Making hope possible rather than despair convincing: Possibilities and proposals to revitalize public serving universities in Canada

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