in the scrupulous inquiry that refrains from easy rhetoric is a kind of struggle or contest, but it would be a serious mistake to think of it as in any way the same as the “competition” that in commerce too often implies imitation rather than distinction, confusion rather than discrimination, destruction rather than discovery. 

There are several defects in the present structure of Canadian university government, some of which have been satisfactorily resolved in Britain and the Commonwealth by allowing for academic representation on governing Boards.  The President, even if he is prepared to delegate authority, has to shoulder an increasing burden of day-to-day decisions.  He must deal in principle with internal arrangements, both academic and domestic; he must conduct and lead negotiations with the government; he must direct, instruct, and confer with his Board in the conduct of their secular responsibilities.  The Board themselves cannot do much to relieve this pressure upon the President, and the few fields in which they traditionally work are so closely related to academic values that the Boards cannot be allowed to act to any great extent on their own initiative.  Boards are probably at their happiest and most effective in fund-raising and dealing with investments.  In areas of more intimate academic relevance, particularly in matters of building and priorities, their record is less impressive. 

The worst feature of the present arrangement is the gulf that lies between the Board and the academic staff.  The word “dialogue” has become a fashionable euphemism for the contact between governing Board and faculty members.  Actually very little interchange of any kind occurs.  There are no regular arrangements for meeting and few topics of conversation that commend themselves to both groups.  Since the possibility of working together on matters of concern to the university is specifically removed by charter, it is unlikely that any close association will occur except by the accident of birth or acquaintance.  The Board is separated from the academic staff partly by absence and preoccupation and partly by the widespread notion that there is a difference in kind between laymen and academics.  Laymen are thought to be endowed with imagination, vision, foresight, uncanny skill, financial competence, political wisdom, and executive ability.  Academics are supposed to be absent-minded, incompetent, ignorant of the world, incapable of understanding the mysterious conduct of funds or the vagaries of political grace, and poorly informed even about the principles of the academic work to which they devote their lives.  It is difficult to see how, except in fun or malice, this generalization can be sustained; yet it is so widely believed that it is almost a national myth. 

There are special pieces of work that outsiders may well be able to do for a university better than anybody within its walls, but there is very little special advice or judgment that cannot be provided by the academic staff of a moderate-sized university, if time and opportunity are favourable.  To place these resources regularly at the disposal of Board and President would enrich the government of universities and bridge the gap between the Board and the academic staff.  For example, there is nothing that automatically disqualifies an engineer from serving on a Board of Governors of a university, but there is nothing that automatically qualifies him either.  A professor of classics may well know more about architecture than does a professional engineer; a professor of English may know as much about economics as does a banker; a professor of mathematics may know more about the forms of democratic government than does a member of the cabinet.  The very fact that academics give so much of their attention to study and reflection quite probably means that they are more skilful and exact in making aesthetic judgments and judgments of value than their more “practical” counterparts in the outside world.  They may also be more confident in their judgments and therefore less likely to fall into timid compromise.  Are these men to be excluded from action and decision because they are professors?  Yet in most Canadian universities there seems to be no definite or direct means for their resources to be deployed.  Certainly nobody is strongly encouraged to originate at the academic level business that will have to be decided by the Board.  The doctrine of professorial incapacity seems to be a peculiar phenomenon of the Canadian culture; certainly no such belief guides the universities from which we drew our inspiration. 

To suggest that laymen should be banished altogether from the governing Boards does not help the situation.  Universities can preserve their autonomy only under the protection of jealous and well-informed trustees who refuse to act as government agents.  Influential laymen can do a great deal for the universities.  They can provide special counsel and professional support of various kinds; they can turn their experience and skill to collecting funds; they can act as trustees of government funds and make investments on behalf of the universities; and they can be advocates of the university position to the government, industry, and the rest of society.  In fact they can become eloquent and well-informed ambassadors, by keeping the realities of university life and academic values constantly before the public. 

When it comes to matters more intimately interwoven with the life and values of the university, however, the governing Boards need more continuous and close contact with the academic world than they are likely to expect from their association with the President.  Governing Boards should include a considerable number of academic persons of grave judgment and unselfish zeal, who are non-partisan and skilful in administration.  Without these a Board can scarcely understand or appreciate how widespread the academic values are in university affairs or how multifarious are the forms of academic problems.  There is no guarantee that the academics would always make the right decisions, but there is every reason to expect that, in the wide areas of their competence, they would do at least as well as the lay Boards are doing at present.  Both laymen and academics would be strengthened by working together, by mutual regard, and by a fuller understanding of each other’s worlds. 

The benefits of academic representation on governing Boards, however, cannot be expected to accrue unless members of the academic staff are actually appointed to executive membership of these Boards.  Membership of advisory committees that have no executive authority is no substitute for true participation in government: where there is no risk, there is no responsibility.  Advisory committees, which are formed, consulted, neglected, or dissolved at pleasure, can, if deftly manipulated, become an image of participation that inhibits criticism and emasculates action.  The contribution that the universities are now expected to make to society is too great to allow us to withhold any promising or workable resources.  If greater academic representation in university government means more time spent in committees, the work can perhaps be shared around.  There is plenty of evidence to show that the professors of our time are at least the match of their forebears in scholarship, native worldliness, and administrative skill.  It would seem an elementary principle that faculty, administration, and Board are meant to be working to fulfil the same purposes, and are more likely to achieve them through harmony, collaboration, and mutual respect than through conflict, suspicion, and systematic misunderstanding. 

