What Are Universities For?

Knowledge Under Siege: Charting a Future for Universities
Edited by Marc Spooner and James McNinch
University of Regina Press (2026)

These have been bad years for Canadian and American post-secondaries.

In Canada, the federal government has restricted the number of international students allowed into the country, choking off a critical revenue stream. Colleges and universities are killing programs and laying off faculty and staff.

A consultancy firm, Higher Education Strategy Associates, now has a Retrenchment Watch listing Canadian colleges and universities in trouble. B.C. features prominently on the list.

In the U.S., the Trump regime has attacked some of the greatest universities in the country, like Columbia and Harvard, by charging them with failure to suppress antisemitism on campus and demanding millions of dollars in compensation while withholding research funding.

In states like Florida and Texas, post-secondaries are shutting down programs, ending tenure and demanding that “controversial” subjects be avoided.

One activist in the subversion of American universities is Christopher Rufo, who argued in his first book that a handful of radicals of the 1960s — Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire and Derrick Bell — somehow managed to educate enough of their followers to enable a gradual takeover of American universities.

That takeover would result in further infiltration of government and corporations, leading to the demise of capitalism and racism and the triumph of values now described as “woke.”

Despite having worked in post-secondary from 1968 to 2008, I completely missed this takeover of the post-secondary system.

Rufo is now on the board of Florida’s New College, which is being converted into a bastion of right-wing orthodoxy.

Scott Yenor, a political science professor at Boise State University and a Christian nationalist, asserts that a “republican framework of liberal education at the turn of the 20th century” has been replaced by a “progressive university,” based on bureaucratic “specialization, professionalization and fragmentation.”

The progressive university, Yenor claims, has lost public confidence. It has been ideologically captured and “produces no measurable gains in knowledge.”

No measurable gains in knowledge?

How about Nobel laureate Katalina Karikó, who developed mRNA as a vehicle for vaccines while a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania?

As a COVID-19 vaccine, that gain in knowledge resulted in saving 14 million lives.

Progressive in name only

Oddly enough, critics like Rufo and Yenor are late to the party. Academics in today’s universities are deeply critical of them, precisely because the universities are progressive in name only, and in dire need of systemic transformation.

The participants in a 2023 forum at the University of Regina understood that very well. They came from universities in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., New Zealand and Australia.

Over three days they asked themselves, “What is a university for?”

To try to answer that, they shared their experiences, their histories and their visions for a new university.

Knowledge Under Siege: Charting a Future for Universities gathers their findings, together with updated information, in book form.

Reading it in the second year of Donald Trump’s second term in office, I find their ideas almost utopian — and precisely what Trump wants to stamp out.

They want more diversity, more equity, more inclusion. They don’t just want more Indigenous students and colleagues; they want Indigenous ways of knowing, taught and learned alongside Plato’s philosophy and Einstein’s physics.

They want universities to change, ironically enough, because the old professoriate of white males has gradually learned that diversity, equity and inclusion make better universities and healthier societies.

Diverse backgrounds give students and teachers alike a wider range of perspectives on most topics. Equity makes them examine ideas on their merits, not on their source. Inclusion exposes them to different ways of thinking, and shows that “classical” and Indigenous ways of thinking can examine one another, with each learning from the other.

The editors of the book recently took part in a CBC Radio interview to discuss its arguments. But Knowledge Under Siege is not really intended for non-academics — least of all the taxpayers who fund the universities and would likely be expected to fund any utopian new version of them.

Higher education, a social determinant of health

The authors of most of the book’s chapters write in long sentences built into long paragraphs. Terms like “spatiality” and “hermeneutic justice” are assumed to be understandable. This is academic shop talk. Readers accustomed to the length of a post on X or Bluesky will likely judge Knowledge Under Siege TL; DR (too long; didn’t read).

But from time to time in the academic gloom, an idea flashes out like lightning. Peter S. McInnis, past president of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, points out that education, especially higher education, is one of the social determinants of health. Those with advanced degrees tend to live longer, healthier lives and to experience less dementia than their less-educated fellow citizens.

McInnis goes on to note that in Canada, access to higher education and to health care opened up in the 1960s. “The question then arises,” he writes, “why have we largely failed to sustain our collective commitments to quality health care and post-secondary education?”

