praise for
Degrees of Failure

Most students today have given up on the utopian dreams of earlier generations and now simply seek certification in order to gain access to what are often disappointing, precarious jobs. This, in turn, has meant deteriorating working conditions for professors, researchers, and instructors whose hopes for critical thinking and creativity in their classrooms have largely been replaced by pragmatism, fierce individualism, and efficiency. Under these circumstances, Randle Nelsen advocates for innovative approaches to higher education, replacing schooling with education and credentialism with critical thinking and analysis. For Nelsen, it’s time to re-embrace creativity and return to the promise of C.W. Mills’ sociological imagination.

—Norene Pupo, professor of sociology, York University

A thought-provoking analysis of the post-secondary education system in North America. Randy Nelsen blends personal experience in the sector with wide-reading and critical research to reflect on the impact of commercialization, technology, and an increasingly managerial culture on the traditional goals of universities in developing and fostering the exchange of knowledge. He makes a convincing argument that these might be reclaimed by prioritizing the interests of students, through problem-based learning, and by closer engagement with the wider community.

—Stephen McBride, professor of political science, McMaster University, and author of Working? Employment Policy in Canada

Having written about higher education since before most current students’ parents were students themselves, Nelsen brings a much needed long memory to the work of identifying and understanding the key socio-historical trends shaping higher education. For students, professors, staff, or anyone interested in ensuring quality education within our post-secondary institutions, this new book is unsettling.

—Scott Thompson, assistant professor of sociology, University of Saskatchewan

Once again Nelsen has outdone himself. Not only is this text accessible, he keeps it pertinent in the academic sense as he methodically carves the university and college system into its multi-faceted business-based pieces. He has put into print what I have believed for years as I have watched my universities treat me like a consumer instead of a student, and then as a “checkout boy” instead of a teacher. This work stands as, not a cry, but a scream for change, and I hope it fuels the debate to an explosive end.

—Dr. Stephen E. Bosanac, Department of Sociology, York University

As universities tempt potential students and donors with glossy marketing tools and pundits suggest that youth without degrees have bleak futures, Randle Nelsen warns that higher education today is “a morbid mess.” Fundamental educational practices have come to be displaced by priorities associated with business and commodified entertainment. Despite what has been lost, however, Nelsen reminds us that genuine education possibilities can be sustained by drawing upon transformative pedagogical practices that engage participants.

—Terry Wotherspoon, Department of Sociology, University of Saskatchewan

DEGREES OF
FAILURE

University Education
in Decline

Randle W. Nelsen

Between the Lines
Toronto

Degrees of Failure: University Education in Decline

© 2017 Randle W. Nelsen

First published in Canada in 2017 by

Between the Lines

401 Richmond St. W., Studio 281

Toronto, Ontario M5V 3A8

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be photocopied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of Between the Lines, or (for photocopying in Canada only) Access Copyright, 56 Wellesley Street West, Suite 320, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 2S3.

Every reasonable effort has been made to identify copyright holders. Between the Lines would be pleased to have any errors or omissions brought to its attention.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Nelsen, Randle W., author

Degrees of failure: university education in decline / Randle W. Nelsen.

Includes index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77113-334-0 (softcover). – ISBN 978-1-77113-335-7 (EPUB).
– ISBN 978-1-77113-336-4 (PDF)

1. Education, Higher. I. Title.

Cover design, cover illustration by Maggie Earle
Text design and page preparation by Steve Izma

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing activities: the Government of Canada; the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country; and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Arts Council, the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Once again I have been fortunate to have Robert Clarke agree to be my editor. As I have noted before, “Rob truly is the writer behind the writer.” His organizational skills and knack for stating things clearly and concisely offer a role model for me and other writers, especially those of an academic bent, to emulate. His talented persistence in getting it right always makes my work better. I am indeed thankful that, amidst carefully considered plans to scale back his busy editing schedule and devote more time to his own research and writing projects, Rob found time to edit this volume. Thanks, Rob.

I once again counted on Steve Izma to do his usual superior job of text design and page preparation. He managed to work me into his busy schedule in a timely manner. Thanks, Steve.

I want to give special acknowledgement to the efforts of Between the Line’s managing editor, Amanda Crocker, who gave strong support to this project. I very much appreciated the effectiveness and dispatch with which she tackled problems and cleared the way for this book’s publication. Her pleasing disposition and solid efficiency were also to be found in abundance among all the BTL staff, who as a group took away my production worries and replaced them with supportive confidence. It has been a pleasure to work with you, and I thank you all.

