A Tale of Two Citizenries

How I fell for an academic sleight-of-hand that was to be trounced by ideology.

The tradition of advancement through the ranks of academia has for decades been tied to a path of self-declared intellectual productivity whose currency is frequent and impactful publication in the literature. This I learned early on, when pursuing my doctoral degree. My supervisor, a notable woman chemist by the name of Sabine Flitsch, made no bones about the requirement to contribute a half-dozen or more scientific papers before even contemplating submitting a thesis. This was de rigeur. The same mantra permeated throughout my postdoctoral career, which led me, still in my salad days, to Canada to work at Toronto’s renowned Hospital for Sick Children.

The Conjurer by Hieronymus Bosch (c.1475-80). The magician is a crafty confidence trickster who works in tandem with an experienced pickpocket—who can be seen stealing an elderly gentleman’s purse—and perhaps a small boy, who acts as a decoy or distraction within the crowd by waving his toy wind vane. Image from https://shauncaton.co.uk/sleight-of-hand/

Today, the prevailing orthodoxy and contemporary practices that underpin a faculty member’s salary trajectory and esteem have morphed away from mere publication record. When I first joined the University of Toronto (UofT), I was for all intents and purposes headhunted from industry for my private-sector experience working in small biotech. Those DEI apparatchiks that have successfully spawned themselves like so many lascivious toads across the universities’ campuses in recent years would perhaps justify this hiring choice by citing the unique value of my ‘lived experience,’ presumably thereby discriminating that accumulated ‘know-how’ from the unlived variety, whatever that looks like.

The job I was recruited to was an operational one: the day-to-day management and running of a professional graduate program which, today, is housed under the umbrella of the University of Toronto Mississauga’s Institute for Management & Innovation, or IMI. What was especially curious, at least in retrospect, was the very peculiar way this particular hire was handled. There were, I was told, only two ways for the UofT to recruit anyone into its esteemed faculty—an enforced binary, if you will. There were no non-binary options, because academic jobs do not fall on a spectrum, apparently. The first way, the one most familiar to the lay reader, was to appoint a research-stream faculty member, the conventional breed of professor who spends their days conducting research in the laboratory, building a research group—and, the University prays, will publish new discoveries in their discipline—as well as supervising a team of graduate students, and occasionally deigning a handful of times a year to appear in a lecture hall and teach undergraduates. The second method, less well disseminated among the hoi polloi, was to appoint someone to the so-called ‘teaching stream.’ This crestfallen second-billing is less prestigious, and focuses on the routine teaching of courses and on developing the ‘science’ of teaching, known by many—but explained or understood by almost no one—as pedagogy.

Now, to be clear, no researcher in their right—or even their wrong—mind would want to redirect a vast portion of their otherwise productive time performing administrative tasks, because that is simply poor use of intellectual capital. Hence, this very particular role was being offered, perforce, in the style of a teaching post, with the added incentive that the required number of courses to be taught each year (the ‘workload’) would be reduced, thereby permitting the necessary commitment to the job the university actually wanted done. Not the elusive rare-earth magnet for top talent, certainly, but still very attractive to the many soon-to-be-mortgaged post-doctoral types seeking gainful employment. And it was tenure-track, the magic trigger word in higher education recruitment.

So what was this job? The quotidian management of a professional graduate program. These are the programs that have enticed all major universities to proceed down the slippery slope of commercialising education. The early success of the MBA prototype first emerging at Harvard in the first decade of the Twentieth Century led other institutions to catch a whiff of financial success that would help to liberate them from a dependency on state funding.

During the Eighties, the Harvard MBA became a totem of earning potential as newly minted graduates spilled out onto Wall Street and began to play complex games with derivatives. The worldwide financial crisis of 2007-2008 was ultimately to put a dent in that image. Nonetheless, it occurred to leading minds at UofT, such as Professors Paul Horgen and Ulli Krull, that a new professional program operating at the interface of science and business could, potentially, herald a novel value proposition, both for the university and its future students. This became the Master of Biotechnology Program, a genuinely revolutionary idea in the late Nineties. Horgen and Krull were its visionary architects, patiently building consensus at the then Erindale College campus of UofT (now UTM), and eventually launching the program in May of 2001. Horgen served as the program’s director for the next half decade, but began suffering from failing sight to the point that he had been pronounced legally blind at the time I alighted on the scene. And so, the university divined, it was time for someone new to step into the breech.

I recall the interview process very well. Or at least some of it. I was passed from one befuddled professor to another during a hectic day of handshakes and finger-pressing to pursed lips. Did I know what it meant to join the academy? There were unspoken warnings interleaved between the platitudes, platitudes that flew fast and furious across the dusty desks of an array of—in those days—sports-jacketed white males. Yet, in spite of these vague allusions to career catastrophe, there were nonetheless hints of genuine enthusiasm, especially from Krull, a lean, balding, mousy-faced scientist who sat behind a large bureau pressing the tips of his fingers together, sporting an infectious grin and engaging me with a razor-sharp mind that—I was soon to find—quickly saw through the flaccid posturing of colleagues with a kind of unwavering X-ray vision. He instantly won me over, alluding to the desperate need for someone from outside, someone from industry, to come and make changes, to bring some creativity and private sector ‘fresh-thinking’ to the institution. I’m not suggesting they were looking for a Dune messiah, but it allows me to indulge my deep-seated nerdish fantasies.