In considering the need to reform Canadian university government on sound democratic principles, we may reasonably make a few preliminary assumptions.  Canadian universities will tend to continue to have Boards of Governors, partly because they have them already and partly because the public and government seem to feel that not all university trustees should be academic persons or members of universities.  Again, we may assume that the object of reform is to balance and integrate all the resources and elements that lie within the command of each university, and to use these, not for the gratification of a governing Board, nor the elevation of a President, nor the aggrandizement of the academic staff, but for the good of the university.  The object we have in view is the wholesome development of the life of teaching, learning, and research, that is, the life of the universities.  Another assumption is that the particular form of life that universities are capable of embodying must be secured against destructive intrusion by government, society, or special interest. 

Given these premisses, I wish to advance the following proposals:

1.  That the monarchic-paternalistic position of the President or Principal be redirected by drawing the academic staff and the governing Board into closer and more continuous relation.  At present, the only regular point of contact between the Board and the academic staff is the President, who is thus in a position to control the volume and kind of communication that takes place and to determine to a large extent the sphere of governmental activity of both the academic community and the Board.  The President, as chief executive officer serving and expressing the university, has enough responsibility without having to assume the authority of a sovereign and the judgment of a Solomon.  It is clear that much of the administrative virtue of the university will radiate from the President’s tact, judgment, authority, and initiative in the same way that the virtues of scholarship and research will radiate from the academic community itself.  It may be that the position and duties of the President do not need to be redefined as long as the functions of the Senate and Board are made clear, and as long as adequate and continuous communications are maintained between them. 

2.  That the centre of gravity of university government be placed, as was evidently the intention of some Canadian charters, upon the Senate as the supreme academic authority and principal governmental body in initiating legislation upon every aspect of university life.  This is not necessarily a suggestion that the Senate replace the governing Board, but that the Senate assume responsibility for all matters that intimately touch the academic life of the university.  Business would, as at present, come up to the Senate from the faculty councils, but it would be serious academic business affecting the life of the university.  Business would also come to the Senate from the President as it sometimes does now, and even from the governing Board.  The Board would continue to exercise the formal de jure privileges of an authorizing body, but communications between Senate and Board would be such as to secure a partnership of interest and an attitude of mutual understanding and respect, so that the presence of countervailing forces and interests would have a unifying rather than the present divisive influence.  The Senate should normally be a purely academic body with no lay members, unless in some circumstances the active relation between Senate and Board would be improved by some degree of joint membership. 

3.  That the constitution of the governing Boards be altered to include comprehensive representation of the academic community, so that although no academic issue may be “pushed through” without the scrutiny of laymen, no decision touching the   life of the university can be passed without the scrutiny and assent of those who are   intimately committed to the life and work of the university. 

4.  That the functions and duties of the governing Board be carefully defined and limited so that, while the Board fulfils its formal function as trustee and advocate, it will have the greatest freedom only in the areas where it is most likely to be competent and effective.  Despite the wide powers conferred by charter, a governing Board is not in practice allowed to exercise more than certain parts of those powers.  What is needed is a  clear definition of the powers appropriate to the experience and judgment of the laymen who at present serve on these Boards.  An extension of the actual work of the governors   is not envisaged; neither the President nor the university will profit much from an energetic but ill-advised penetration by the Board into the heart of university affairs.  On the contrary, certain matters traditionally regarded as within the competence of lay Boards cannot safely be allowed to remain.  No group of laymen, even if well informed by their President, should have exclusive decision over such intimate academic matters as buildings, priorities, and the broad principles of allocating funds.  Again, the governing Board should be prepared to meet its obligations by frequent meetings of the whole body, rather than through the executive activity of a small group.  If the whole body is  paralysingly large, it should be reduced to executive dimensions; and if too widely scattered to meet often, its duties should be adjusted to the scope of the Board’s actual attention.  The functions of a reformed Board would be of two kinds: (a) highly specialized activities for which the professional experience of lay members would best prepare them, such as matters of investment, fund-raising, formal representations to government, industry, and commerce; and (b) formal or hieratic functions in passing de jure upon what the Senate and President represent as the needs and wishes of the   university, these formal actions involving careful scrutiny and worldly judgment, together with a highly developed sense of governmental decorum and convention. 

5.  That the democratic principle of election be introduced, with appropriate restraints and formalities, so that the academic community shall have a clear voice in choosing a President and in appointments to senior academic posts.  The academic community should also have an increased voice in the election of members of the governing Board, beyond the election of its own representatives, this being a reasonable restraint upon inbreeding and the self-perpetuation of the Boards. 

6.  That all reforms of university government be codified and established by overt regulation, as far as possible within the structure and authority of existing charters; and that if any existing charter makes such reforms impossible, action be taken to revise the charter appropriately. 

It is clear that much of the initiative for such reforms will have to come from the academic community itself.  Fortunately many universities are able to count their Presidents within that community.  Professors will have to find out what scope and structure of government is possible within their individual charters.  They will have to discipline themselves to use correct procedural means of assuming full responsibility and of making business flow in an appropriate manner.  They will have to refuse to be steered away from their actual rights and responsibilities by the red herrings of minute trifles and quotidian importunities.  They will have to be watchful and learned in matters of procedure, and will need to develop a fine sense of relevance.  Such an attitude and such actions should develop the vigorous atmosphere in which healthy reform can without acrimony be instigated.  Propriety, intelligence, and professional understanding on the part of academics will fortify the best of our university administrators and place at their disposal, for the sake of good government and the life of the universities, the range of resources upon which the universities need to draw today and in the future.