Experiential Learning for All! An Institutional Analysis of How University Administrators Responded to the Ontario Government’s Call to Action
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Governments in Western liberal democracies, such as Ontario, have increasingly used policy tools to influence university priorities and actions, despite the literature suggesting that policy tools are limited in their ability to shift institutional behaviour. As institutional theory posits, institutions require legitimacy to remain prominent in society and they may respond to government policy tools in superficial ways that mask non-compliance. Universities are autonomous institutions rooted in their small, liberal arts traditions and structures of decentralization, collegial governance, and academic freedom, and this institutional context makes institutional change difficult. This study explores the gap between the intention of government policy tools and their implementation by institutions. By leveraging the Ontario government’s experiential learning (EL) call to action in 2016-2019, a multi-case study design is used to explore how five universities interpreted and responded to the government’s EL call, as a way to explore this gap between policy tool goals and institutional responses. In particular, this study focuses on the experience of 21 university administrators who sit below the President and Provost, and at the juncture of strategy and implementation (i.e. Vice-Provosts, Assistance Vice-Provosts, Directors, Managers, and Registrars) to explore how administrators balance government calls for accountability and transparency with university structures and cultures. Using theoretical and conceptual constructs from institutional theory, this study contributes to our understanding of policy tools and institutional change by highlighting characteristics of the political and institutional contexts that influence institutional actions. First, the findings suggest that a process of layering is occurring, where the Ontario government is arguably introducing new priorities without the authority to replace existing structures and priorities. Second, the findings highlight the role of central university administrators as rule facilitators—critical actors who work with their institutional structures and cultures to respond to government policy tools in ways that maximize institutional legitimacy. Lastly, the findings echo existing propositions in the literature that suggest there is a relationship between alignment and compliance, where government policy tools that do not align with institutional priorities encourage strategic responses that mask non-compliance.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
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".