On Private Universities
Universities are not employee farms, yet that is exactly the role they are being forced into. Reduced funding and a political environment shifted far to the right (``thanks'' in large part to Conrad Black's overwhelming newspaper ownership) ensures that University management must appeal more and more to the private sector; a sector who is very interested in research which has commercial application; art which is sale-able; graduates who are ready to work. These have not been goals of Universities. Universities have been and should continue to be a place where learning, research and art are done for their own sake, not the sake of commerce. This has not been the case in recent years: as we move toward increased private funding of post-secondary education, and even entirely private institutions, the goal of University as higher learning recedes farther into the distance. Instead, job-placement is paramount, research needs to have practical applications and art needs to be popular.
With entrance requirements diminishing and class sizes growing ever larger, the abilities of professors to teach shrinks; a meaningful discussion cannot take place among huge humanities and art classes of sixty students or more and a professor cannot hope to ``teach'' a class of three hundred science students. Ignoring the social, political and health benefits of an educated population, our current governments instead tout the earning power of University graduates. Income is not a measure of University success; scientific and artistic returns to the community are the measure.
There are plenty of opportunities for post-secondary job training at places like SAIT, Mount Royal or DeVry. Subverting universities -- one of the few remaining places where research or art can be explored simply because it's interesting -- to little more than glorified employment training facilities is not a laudable goal. A greater need to appeal to the private sector for research and lecturing dollars means a greater emphasis on the wrong educational goals. A greater dependence on tuition funds means University entrance based on economic background, not scholastic success as well as a dependence on large class sizes and low entrance requirements.
Universities have been publicly-funded for good reason: universal access based on academic success; research which becomes freely available to the scientific community as a whole, not patented and ``spun-off'' as has become vogue recently; film, sculpture, paintings and theatre which doesn't depend on corporate funding or commercial success. These goals are generally the opposite of the private sector. Keeping University education public is the only way to keep University; a private University is merely a career college with a different name.