Keynote presentation by Dr. James L. Turk, Executive Director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) at the 2014 conference "Capitalism in the Classroom: Neoliberalism, Education and Progressive Alternatives." Presentation made in Toronto, 4 April 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGEIFZoAAgs

1. The Remaking of University:
What Can We Do?
James L. Turk
Ryerson University
April 4, 2014

3. Role of the University
o Advancement of knowledge
o Preservation and dissemination of
knowledge
o Education of students

4. Made possible by:
o Academic freedom
o Teaching
o Research
o Intramural
o Extramural
o Collegial governance

5. Purpose of the University
“The University of Toronto is dedicated to fostering an academic
community in which the learning and scholarship of every member
may flourish, with vigilant protection for individual human rights,
and a resolute commitment to the principles of equal opportunity,
equity and justice.

6. Purpose of the University
“The University of Toronto is dedicated to fostering an academic
community in which the learning and scholarship of every member
may flourish, with vigilant protection for individual human rights,
and a resolute commitment to the principles of equal opportunity,
equity and justice.
“Within the unique university context, the most crucial of all
human rights are the rights of freedom of speech, academic
freedom, and freedom of research. And we affirm that these
rights are meaningless unless they entail the right to raise deeply
disturbing questions and provocative challenges to the cherished
beliefs of society at large and of the university itself.

7. Purpose of the University
“The University of Toronto is dedicated to fostering an academic
community in which the learning and scholarship of every member
may flourish, with vigilant protection for individual human rights,
and a resolute commitment to the principles of equal opportunity,
equity and justice.
“It is this human right to radical, critical teaching and research
with which the University has a duty above all to be concerned;
for there is no one else, no other institution and no other
office, in our modern liberal democracy, which is the custodian
of this most precious and vulnerable right of the liberated
human spirit.”
http://www.utoronto.ca/about-uoft/mission-and-purpose.htm
“Within the unique university context, the most crucial of all
human rights are the rights of freedom of speech, academic
freedom, and freedom of research. And we affirm that these
rights are meaningless unless they entail the right to raise deeply
disturbing questions and provocative challenges to the cherished
beliefs of society at large and of the university itself.

8. Customers
HR Policies
CEOs?

10. Thorsten Veblen, The Higher Learning in America. New
York: Sagamore Press, 1957 (originally published 1918)
“What is here said of the businesslike spirit of the
latterday „educators‟ is not to be taken as reflecting
disparagingly on them or their endeavours. They
respond to the call of the times as best they can…to
substitute the pursuit of gain and expenditure in place
of the pursuit of knowledge, as the focus of interest
and the objective end in the modern intellectual life.”
(p. 149)

11. ideological state apparatus is to focus research (both basic and
applied) and to coordinate vocational-professional manpower
training with labor and capital markets. This conflicts with the
intellectuals‟ own cultural or scientific intentions which rest on a
traditional claim to autonomy, that is to collective self-
management.
“…What radical scholars must therefore rediscover is not
merely that intellectuals play a significant role in the
reproduction of capitalism and the capitalist state, but that
education has been and remains every bit as much a contested
terrain as the shop floor, the party caucus and the halls of
legislative assemblies.”
“The imperatives of the corporate ideal…are
fundamentally mission directed. The role of an
Clyde Barrow, Universities and the Capitalist State:
Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of the
American Higher Education, 1894-1928. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1990

12. Bill Readings, The University in Ruins. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1996
“…the modern university is a ruined institution. Those ruins
must not be the object of a romantic nostalgia for a lost
wholeness but the site of an attempt to transvalue the fact
that the University no longer inhabits a continuous history of
progress…Like the inhabitants of some Italian city, we can
seek neither to rebuild the Renaissance city-state nor to
destroy its remnants and install rationally planned tower-
blocks; we can seek only to put its angularities and winding
passages to new uses, learning from and enjoying the
cognitive dissonances that enclosed piazzas and non-
signifying campanile induce.”