The same day, the man who was later to become my immediate report for an entire decade—who said the Dune analogies were misplaced?—a man by the name of Scott Prosser welcomed me into in his academic man-cave on the third floor of the Davis Building, a squalid, brutalist concrete-and-redbrick pile that hailed from an era where, ironically, windows onto the outside world had been banished to the realm of bourgeoise fantasy. At the time, I noticed a postcard displayed on his windowsill, a famous image of a former tutor of mine—Professor Gus Hancock, a noted don at Trinity College—riding his bicycle through the cobbled streets of Oxford. I remarked on it, feeling a sense of compatriotism. He looked quizzically at me, reached over, and casually tore up the postcard and discarded it in his bin. “That old thing. I don’t know why it is still sitting there.” My heart sank.

Dr. Gus Hancock, fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, cycling to the university’s examination schools. Image courtesy of G. Hancock.

What of the job? Well, it was largely a management role. Yes, I would be required to teach, but so long as I focussed single-mindedly on the performance of my program, then my advancement was assured.

So it began.

After some salary negotiations that led precisely nowhere—because the Chair of Biology, one Robert Reisz, was completely stymied by the concept that a candidate for a faculty job might have the effrontery to negotiate—I took some ‘time out’ to consider my options. I should say at this point that Rob Reisz was a funny man. He was, and still is, a world-renowned palaeontologist. Forgive the digression, but a few years into my pre-tenure forelock-tugging, I recall him telling me in a one-on-one meeting, “You need to focus on the fresh young students. They bring new vigour into one’s teaching.” Or words to that effect. Quite awkward words, now I come to think of it. There was something indefinable, something about the way he said it with a certain unabashed passion in his eyes that unnerved me. I’m sure I misread that cue, not least because I am a self-declared broken barometer of others’ motives. But it stuck with me.

In any case, I took the job. And it was a solid gig—playing educational entrepreneur within the expansive sandpit of the UofT, comfortably fenced off from a wider world. But I didn’t publish. I had no laboratory to generate the necessary scientific research, and when I was told I could, and should, publish in the ‘pedagogical literature,’ I baulked. It was the very same gut reaction of the wise party guest who declines the last ‘one for the road.’ There seemed no rhyme or reason to that body of work, and a brief inspection revealed it to be a vipers’ nest of barely concealed neo-Marxism.

“We would love to see you publish on your teaching,” Professor Joel Levine, the new Biology Chair, once told me in a re-run of the Reisz interview of earlier years. In hindsight, I am glad I utterly ignored him. Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose have long since disabused me of any desire whatsoever to commit such an academic felony. The whole discipline of pedagogy is corrupt. It isn’t even a valid discipline; it is an ideology that eschews reason and seeks to indoctrinate its acolytes in the radical fashion pioneered by Paulo Freire and delineated by him in his widely read book, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. No, these were wholly unworthy aspirations, and my curriculum vitae remains to this day inviolate and unblemished.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, I became a blister on the side of the department: painless but ever-present, the lone faculty member who fulfilled the academic expectations laid out before him by delivering up, not journal articles, but tangible, corporate-flavoured performance metrics that were alien to the academic mindset. The program I stewarded grew in student numbers, its reputation spread; we were rigorous, we avoided politicisation, we foregrounded merit. We set many hundreds of young graduates on their career paths into the pharmaceutical industry. I did not do this alone: Scott Prosser and Ulli Krull and Jayson Parker were powerful, ever-present movers and shakers. I limited myself to the operational efficiencies, committed to making it work. And that is no cake-walk in the world of academic administrators, where the solution to workplace incompetence is always to hire yet more staff.

For the avoidance of doubt on this topic, I should elaborate that my own home department, IMI, today boasts 20 full-time Faculty and only 40 unionised administrators. That’s a two-to-one ratio, but I do not see much in the way of productivity. Rather, if it were left to me to apportion the IMI labour force, I would appoint to myself—and to every other faculty member, because I believe in equity—a pair of personal assistants. Shocking, I know, but it would be more productive. And, in any case, where are these 40 people, and what do they do? Not a single one of them delivers a lecture, or carries out any research. On a typical weekday during term-time, you can walk around our office floor and find only a handful of people in attendance. But somehow, in some delusional fantasy world that has today become a reality, the university has committed to paying this New Model Army most handsomely in gold, the better to wage its ongoing war on perceived oppression.

All of this is unsustainable. I foresee two sensible strategic directions. The first is to dismiss fully 50% of those administrators, immediately and without remorse. The second is to simply fire all Faculty and cease to recruit students altogether, and instead become an administrative college bent on advancing bureaucracy, in line with a recent opinion piece by Professor Gary Smith in the Washington Post.

The academics are flailing in the dark. The bureaucratic bloat has swelled to monumental proportions, and they are all caught under the rotting whale carcass, as Jordan Peterson has so vividly described it. Are we to stand by and watch the cherished institutions that were built out of the Enlightenment fail so catastrophically? I think not.

But what of my own circumstance? I stepped down from my administrative position—the entire raison d’être of the job as first conceived—voluntarily. I won’t suggest that I was cancelled. That would be improper. It might not be misleading. No, rather, it is symptomatic of a malaise. The administration, in my case, sought by hiring me to advance its capitalist aspirations; then it chose to defeat itself by prioritising a deranged, Postmodern ideology. It is plain for all to see. These universities have embarked on a path of self-destruction because they have lost sight of the pre-eminence of merit in their business calculus.

This is not going to end well.