Finally, I recognize that it would be extremely difficult to acknowledge everyone who has contributed something to the ideas and analysis found in this book. My thoughts on many of the matters discussed have been developing for half a century, and the probability of leaving out important contributors runs high. However, I do want to offer a general acknowledgement to those close to me for their loving support and inspiration, for the foundation they provided. To my friends and family in Hamilton, Thunder Bay, Montreal, Portland, and elsewhere, while I have not named you individually, please be assured that this book could not have been completed without you by my side. Thanks for your unwavering support and for having my back.

R.W. Nelsen, May 2017

ONE

The University from the
Inside-Out

Thoughts of a Participant Observer

The state of higher education today is in a morbid mess. Our colleges and universities are edubusiness corporations that operate on business principles and are managed by administrators who serve the interests of wealthy capitalists. Yet this world of corporate higher education – constructed by the rich, who disguise their interests as philanthropy – is by no means a recent phenomenon. Its history has unfolded in the United States and Canada over the past two-hundred-plus years. The consequences are many and varied, and all participants, regardless of their position within or connection to the university hierarchy – faculty, students, parents, support staff and/or service workers, and even administrators themselves – pay the price.

Members of university faculties are increasingly attuned to the reward structure sponsored by the philanthropists, who treat the teaching staff as lobbyists who can be bought and sold. As faculty members chase after privatized research funding and government-sponsored grants, they accordingly reduce the amount of time spent on classroom preparation and being present in the classroom. The emphasis in their work is necessarily on research. The consultant-grants-person professors have little opportunity to model scholarly curiosity and inquiry; the students are left with a professorial model of vapid professionalism buttressed by high-tech electronic-based learning that helps ensure a classroom experience that reproduces rather than challenges status quo arrangements.

For the most part, the students are not to blame for this mess. They are its unfortunate victims or casualties. Just to adapt and survive they have to rationally shift their own thinking and priorities. They tend to view themselves as consumers of education who are seeking certification legitimacy by obtaining academic degrees and professional licences to practise. For many students, emulating their professor role models, the university system has become a game to be beaten or scammed; more traditional scholarly orientation gives way to jumping educational hurdles not unlike the challenges of the various levels in the video games they have grown up with. The high-tech classroom becomes just another part of the students’ immersion in the familiar world of electronic social media. It is a learning environment that greases the slide into edutainment and away from scholarship.

Parents join students in the practical understanding that certification through higher education is an expensive and time-consuming process. With tuition fees and the general cost of living (room, board, and other expenses) rising, many students are forced to work part-time, a lesser number full-time, and almost all parents are called upon to contribute financially in some way. Most significantly, parents are justifiably worried about their children’s futures in a struggling economy that features the uncertainty of precarious labour. Some parents (referred to as “helicopter parents”) become overprotective as they try to chaperone their children through this certification process, often causing increased anxiety and strain on both parties, as well as leading to unnecessary classroom protections that hinder scholarly exchange and further emphasize the edutainment aspect of higher education.

Administrators, continually on the prowl for more funding to do their benefactors’ bidding, contribute to creating the edutainment learning environment. Big-time college sports play an outsized role in attracting alumni and wealthy benefactor dollars, and I outline in some detail how this has worked out at the University of Oregon. Administrators at various major universities not only oversee but encourage the party atmosphere of game-day Saturdays with their attendant tailgates as the party moves from the playing fields and stadium parking lots to classrooms grounded on edutainment. At the same time they are overseeing the cutting of full-time faculty positions alongside a dramatic rise in the use and abuse of part-time sessional faculty. Meanwhile the ranks of administrators charged with recruiting funds and various bookkeeping tasks continue to grow.

Somewhat bizarrely in this world of supposed higher learning, its members – students, teachers, parents, university support staff, and service workers – have at least one thing in common: cars and the need for a valid parking sticker that allows for easy access to and exit from today’s increasingly commuter-oriented institutions. With all the off-campus jobs, the need for classroom attendance (when classes are not online), and research and funding recruitment appointments, the necessarily frequent trips back and forth to the college or university learning boutique are not unlike consumer activity at the nearby shopping centre or mall. A road-worthy car and a space to conveniently park it are essential elements of the educational environment. The automobile is also the centrepiece for the tailgate parties accompanying the college sports spectacles that are an integral part of higher education’s edutainment focus. With the tailgates and campus commutes as obvious examples, automobility and today’s universities become “third places” tightly connected to the two other social spaces that are primary to all of us: family and work.