13. Howard Woodhouse, Selling Out: Academic Freedom and the
Corporate Market. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen‟s
University Press, 2009
“Government underfunding continues to accompany growing
corporatization. This pincer movement ensures that
universities move ever faster to subordinate the pursuit of
knowledge to the overriding market principle of monetary gain
for stockholders. Universities compliant with this principle
place at risk not only the freedom that makes the pursuit of
knowledge possible but also the very process of understanding
itself…Those of us who advance [this] must reaffirm the
distinguishing features of the vocation of higher education that
make possible the independent and critical search for
knowledge – academic freedom and university
autonomy.”

14. University collaborations

15. Big Oil Goes to College
An Analysis of 10 Research Collaboration Contracts Between
Leading Energy Companies and Major U.S. Universities
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/report/2010/10/14/8484/big-oil-goes-to-college/

16. University Corporate Partners Amount
Arizona State BP $5.2-million/2 years
UC, Berkeley BP $500-million/10 years
UC, Davis Chevron $25-million/5 years
Colorado Sch. of Mines Chevron $2.5-million/5years
Colorado; Colorado
State; Colorado School
of Mines
27 companies $6-million/5 years
Georgia Tech Chevron $12-million/5 years
Iowa State Chevron $22.5-million/5 years
Stanford ExxonMobil, GE, Toyota,
Schlumberger
$225-million/3 years
Texas A&M Chevron $5.2-million/5 years
U Texas, Austin; Rice Baker Hughes, BP, Shell,
Conoco Phillips, Total,
Haliburton, Marathon,
Occidental ,Petroleo
Brasileiro, Schlumberger
$30-million/3 years
Big Oil Collaborations

17. Findings
 In 9 of the 10 agreements, the university failed to
retain majority academic control over the central
governing body charged directing the university-
industry alliance. 4 of the 10 alliances actually give
the industry sponsors full governance control.
 8 of the 10 agreements permit the corporate
sponsor or sponsors to fully control both the
evaluation and selection of faculty research
proposals in each new grant cycle.
 None of the 10 agreements requires faculty
research proposals to be evaluated and awarded
funding based on independent expert peer review.

18. Findings (continued)
 8 of the 10 agreements fail to specify
transparently, in advance, how faculty may apply
for alliance funding, and what the specific
evaluation and selection criteria will be.
 9 of the 10 agreements call for no specific
management of financial conflicts of interest
related to the alliance and its research functions.
None of these agreements, for example, specifies
that committee members charged with evaluating
and selecting faculty research proposals must be
impartial, and may not award corporate funding to
themselves.

19. Findings (continued)
 9 of the 10 agreements affirm the university‟s right
to publish, but in many instances this contractual
right is curtailed by potentially lengthy corporate
delays. The National Institutes of Health generally
recommends no more than a 60-day delay on
academic research publication, which it deems
adequate time for the corporate sponsor to file a
provisional patent application and remove any
sensitive proprietary information. None of the 10
agreements analyzed abide by this maximum-60-
day federally recommended publication delay; most
far exceed it.

20. The same in Canada?

21. Research
Collaborations
University Partners
Consortium for Research
and Innovation in
Aerospace in Quebec
14 universities
9 research centres
52 companies
Alberta Ingenuity Centre
for In-Situ Energy
Calgary Shell, ConocoPhillips
Nexen, Total, Repsol
Alberta Innovates
Centre of Oil Sands
Innovation
Alberta Imperial Oil
Alberta Innovates -
Energy & Environment
Solutions
Consortium for Heavy Oil
Research by University
Scientists
Calgary Nexen; ConocoPhillips
Petrovera Resources
Husky Energy
Enbridge Centre for
Corporate Sustainability
Calgary Enbridge
Mineral Deposit Research
Unit
UBC Mining industry
Vancouver Prostate
Centre
UBC Pfizer
BC Cancer Agency

