One Thought to Start Your Day

NOVEMBER 4, 2024 | ALEX USHER

Technically, I am using the term incorrectly. When Cory Doctorow first coined the term, he talked about specifically as something that internet platforms use to lock in users (and in some cases distributors as well) and then gradually start increasing the prices and making the service worse in order to ramp up profits. Remember what uber used to cost? Remember when streaming services didn’t have ads? Yeah. That.

When I use the term, I am not talking about anyone using quasi-monopoly power to drive down quality and raise prices (I mean, come on, the problem stems first and foremost from the fact that universities are being forbidden to raise prices). No, what I am talking about is the process of everything slowly, quietly, and inexorably being made worse. Obviously, it is a term I use in respect to certain specific governments (mainly but not exclusively Ontario), who want the system to starve.

Look, we all know that universities and colleges do a lot of stuff that they don’t need to be doing. Many, many Deans at large universities have spent the last decade or so replicating central university structures at the faculty level in fields as varied as Finance, IT, Student Services, Communications and Fund Raising. At a certain level, you can justify all of this as being a matter of “improving service,” bringing all these services as it does closer to the level of individual students, professors, and units. But at another level, it’s an obvious duplication, a place where we need to ask, university-wide, how many of these positions do we really need? How many can be shared, merged or done away with altogether? A refusal to answer this question honestly is what leads to enshittification. So let’s try to answer it, a bit at least.

A colleague of mine at a U15 university noted to me recently that an Australian university which his university uses as a benchmark (similar size, mandate, and level of prestige) employs only one-sixth as many people in accounts payable as his does. Why and how? It comes down to i) process management ii) investments in automation and iii) not duplicating work or processes all over the damn place.

Some people are obviously going to hate this, even if in many cases it leads to better service on campus both because it means headcount reductions and because process re-engineering is inherently difficult and time consuming. There will be resistance (there certainly was at U Alberta). But the trade-off is this: you can spend money on duplicative/inefficient services, or you can spend it on core academic activities, whatever they may be. Institutions that choose to maintain duplicative/inefficient services are, by definition, choosing enshittification.

(Note: sharing or merging services doesn’t necessarily mean full centralization. A couple of years ago, the University of Alberta took a lot of this stuff from its mindboggling eighteen faculties and put it into three big bundles, one each to serve colleges in Arts/Social Science, Science/Engineering and Health. Last I checked, they saved a lot of money by doing so, and the university’s services are not notably worse for wear, given the size of the cuts the institution was required to absorb). This won’t be an option for all institutions, but any institution with more than 20,000 students and ten faculties need to at least consider this path).

Now I say “core” academic activities because we all know—even if no one wants to say it out loud—that not all academic activities are core. Institutions need to know where their strengths are and invest accordingly. I know of one university in this country (not a particularly wealthy one, I might add) that maintained a Music department in which for many years the staff complement outnumbered program majors. I am a big believer in cross-subsidization of programs—that is one of the core functions of a university or college, after all—but this is absurd. Maintaining departments like this—no matter how lovely the staff are—it is not harmless. Using institutional resources to keep departments like this alive deprives every other discipline and service at the institution. Or, to put it another way, it is a classic way to choose enshittifcation.

To be absolutely clear: not all small departments should be considered non-core. That would be ridiculous. But if they aren’t covering their costs by attracting majors, they had better be delivering a serious amount of value through phenomenal amounts of service teaching or through their research and community engagement activities. It is of course up to each institution how to define what “core” means and what the balance between financial and non-financial considerations is in determining core status. But a refusal to be honest about determining core/non-core, or worse, determining core/non-core in a less-than-objective or inconsistent way, is again a way of choosing enshittification.

As you can see, avoiding enshittification is a difficult business. As in any organization, universities are going to contain any number of interests who will fight attempts to focus spending strategically. This is true of colleges, too, but universities are a structural disadvantage in two ways. First, they usually have collective agreements which make it very difficult to get rid of employees on a department-by-department level (it is possible abolish programs, usually following a vastly over-wrought process and in which institution usually need to keep paying staff for anything up to about two years, but often they are forced to relieve people of duties in reverse order of seniority, which is the exact opposite of anything that makes sense in a financial emergency). Second, the common understanding of collegiality in Canadian universities requires academics to extend an “I’m OK, you’re OK” attitude to scholars in other disciplines, which makes it impossible for them to ever agree to make comparisons across fields, which is deeply inconvenient if an institution needs to make serious decisions about what to offer and not offer (this is, in fact, the precise reason no one ever asks Senates to be responsible for cuts: they are temperamentally unsuited to do it). These are both powerful forces that push universities towards solutions which involve equal across-the-board cuts and as-minimal-as-possible adjustments to programming and staffing. In an era of stable or growing resources, these forces would be merely unfortunate: in an era of diminishing resources, they are literally a recipe for enshittifcation.

This is why enshittification is undoubtedly how many institutions will choose to get through the coming carnage: it is, in the short-term, the path of least resistance. In that sense at least, it is a strategic choice. But it is only a good strategic choice if the institution has no long-term goals that involve differentiation or excellence and mere survival with a minimum of fuss is all that matters. But if an institution does have such goals, then genteel impecunity/gradual enshittification makes no sense—better by far to protect and even increase investments in the areas that matter, whatever those happen to be.

But by their deeds you shall know them: we’ll see over the next few years which institutions have intelligible long-term strategies that drive strategic investments come hell or high-water and which just want to survive with as little change as possible. I’d like to think the former will outnumber the latter, but it may be a near-run thing.