It’s always difficult to make accurate observations about differences in national higher education cultures.  But one thing I can tell you that is absolutely not true is the perception that Canadian universities are suffering under some kind of unprecedented managerialist regime.  If anything, Canadian academics are among the least managed employees in the entire world;

When academics complain of over-management, they aren’t using that term in a way that workers in other fields would recognize.  They are not, for instance, required to be in any one place other than the six to nine hours per week they are teaching: it is simply understood that they are working and being efficient at a place of their choosing.  The content of their work largely escapes scrutiny: no one checks-in on their classes to see what is being taught (though Queen’s university may be wishing they had a bit more hands-on management after revelations of anti-vaxxing material in a health class last week).  Research topics are largely left to the individual researchers’ interests.  In other words, subject to contractual obligations around teaching, they mostly do what they want.  In most respects, they resemble a loosely connected set of independent contractors rather than actual employees.

Rather, what academics in Canada are actually complaining about when they talk about managerialism is three things:

1)      The existence (and growth) at universities of a class of managers that are almost as well paid as senior academics.  The fact that these people rarely impact the working life of academics is irrelevant; their mere presence is evidence of “managerialism”.

2)      The existence of apparently pointless bureaucracy around purchasing, reimbursement, and travel.  This annoyance is easy to understand, but it’s not clear to me that this problem is any worse at universities than it is at other organization of similar size.

3)      Meetings.  Lots and lots of meetings.  Yet the thing about meetings in universities is that they are rarely decision-making affairs.  More often than not, in fact, they are decision-retarding events (or possibly even decision-preventing events), whose purpose is more about consultation than administration.

In a real managerial university, courses would be ruthlessly overseen, if for no other reason than to ensure that classes met minimum enrolment counts.  In a real managerial university, individual professors’ research programs would be reviewed continuously in order to ensure that it was attracting maximum funding.  In a real managerial university, the managers would know where employees were from 9-5 every day. But almost none of that exists in Canada.  To really see that stuff you need to go to the UK or – to a lesser extent – Australia.

Professors are, of course, right to worry about managerialism, because UK universities sound pretty horrid.  But a dose of actual managerialism (as opposed to just having more meetings) probably wouldn’t hurt in Canadian universities – particularly when it comes to ensuring curriculum coherence and enforcing class-size minima.