Historically, of course, universities were designed for a very small number of young men who would be needed for service in the church or professions like law. Their prestige also made them attractive to wealthy families who wanted their sons to acquire at least a veneer of scholarship. And for a very small number of talented middle-class young men, universities offered social mobility through a combination of professional achievement and networking with their more affluent classmates.

After the Second World War, veterans and then their sons and daughters gained access to social mobility through universities.

The prospect of rising in society became a key driver of enrolments, which grew year after year, and therefore of university growth itself.

A subsidy for business

Somewhere along the way, universities and colleges also became a kind of subsidy for business, teaching skills that employers had once done themselves with new hires. As several of the authors in this book make clear, a market economy demanded a market university. Education was a private benefit that ought to be paid for like any other good or service.

McInnis notes, “The neoliberal university defines successful academics more as private entrepreneurs, intent on maximizing individual gain, rather than members of the collective collegium with a broader civic mission.”

Consuelo Chapela, a professor of health at the Autonomous Metropolitan University of Xochimilco, near Mexico City, argues that, “at first, universities referred not to a totality of knowledges but to a collection of people — in this case, students and teachers bound by similar objectives, skills and challenges.”

One challenge was that their studies might mark them as blasphemers or traitors; as a kind of intellectual guild, universities managed to develop immunity from popes and kings alike.

But they relied on rich and powerful patrons to protect them as well, and academic freedom depended on the patrons’ whims. Under Napoleon, Chapela argues, the state redefined the universities “as an explicit means to control the moral and political content of public thought and opinion”— a model adopted in the universities of Central and South America.

It took generations of struggle for those schools to win “autonomy,” the power and independence of self-governing institutions.

A trampoline to success

North American universities, Chapela writes, followed a German model that combined teaching and research and an arm’s-length distance between state and school. But she argues that North American universities after the Second World War were both profitable and institutionalized, “creating systems resembling corporate enterprises.... They became a kind of trampoline or springboard to catapult new outsiders into the establishment.”

The Regina symposium did not pay much attention to the demographics of universities’ growth and decay, but the steady shrinkage of the cohorts of young adults is clearly a major problem. Universities have tried to solve the problems by recruiting older adults, then working-class students, minorities and international students.

This has worked, sort of. As government funding dried up, universities charged higher tuition — especially for international students. But it’s very expensive to support tenured faculty, especially those in programs that attract fewer students. After all, in the neoliberal university, graduates are products; professors with more graduates are more productive.

The answer for decades has been the exploitation of “adjuncts,” younger faculty who teach on short-term contracts “contingent on enrolments.” As McInnis notes, in the United States, “an astonishing 70 per cent of undergraduate instruction is performed by precariously employed faculty.”

McInnis says it’s not quite that bad in Canada, but he cites a report by CAUT and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives that found “54 per cent of academic appointments were limited-term positions. Of this, the majority were short-term contracts of four to eight months.”

The consensus of the Regina symposium was that neoliberalism has created universities in its own image, determined to grow or at least not to shrink, to curry favour with ultra-rich donors and to carry out research for governments and corporations.

Students themselves have accepted the model of university as “trampoline” into the establishment. They take on enormous debts only to find themselves unable to find work they’ve been trained for.

Regardless of far-right critics like Christopher Rufo and Scott Yenor, universities do not shape their societies. Scholars do their work and present their findings. The society then accepts those findings or questions them — especially if they seem to threaten the status quo. So universities must debate with their societies, presenting facts and arguments that societies may or may not accept. To the extent that universities are usually dependent on social funding to survive, society often wins the debate — regardless of the facts.

Thanks to their work in the Second World War and thereafter, American universities helped make the United States a military, economic and cultural hegemony for over half-a-century. But with more university graduates than ever, the United States has turned (twice) to the anti-intellectualism of Trump.

Knowing that universities strengthened his enemies, Trump now wants to reduce higher education by redefining its purpose and curriculum. Its graduates will be few and obedient.

But docile ignoramuses cannot run hegemonies, or even successful societies. Other societies will grow stronger as they debate with their universities, and will have a better chance to endure and prosper.

The academics in Knowledge Under Siege have made a powerful case for universities in the service of an egalitarian and inclusive state. It will be up to Canadians to accept those arguments, create such a state and continue the debate.