Guest Speaker, Dr. Glen Jones - Address to the Membership
The Annual General Meeting of the York University Retirees’ Association took place on Friday November 1st, 2024, with Dr. Glen Jones as the guest speaker.
Dr. Glen A. Jones is a leading Professor of Higher Education, and former dean of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. He holds the Ontario Research Chair in Postsecondary Education Policy and Measurement, and he is the Director of the Centre for the Study of Canadian and International Higher Education.
Dr. Jones is a past president of the Canadian Society for the Study of Higher Education and a former editor of the Canadian Journal of Higher Education. He has held visiting professorships in several countries and has received numerous honours, including the Distinguished Research Award from the Canadian Society for the Study of Higher Education in 2001 and their Distinguished Member Award in 2011. He is regarded as a leader in education with considerable insight on both the current state and future direction of higher education in Canada, North America and beyond.
More complete biographical notes about Dr. Jones are available by clicking here.
Summary of Dr. Jones’ address: The Challenges and Possibilities for Higher Education in Canada—the Future is not what it used to be.
Dr. Jones gave a sweeping yet detailed overview of higher education in Canada and speculated about possible future developments ---all the while recognizing that predictions often miss the mark and might even limit our capacity to imagine a better future. Using an engaging technique and wry wit, he invited YURA members to reflect on how, in the past, they used to imagine the future of higher education in Canada. With this, he set the stage for looking at how our vision of the future has shifted in the past three decades since the early 1990’s. He then organized his talk around four key areas that present both challenges and opportunities in the coming years.
The first area, building on the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, has become more central to discussions and actions in Higher Education, and has implications for teaching, research, social work, languages and cultures and law and justice. Dr. Jones noted the increase in the number of Indigenous institutions and the increasing number of partnerships with “traditional institutions”, and outlined the possibility that Indigenous approaches to self-governance might inspire a reconsideration of community relationships and engagement within universities.
He then turned to the areas of education/teaching and research, the traditional “core functions” of universities. With respect to the specific context of Ontario, he noted the high participation rates, the recurring funding crisis, and in recent years, a “blurring” of the distinctions between the Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology (CAATS) and the Universities, with the CAATS, since the early 2000’s, starting to award applied degrees (rather than diplomas), to have an applied research function and to award applied master’s degrees. With the university sector, he noted that research intensity and ranking exercises (both nationally and internationally) lead to increasing status differences and increasing quality differences among institutions.
For the final area, that of internationalization, he used the classic definition provided by Jane Knight of internationalization as the process of integrating an intercultural, global dimension into the purpose, functions or delivery of higher education. He observed that very rapidly, in Canada we have moved from internationalizing the curriculum and promoting student mobility, to a heavy reliance on international students as a major source of revenue and as a domain for forming future citizens.
The ensuing discussion focused on the possible role of higher education in forming future citizens, the seeming increasing divergence between the CAATS and universities rather than partnerships, and the ethical questions that are inherent in each of the four areas discussed. In sum, the presentation by Dr. Glen Jones was engaging, informative and thought-provoking.
The AGM Business Meeting
Following Dr. Jones' talk, which concluded with several interesting questions and answers, there was a half-hour lunch break before the annual business meeting of the Association was called into session by Co-President (non-academic), Steve Dranitsaris. A link to the AGM agenda, minutes of the 2023 AGM and 2023-2024 reports can be found below.
57 YURA members attended the Association’s business meeting portion of the AGM: 41 in-person and 16 online.