If the automobile is a key technology in college and university learning experiences, computer-based electronic-learning technology is another – something that has reshaped the classroom and scholarship in general in its image. In the movement towards computer-mediated online education at a distance, the institution where I teach, Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, with the sociology department as a case in point, provides several examples of what has been transpiring in this regard.

While the increasing power of electronic-based social media to shape and control our lives extends beyond the university, it is the learning context of the classroom that especially interests me. Indeed, to a certain extent social media is a misnomer. Often these media can be characterized as anti-social, and perhaps undemocratic as well. For instance, Sherry Turkle, a clinical psychologist and professor of the social studies of science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), argues that computer technology, rather than bringing us together, is making us “alone together,” and she urges us to reclaim conversation, to save it from the technology to which we have become addicted.¹ Scholarship is certainly a social activity – or at least it should be – and Turkle’s work has important ramifications and implications when it comes to organizing the university classroom as a learning environment.

How, then, can we go about reorganizing and reshaping college classrooms in order to make them more user-friendly? And by “user-friendly” I mean everything from architectural design to, most especially, the development of course content with students included in the planning process as a top priority – basically, a student-centred as opposed to the teacher-or professor-centred approach that continues to be dominant in universities (with classrooms organized to service the desires, needs, and interests of the professors). One first step is to make storytelling a major focal point in reconstructing the classroom environment. An emphasis on sharing and learning from each other’s stories can provide a learning context that is less structured by bureaucratic authority relations and can introduce more opportunities for the classroom to be student-centred. The classroom becomes open to the wider community outside the university, and the wider community to the university. Storytelling can form an effective combination with project work: that is, student projects or research work that go beyond the standard library-oriented term paper and reach out to contact and connect university classrooms with members of the surrounding community. A user-friendly classroom would have the additional advantage of reducing the dependence on technology. Storytelling and other possibilities emphasize the importance of returning to more in-person instruction in a classroom in which learners can meet regularly face to face, preferably in a seminar format – an arrangement that has several advantages over, and is superior to, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS), which, at many colleges and universities, have been fast-tracked as the preferred method of instruction to be celebrated in our electronic age.

Storytelling as a primary focus in our university classrooms not only brings history into our contextual understandings but also, in so doing, encourages us to think of our present circumstances in terms of the legacy that we will leave future generations. Storytelling also puts a premium upon listening skills, something that today’s students and all of us, in an age of preoccupation with rapid-fire social media and the assertion of self, need to work on developing and refining. Stories can help to create an atmosphere in which diversity and inclusion are not only tolerated but encouraged.

In all of this we have much to learn from Indigenous peoples and their oral culture of storytelling. As Naomi Klein outlines in her book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, Indigenous experiences reveal tried and true ways of creating and sustaining a more just and environmentally sustainable society.² Storytelling can be very powerful, with a great potential for helping to initiate social change. The advantages of storytelling in a seminar format will stay with our college and university students long after they graduate. I hope that this book might occasion reflection upon how to safeguard, nurture, and use our stories. They offer building blocks for reflection, adaption, and change, providing opportunities to consider and create improved alternatives to what is.

On Method: Interpretation, C. Wright Mills, and Stories

Social analysis – like storytelling – involves interpretation. This book contains material that sociologists might label and refer to as “hard data,” along with references to academic books and journals. It also contains references to informed journalism in popular literary and current affairs magazines that I find helpful in exploring the connections between individual consciousness and collective social arrangements – or in considering the affinity between ideas and socio-historical trends in higher education. Like other social analysts, I draw upon my own experience, in this case fifty-five years of university experience as a student, both undergraduate and graduate, and professor. As a result the book contains elements of what today’s students of sociology and cultural studies would call “autoethnography” as I examine and interpret several events by weaving together autobiography and social context.³ Given my familiarity with the terrain of sociology, my critique of professionals and their training as experts often features that discipline as “a whipping boy,” as exemplifying the deleterious consequences of a corporatized and professionalized higher learning. Yet my goal always is to fulfill what C. Wright Mills called the “task” and “promise” of “the sociological imagination [that] enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society.”⁴

