Universities are a key industry

Goal of educating wise citizens should be spared the budget axe

In times of economic difficulty — like Thursday’s provincial budget — universities come under pressure. Finance Minister Doug Horner’s budget speech promised “over $2 billion in base operating grants in 2013-14,” but did not mention that this amounts to a 6.8-percent reduction.

Cuts to university funding will likely mean fewer programs and perhaps even fewer professors, while research must be commercialized to make up for the shortfall. Horner says, “We need to more closely align university research funding with the government’s economic diversification agenda.”

But a clarification is in order. The STEM (science, technology, engineering and medicine) disciplines are not likely to feel the budgetary pinch, because “this dynamic new direction” is supposed to produce “worldclass research in important fields like health, food safety, environment and energy,” and then “deliver that research to market.”

This ends up as a “oncein-a-generation restructuring” where we focus on core priorities.

Meanwhile, those disciplines known as the arts — history, anthropology, drama, literature, etc. — will likely find themselves increasingly outside this new mandate. They aren’t core priorities.

After all, in “challenging times” why should our province spend money on scholarship that doesn’t help us create jobs and foster economic growth?

That’s a good question, so let’s examine it for a moment. But hang on: how are we supposed to answer it?

It’s a “should” question — it’s about value — and “should” questions are not answered by techno-scientific innovation. The expertise of the STEM disciplines lies in discovering facts, but explicitly avoids issues of value and meaning.

Educated answers to big questions about social goals are one important service that universities provide Alberta with.

So if we want to know why we should focus academic research on getting jobs and making money, we need to rely on academic research that (supposedly) doesn’t help us get jobs and make money. That is, we also need research that can help us answer “should” questions.

So here’s a “should” question for Albertans, be they politicians, professors or private-sector employees: what value is there in thinking about things that (supposedly) don’t help us get jobs and money? Or further: should we, as a province, spend money on those things?

Interestingly enough, you already have an answer. If you have a job and make money, you use it to provide something else. You pay your bills, of course, and then you do all sorts of things in your spare time which probably don’t help you get a job or make money.

So what really interests you? What would you do if you had all the spare time and spare money in the world? Those things are valuable even if they don’t help you get a job or make more money.

When we consider the purpose of wealth and leisure, it becomes clear that some people want to study the STEM disciplines just for the sake of discovering the nature of the universe. Others might want to investigate the meaning of life or the things we do when we’re not working: big questions, value questions. Why are we here? Where are we going? How should we live? What aspects of our society should change?

These are fundamentally human questions that everybody will eventually ask, and this is what gets studied in arts faculties: the meaning of great literature and music, or the nature of being human, or how to logically evaluate competing arguments for a course of action, or how and why we ended up here, or how our minds work, or how our society compares to other societies, or what the purpose of science and technology should be.

Maybe, just maybe, we will want to continue generating leaders, politicians, entrepreneurs and voters who have an educated grasp of these fundamentally important issues. Especially if we expect them to make decisions about how our economy, province, nation and world should be.

The budget says “we can no longer proceed with ‘business as usual,’ ” but if we continue to prioritize STEM research without also funding research into the direction our province should take, then we are proceeding with more business as usual — more inability to respond to “should” questions.

Educated answers to big questions about social goals are one important service that universities — and particularly their arts programs — provide Alberta with.

They provide us with young graduates who have studied the human condition, the big ideas that have shaped the lives of millions through history, and have studied this in the context of a university, the place where for a thousand years ideas have been rationally produced and tested.

A university helps produce wise citizens and leaders. That’s an important industry. It’s something worth budgeting for.