UCP prepares to roll out Ford-flavoured post-secondary changes in Alberta
Many ended up simply penning a policy saying they supported the Chicago principles, Ben-Porath said, despite the fact the policy cannot apply in Canada as it does in the States because of our hate speech laws.
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“The Chicago principles have very little to do with any of that, because they don’t actually let you think as an institution what your values are, what your norms are, what is your history, what is the population that you’re serving.”
Gyllian Phillips, Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations president, watched the Ford policy roll out in her province. She called it an unnecessary, “crass political gesture.”
Like Alberta post-secondary institutions, Ontario universities are already governed by a host of regulations including hate speech laws, academic freedoms in collective agreements and student codes of conduct, Phillips said.
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The UCP has also promised to “measure labour market outcomes of post-secondary programs to identify the correlation between provincial subsidies and economic returns for taxpayers.”
A similar scheme under Ford tied 60 per cent of provincial funding to performance measures like graduate employment and pay, which Phillips worries will set in motion an “unprecedented” change.
“Instead of universities working together to build different regional or research based or education-based needs for the province, it creates winners and losers,” she said.
“The idea that we should turn universities into competitive entities absolutely ignores the reality that each university is autonomous, it’s different, it serves different populations, it has a different reason for existing.
LOL why doesn’t this surprise me… 😕