Back from the brink: Restoring public funding to Ontario’s universities

Corporatization in the university context involves providing businesses with the means to socialize the risks and cost of research while privatizing the benefits, and to accrue advantages through the transfer of technology to the private sector. [...] That is followed by a review of the evolution of university funding in Ontario; the impact of the changes on students, faculty and staff, university research capacity, and individual universities and their communities; and a look at provincial funding for universities in the context of Queen’s Park’s approach to funding public services generally. [...] While a sharp drop in transfers to the provinces did reduce federal funding to post-secondary education in the second half of the 1990s, that reduction was, largely, temporary.23 In Ontario, federal funding has ranged from 9.6 to 11.6 per cent of total university revenue since 2000, roughly in the middle of the 8.6 to 12.4 per cent range for the other provinces. [...] For much of the modern history of higher education, the reigning archetype of the university professor was the Teacher/Researcher, engaged in a unified, mutually reinforcing practice of the two.71 As early as the late 1980s, when the neoliberal transformation of higher education was just beginning, leading scholars and teachers in Canada were warning of an increasing over-emphasis on research work. [...] The reduction in per-student spending is the result of the combina- tion of a number of factors: a reduction in the number of staff per student; changes in the composition of the teaching and research workforce (i.e., fewer permanent full-time staff, more contract staff); and a reduction in real (inflation-adjusted) wages.