Crucial in the development of this imagination is interpretation. Because we humans are social animals who weave complex and complicated connections and relationships, interpretation is always at the centre of analyses of our social interactions. Furthermore, the interconnections between people’s ideas and their social arrangements indicate that many questions and issues of concern to social analysts cannot be answered by studies where “the details are piled up with insufficient attention to form,” what Mills called “abstracted empiricism.”⁵ For sociologists and others in the social sciences, the details or “facts” are social, which means that they come to social investigators already interpreted. Analysts then, whether or not they self-identify as scientists, are faced with accepting the analytic reality that they, like the individuals and groups they study, live in a socio-historical institutional framework with others rather than in another and different world of abstractions. In addition, control by the analyst, even when it is desired, over the social groups and data that make up our subject matter is always problematic. Control over our data can never be complete – a point that is similar and connectible to a key argument in this book: namely, that the best way to reorganize our classrooms in order to create a more hospitable and effective learning environment is to give up a sizeable measure of professorial control.

When ethnography and social analysis meet and inform each other, as I hope is the case here, interpretation is both informed by and deeply reliant on memory; and memories are often imperfect. Memory is “a holding cell,” a phrase that Canadian humorist and award-winning novelist Will Ferguson employs to describe the recollections of individuals.⁶ It is a phrase that can also be applied to cultural subgroups and whole cultures as a description of communal, or collective, recollections. Memory and interpretation are both closely connected to ideology, a term that is used not only in reference to individuals, often to address the “false consciousness” of those who are not aware of their true role, but also to signify the consciousness of an epoch. My analytic focus here is on indicating our epoch’s limitations, the manner in which social interaction is imposed and regulated by the affinity between thought forms and social structure with regard to higher education. I take my lead from renowned linguist and social justice activist Noam Chomsky, who writes about the connection between science and ideology and the ever-present potential for one to turn into the other: “When we consider the responsibility of intellectuals, our basic concern must be their role in the creation and analysis of ideology.”⁷

Ideology, then, can be correctly viewed as having a reciprocal effect as it moves between and is influenced by human interactions that connect people and issues both to the larger social context and to the collective consciousness of those working within specific academic disciplines such as sociology and history. Thus, philosophers of science speak about and examine an ideology of science, and similarly sociologists have a branch specialization known as the sociology of sociology – a subfield that informs some of my commentary in the following pages. The well-known work of Thomas Kuhn is relevant as he speaks to how prevailing paradigms in academic fields are shaped and shifted, a social process that eventually reaches a tipping point whereby practitioners achieve a consensus on a new paradigm that replaces the old.⁸ Ideology, interpretation, sociology, and, of course, the structural relations of power – all play their parts as we go about the daily business of deconstructing and reconstructing the “facts,” discourses, and interpretations that form the basis of our understandings. The metahistory work of historian Hayden White also frames my thinking regarding method and approaches: White examines how we employ different modes of emplotment, argument, and ideological implication in constructing the narratives of our lives individually and collectively.⁹

In living my life, and especially in my role as an analyst, I attempt to recognize and acknowledge the ways in which ideological underpinnings may combine with cultural discourses (academic paradigms included) in the developing narratives I construct. The kind of sociology I do, the present work included, has always leaned towards the historical and what I consider the most primary and demanding task of unmasking complex relations of power. Over the years I have found that literature and a kind of investigative journalism, in the tradition of muckrakers such as Ida M. Tarbell and Upton Sinclair, are complementary fields that often provide keen sociological insights.¹⁰ The infamous Chicago School of Sociology that emerged during the 1920s and 1930s owes a good part of its foundation and notoriety to former journalist-turned-sociologist Robert Park. This school produced several well-known participant-observation studies that share the same spirit with and are in part forerunners of today’s autoethnographies.¹¹ The best work in this tradition gives due consideration to both structure and agency. Like history written from the bottom up, it attempts to uncover the standpoints of all the actors, regardless of their position in the structures of authority and power. The goal is to reveal as much as possible about their structural positioning and the values, beliefs, and motives that, taken together, show where they stand in the confluence of personal concerns and social issues. Relevant background interests and biographical information revealing the standpoint of the social analyst should also be part of the analysis. In trying to construct my version of standpoint analysis, I take my lead from Dorothy E. Smith, who, in several writings elaborating upon her creation of “standpoint sociology,” advocates practising a sociological analysis that draws upon and reaffirms the experiences of women.¹²

