Making hope possible rather than despair convincing: Possibilities and proposals to revitalize public serving universities in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Writing this paper has been difficult.Since drafting the first of its many versions, I have been unable to commit to a position on the question of hope for Canada's public serving universities.On the one hand, I believe strongly in the public service mission and potential of our universities.On the other hand, I despair of the abhorrent past of these institutions and of the continued and intensifying corporatization of them (Brownlee, 2015;Hampton, 2016; Thobani, 2021).As I cannot, in good conscience, make an unequivocal case either for hope or for despair, I have opted instead to try to "make hope possible rather than despair convincing" by providing three reasons to believe that the public serving nature of our universities can be preserved.These are some recent hopeful developments in our universities, persisting features of our universities that can give us hope, and a more hopeful and potentially more fruitful approach to renewing our universities' public service.I offer these reasons not to convince readers that the future of our public serving universities' is assured, but to cultivate hope that this can still be achieved and, thereby, stimulate the reflection, discussion, and action that are needed to make this happen.At the outset, I emphasize that when referring to "preserving our public serving universities," I am speaking specifically about resisting and reversing their increasingly corporate nature.While it is absolutely the case that for our universities to be truly public serving we need also to overcome their colonial, racist, and sexist natures, I do not directly address these aspects of our universities here.This is due in part to limitations of space.It is due also to my conviction that unless we also transform the corporate nature of our universities, these other liberatory projects will be diminished, if not neutralized or undermined. 1 There are at least two recent developments in our universities that can provide some hope-and leverage-for the struggle against corporatization.First is the burgeoning wellness movement on campuses across Canada and elsewhere.This involves the production and resourcing of a broad
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.018 | 0.030 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.040 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.028 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.021 | 0.017 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".