Differentiated Visions: How Ontario Universities See and Represent Their Futures

Michael Buzzelli,Emmanuel Songsore

doi:10.7202/1086430ar

Abstract

This paper is concerned with long term strategic planning in higher education and focuses on Ontario’s strategic mandate agreement (SMA) sector planning framework. In 2012, the province initiated its new SMA planning process by requiring all higher education institutions to propose their own strategies for their academic visions, missions, and objectives. The proposals submitted by Ontario’s universities furnish the empirical content of this paper: a historically unique, comprehensive and comparable set of documents capturing institutions’ self-understanding and plans for their respective futures. Using concepts from organizational theory, content analysis of universities’ SMA proposals reveals divergent strategies, both in terms of institutional administrative responsiveness to the SMA process as well as the academic (i.e., education and scholarship) content of the submissions. In addition, two further sub-themes are analysed: proposals for experiential learning and so-called town-gown connections. Both themes also reveal very different visions amongst institutions. In general, the proposals appear to be independent of institution type and community size/location. Setting the stage for future research, the paper concludes with policy discussion of: (i) the possibilities for institutional diversity in the context of policy discourses on institutional differentiation; (ii) implications for system planning given the structure and process of Ontario’s ongoing SMA framework.

Highlights

In 2012, Ontario initiated its new Strategic Mandate Agreement system planning framework by requiring all higher education institutions (HEIs, including both colleges and universities) to articulate their own strategic plans
As with experiential learning (EL), capturing universities’ TG plans is important to identify where they stood in their commitment to changing definitions of university relevance and impact, as these may be imposed by a key external stakeholder through system-level planning
The principal methodological approach in this paper is a keyword in context (KWIC) analysis of the twenty strategic mandate agreement (SMA) proposals submitted to the province by each university

Summary

Introduction

In 2012, Ontario initiated its new Strategic Mandate Agreement system planning framework by requiring all higher education institutions (HEIs, including both colleges and universities) to articulate their own strategic plans. Universities’ responses, as seen through their own 2012 visioning documents, can be framed by two defining features of HEIs in Ontario: first, a high degree of historical autonomy from external influences; second, internal organizational complexity (Eastman et al, 2018; Manning, 2018; Scott, 2015). These defining features map onto what OT identifies as the distinct though potentially overlapping ‘cores’ or subsystems of the university: the administrative core, on the one hand, and the academic core on the other. As with EL, capturing universities’ TG plans is important to identify where they stood in their commitment to changing definitions of university relevance and impact, as these may be imposed by a key external stakeholder through system-level planning

Research Methodology

Findings

Conclusions and Discussion