Mills and the sociological analyses he constructs can also help us to gain further insights regarding the effectiveness of combining sociology and journalism in the art of storytelling. In the latter part of his short career, prior to his untimely death in 1964, Mills turned more and more towards journalistic storytelling in applying his sociological sensibilities and talents to pressing social issues. His wisdom and warnings are to be found in books such as The Causes of World War Three and Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba. In Listen, Yankee he wrote and spoke from his travel and living experiences in Cuba about the revolution there as well as revealing to Americans, for those who cared to listen, the complicated and ongoing struggles of all the Latin American countries in general. In doing so Mills never lost sight of what was in his view “perhaps the most fruitful distinction with which the sociological imagination works” – the distinction between “the personal troubles of milieu” and “the public issues of social structure.”¹³ He argued that classical sociologists have left us a tradition demanding that intellectual problems be made relevant to the public issues of the times and the private troubles of individual men and women: the “sociological imagination” they practised “enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society.”¹⁴ My hope is that this book will help readers carry this approach further with respect to higher education in Canada and the United States.

TWO

Campus Parking and the Car as a Third Place

Asphalt Grievances and Commuter Sociability

In 1964 – more than fifty years ago – Clark Kerr, as chancellor of the massive University of California system, described the growth of the modern multiversity as “a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking.”¹ Although Kerr undoubtedly meant his statement to be humorous, today it is well past time to remove tongue from cheek when it comes to parking and day-to-day university life. Parking has become a, some would say the, major policy item in university planning. While it might seem odd or almost out of place to begin a book on higher education with a chapter about cars, the issues of automobility and colleges/universities – and especially on-campus parking, both the lack and expansion of it – are inextricably linked.² Not surprisingly to university insiders, “parking space” and accessibility – as we will see in the examples of three Canadian schools – play a significant role in negotiations with regard to faculty recruitment, promotion, and even retention.

Parking at McMaster, York, and Lakehead

Not so long ago a department chair at McMaster University was moved into a more senior administrative position.³ A key negotiating piece brought to the table for this promotion was that the offer, if accepted, would guarantee the professor a conveniently located, always-available on-campus parking spot. There was none of the usual quibbling over salary, proposed occasional teaching assignments, or any other perks – only parking, in this case with a capital P. The professor, I have since discovered, was simply taking a page out of the university president’s book. One of the few committees on which the president sits is the university’s parking committee.

McMaster, founded in 1887 in Toronto through a bequest from the estate of businessman-banker Senator William McMaster, is located in Hamilton, Ontario, a city of over half-a-million residents that more than doubles in size when you take the population of the surrounding metropolitan area into account. The university is about an hour’s bus ride from downtown Toronto, where it was first located before moving to Hamilton in 1930. Its population of some 30,000 students (approximately three times the number in place when I first enrolled in 1970) includes about 3,700 students living on campus in twelve residences. The remaining students, close to 88 per cent of the total, can therefore be placed in the category of commuters. Some 1,400 members of the academic staff and nearly 6,500 support workers add to the mix – and the majority of them do not use public transportation. Furthermore, with the McMaster campus being decidedly more urban than rural, situated on only 152.4 hectares or 377 acres of land, parking space is at a premium. A valid campus parking sticker is clearly an important item.

In this competition for scarce spaces, the campus has more than twenty parking lots, with several of them located across a thoroughfare adjacent to the central campus – a distance great enough to call for the use of a shuttle bus. In 2015 the cost for a preferred non-commercial spot ran as high as $101 a month (HST included), although for the shuttle-bus sites the price could go down to $48 per month. If you had a motorcycle that you wanted to park, you were in luck at just $17 a month. If you participated in night-time intramural sports, your basketball jones could cost you $7 an outing if you wanted to park on campus. Better to buy a motorcycle or a scooter; it might be cheaper in the long run. As these figures indicate, financial means (the ability to pay beyond car payments, maintenance, and insurance bills), typically limited for most students, is an important sorting mechanism in determining who gets to claim a desirable on-campus parking spot. But when you have money combined with the pull of rank and status inside the institution, the task of finding a berth for your ride is greatly facilitated. Our newly appointed administrator definitely had his priorities in proper order and followed a negotiating strategy that served well in this regard.