22. Program
Collaborations
University Partners
Partnership UOIT
Durham College
Ontario Power
Generation
Munk School of Global
Affairs
Toronto Peter & Melanie Munk
Charitable Foundation
Gov‟t of Ontario
Balsillie School of
International Affairs
Waterloo
Wilfrid Laurier
CIGI
Ontario Gov‟t
Partnership Toronto Pierre Lassonde -
Goldcorp Inc.
Partnership Western Cassels Brock &
Blackwell LLP

23. How do the 12 measure up?
1. Transparency?
The terms of 10 were secret.
2. Academic freedom protected?
7 had no specific protection for academic freedom.
3. Does the university retain complete control over all
academic matters?
6 had no provision assuring the university retained control of
all academic matters affecting their students and faculty.
4. Disclosure of Conflicts of Interest?
Only 1 requires disclosure of institutional or individual conflicts
of interest.
5. Requirement that academic staff have no financial
interest in the collaborating partner?‟
Only 1 prohibited financial conflicts of interest

24. How do the 12 measure up?
6. Right to publish?
5 protect faculty members right to publish; 5 do not; and for 2
it is not clear.
7. Recruitment and evaluation of postdocs and faculty
members protected from being influenced by their
potential involvement in the collaborative project?
6 had not such protection.
8. Mechanism for regular, publicly-available assessments
of the effects and effectiveness of each agreement?
No agreement had that provision.
9. Independent post-agreement evaluation plan?
Absent in 11 of 12 agreements.

25. For 7 research collaborations only
10. Funding decisions based on peer review?
Only in 1 of 7 research collaborations
11. Clear details about how faculty apply for funding and
what evaluation and selection criteria will be used?
Only in 3 of 7 research collaborations
12. Researchers assured access to all the data collected?
Only in 3 of 7 research collaborations

26. University governance

27. Thorsten Veblen, The Higher Learning in America. New
York: Sagamore Press, 1957 (originally published 1918)
Faculty of a well administered university are
organized into “the many committees for the-
shifting-of-sawdust…These committees being in
effect, if not in intention, designed chiefly to keep
the faculty talking while the bureaucratic machine
goes on its way under the guidance of the
executive and his personal counsellors and
lieutenants.” (p. 186)
1918

28. “...the charges that one so often hears today,
that universities are becoming so large, so
complex, and so dependent upon public funds
that scholars no longer form or even influence
their own policy, that a new and rapidly growing
class of administrators is assuming control, and
that a gulf of misunderstanding and
misapprehension is widening between the
academic staff and the administrative personnel,
with grave damage to the functioning of both.”
James Duff and Robert O. Berdahl, University
Government in Canada, 1966, p. 3.
1966

29. “It was consistently suggested during our
hearings that the control of the university had
fallen into the hands of an administrative group
of senior officials (the president, the vice-
presidents, the deans) and that this group, in
fact, ran the university without any genuine
accountability.”
1993
Independent Study Group on University
Governance, Governance and Accountability. Ottawa:
CAUT, 1993.

30. What can academic staff
& students do?
“At a certain point…we don‟t have
universities any more, but outlying
branches of industry. Then all the
things that industry turns to
universities for – breadth of
knowledge, far time horizons and
independent voice – are lost."

31. More specifically, we can:
o Use collective bargaining creatively to ensure
academic freedom & collegial governance

32. Collective Bargaining
academic freedom
promotion and tenure
complement
intellectual property
dispute resolution - discipline
selection of senior administrators
appointments
workload
financial exigency
program redundancy
regularization

33. What can we do?
o Use collective bargaining creatively to ensure academic
freedom & collegial governance
o Defend labour rights & have a vision that goes beyond
business unionism
o Use our academic freedom
o Mobilize colleagues & students around these and other
issues, e.g., accessibility, equity
o Build real alliances with students, alumni, broader
university community, other labour & civil society groups
o Take these issues to the public
Our action or inaction will determine our future