Alex Usher has posted two good columns in a row, a fun one yesterday describing (not inaccurately) a university as "a set of cats fighting in a bag" and an even better one the day before looking at the University of Calgary's new strategic plan, a plan forced by the pandemic and by the Alberta government's radical funding cuts. Here's their slide deck. Usher concentrates on the idea that the university will focus on domains rather than disciplines (which may be, he suggests, simply a way to remove departments), noting that "not only is it unclear how you turn a transdisciplinary research approach into a new set of managerial structures... it's really unlikely that many disciplines are going to easily relinquish the privileges that go along with controlling a departmental apparatus."
NRC went through a similar process starting almost a decade ago with a program-based structure, so we can predict (a bit) how this new initiative will unroll, but this also points to the other half of the equation: the idea that the U of C will be the "entrepreneurial university", which means marketing research and training directly to business in an effort to make up through sales the revenue lost from government. Which sounds great, and I don't blame them for trying. But people don't join a university because they want to work for some company. If they wanted to be entrepreneurs, they would have launched a start-up, or joined Suncor, or some such. And it pits the university against some very well-heeled companies that already provide these services to companies, from IBM to KPMG.
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