Just up from the Queen Elizabeth Way (QEW) at York University, the situation is even more grim and alarming. The school’s size and location are issues here. With some 53,000 students and 7,000 faculty and administrative staff, York is the third-largest university in Canada, behind the University of Toronto (U of T) and the University of British Columbia (UBC). Founded in 1959 and part of the Canadian postwar boom in higher education, the university opened in September 1960 on the U of T campus. It moved to its own campus, Glendon College on Bayview Ave., the next year and from there expanded, a few years later, to what would be its main campus on Keele St. in far-off North York. With a large number and variety of facilities and buildings – its York Lanes shopping mall and an array of medical services, banking, clothing, eateries, and many other options, combined with the huge population of students and university employees served – the Keele Campus became an entity resembling a mid-size city. Based on 2011 statistics on Ontario’s fifty cities, the Keele Campus city and associated locations would rank in the middle, around number 28 – a mid-sized city with the bonus of a reasonably well-stocked academic bookstore.

The Keele Campus’s 457 acres make it the largest post-secondary campus in Canada. Its eight undergraduate residences each house about 250 students, for a total of 2,000. Several smaller apartment complexes accommodate others. The old Glendon Campus has two residences, Hilliard and Wood, which between them have 400 beds. Accounting for some inaccuracies and incomplete data as to exactly how many people reside on-campus at York, a reasonable estimate would be that only about 7 per cent of the total student body lives there, with the other 93 per cent left to figure out how to get there and back. York is, then, a classic commuter university, with fierce competition and long waiting lists for the approximately 9,200 parking spaces provided by the university. Those spaces have various designations and benefits: reserved, unreserved, day or evening (or a combination of the two), outdoor or garage. In 2014, depending on availability, a driver could spend up to $1,676.69 (HST included) for a year’s worth of garage parking. That would be top dollar. From there prices descended to $1,453.63 for day/ evening unreserved, and further down to the lowest mad-scramble unreserved price of $989.88 for those able to arrange all-evening class schedules. Here again, motorcycle ownership along with answered prayers for a mild winter might serve budget-strapped students well, because in that case reserved parking spaces could be had for just a little more, $1,065.82. Yet, just as at McMaster, the availability of preferred parking trumps the ability to pay, and waiting lists have become routine standard operating procedure.

Much, much further away – by some 1,378 kilometres or 856 miles – is Thunder Bay, Northwestern Ontario’s regional metropolitan centre with a population of more than 120,000. This is the city where I spent thirty-five years as a professor at Lakehead University, a relatively small school. When I first arrived in 1976, parking was free and the undergraduate population was somewhere around 2,500, with those ranks supplemented by 100 or so graduate students and plenty of part-time evening students. The latter were mostly school teachers seeking courses for further certification (a search that would later be government-mandated) to ensure jobs and move them up the salary grid. By the time I retired in 2011 Lakehead had 8,680 students, with 7,042 registered as full-time. The Lakehead teaching staff numbered 319 full-time faculty, supported by 1,850 staff, with 715 of those holding full-time positions. The campus in Thunder Bay had accommodations for 1,436 students to reside on campus. (The university also has a mainly-commuter branch plant located in Orillia, closer to Toronto.) On-campus residents, then, comprised only somewhere between 16 and 17 per cent of the school’s students, making Lakehead yet another commuter university.

Still, its smaller size and a large amount of land available for parking space – a manageable walking distance from central university buildings – make Lakehead University different from McMaster and York. Another important difference is that Thunder Bay’s public transportation system is nowhere near as extensive or efficient as the public mass-transit systems found in Southern Ontario. Wait times are longer, as are many of the meandering routes that lead to the university. Students and some faculty do use public transport, but as an irregular user I found that driving a car to campus is preferable. A missed connection and a twenty-minute wait in the frigid –30 to –35°C temperatures of mid-January are nobody’s idea of a picnic. Also, the parking fees are a bargain compared to the fee structures of the universities to the south. At Lakehead in 2015 a spot in one of the R (reserved) lots could be had for $348 (HST included) for twelve months, or $232 for the fall-winter academic year (relatively few courses are offered in the spring-summer sessions). Reserved permit holders do not have to worry about queuing if they find no spot immediately available because they can just move over to one of the many other spaces always available in the lower-priced G (general) parking areas ($264 full-year or $176 academic-year), which are also within easy walking distance of the university facilities.