A. Arvast / The New CAAT 105 CSSHE SCÉES Canadian Journal of Higher Education Revue canadienne d’enseignement supérieur Volume 38, No. 1, 2008, pages 105-121 www.ingentaconnect.com/content/csshe/cjhe The New CAAT: (Dis)illusions of Freedom and the New College Charter in Ontario Anita Arvast Georgian College ABSTRACT In 2002 a new Ontario college charter signaled a new era for higher education in Ontario. The charter was presumed to usher in a new way of doing higher education, one that provided greater freedom for Ontario colleges and presumably greater access for communities to higher education. Coupled with the Post-Secondary Choice and Excellence Act of 2000, which provided colleges the opportunity to offer degrees, the colleges appeared well set for the freedom they sought. With the decentralization of approval for curriculum comes an appearance of greater autonomy and authority at the local level; however, with steering mechanisms of funding, performance indicators, and discourses of the marketplace, globalization and performativity permeating curriculum processes, “freedom” remains strongly tempered. This paper uses Foucauldian and critical discourse analysis as a means of considering power and higher education in Ontario, and the limitations and opportunities for “freedom” within our existing discourses. RÉSUMÉ En 2002, la Charte des collèges annonçait le début d’une ère nouvelle en matière d’éducation supérieure en Ontario. La Charte, disaiton, devait inaugurer un nouveau mode de fonctionnement dans le système collégial, mode qui assurerait à la fois plus de liberté aux collèges eux-mêmes et, espérait-on, un plus grand accès aux études postsecondaires pour les diverses communautés de la province. De 106 CJHE / RCES Volume 38, No. 1, 2008 pair avec la loi de 2000 favorisant le choix et l’excellence au niveau postsecondaire, qui offrait aux collèges la possibilité d’octroyer des baccalauréats appliqués, la Charte semblait fournir aux collèges toute la marge de manoeuvre dont ils avaient besoin. En même temps, la décentralisation des mécanismes d’approbation de curriculum semblait assurer une autonomie accrue au niveau de l’établissement individuel. Pourtant, cette autonomie est en réalité contrainte par les processus de financement, les indicateurs de rendement, l’influence du marché, la mondialisation et la performativité qui agissent sur les processus de curriculum et finissent par limiter la notion de «liberté». Le présent article utilise les théories de Foucault ainsi que les analyses de discours pour conduire à une étude du pouvoir et de son rapport avec l’éducation supérieure en Ontario, ainsi que celle des limites et des occasions qui se présentent pour accroître les notions de «liberté» à l’intérieur de nos dialogues actuels. An illusion is something that deceives the senses or mind, often appearing to exist when it does not, or appearing to be one thing when it is in fact another. It is a misrepresentation, a fantasy, a trick. A disillusion destroys or undermines the mistaken belief. It disenchants, it deconstructs, it seeks honesty. In 2002 a new college charter signaled a new era for higher education in Ontario. The charter was presumed to usher in a new way of doing higher education, one that provided greater freedom for Ontario colleges and presumably greater access for communities to higher education. The new charter promised the free and equal participation of colleges in their decision-making processes and in their governance. But a critical discourse analysis provides insight into the illusion of freedom offered by this new document, especially when contrasted and conflated with other steering documents affiliated with higher education in Ontario. Foucault, Governmentality and the Power of Discourses If we approach discourse from a Foucauldian (Foucault 1978, 1991) perspective, we appreciate that dominant discourses are the very axes upon which power is dependent. Discourses are about what can be said, and thought, about who can speak, when, where and with what authority. Discourses embody the meaning and use of words. Therefore, collections of words into rhetoric exercise power through a production of “truth” and “knowledge.” If language around “democracy” and “freedom” become perceived as aspirations that ought not to be questioned, then these very principles do not get questioned – except perhaps at such marginalized locations as the odd academic conference. “Discourses are not about objects; they do not identify objects, they constitute them and in the practice of doing so conceal their own invention” (Foucault, 1978, p. 49). In adopting a Foucauldian understanding of discourses, we A. Arvast / The New CAAT 107 accept that language shapes broader ways of thinking about our world, and, in turn, limiting what we think and how we come to normalize ways of speaking and acting (Fairclough, 1994; Maclure, 2003). The state is not the government in this way of understanding; rather, the dominant ways of thinking, as reinforced in various texts (e.g., media, policy, conversation), govern us. In Foucault’s concepts of governmentality (1991), which oppose traditional concepts of sovereign power, we are given the ideas that the rise of modern government as political, economic and social power becomes a power over life itself in terms of both individuals and whole populations. In reading historic statements about “economy” through a Foucauldian lens, we recognize that the term no longer holds to the traditional meanings of sovereignty. Instead, the concept comes to define economy as the field by which the lives of whole populations must be governed. “Political” economy (via governmentality) emerged to replace sovereignty as the scientific technique through which the centres of governance became requisite in the management of individuals and peoples. Here, education is called to serve the orders of the economy, primarily by drawing upon the concepts of freedom, opportunity, and accountability as tied to commercialism and expansion. Since formal schooling successfully indoctrinates diverse workers to the market demands of the economy, patterns of inequity become subjected to these seemingly loftier concepts. The Evolution of CAATS and the Illusion of Freedom On February 11, 1965, The Honourable Leslie Frost, former premier of Ontario, delivered a speech where he asked for support in developing what would ultimately become the Ontario College of Applied Arts and Technology (CAAT) system. In this speech, Frost (1965) appealed to business rationale in terms of costs and benefits, to humanism in terms of equality of opportunity, and to some synthesis of the two: I shall not use the word “cost” but rather tell you about the investment in human resources, upon the success of which our future will depend. I have referred to our age-old objective of equality of opportunity. Let us look at this in the context of the modern age. Such spending is the soundest and best investment we can make. The appropriate view today is that such investment, providing that each child in our Province shall have the opportunity of being equipped with that education best suited to him [sic], is a fundamental necessity of the days in which we live if our Province and our country are to achieve their manifest destiny. (p. 1) Community Colleges in Ontario, formed not long after Frost’s impassioned speech of 1965, lived with a charter from their inception until 2002. A study of the original charter finds a blending of market discourses and social justice discourses. The original charter appears to embrace principles of freedom and 108 CJHE / RCES Volume 38, No. 1, 2008 economic growth, but these discourses are tempered by discourses of social justice. The Minister of the Ontario Department of Education, William G. Davis, introduced the Basic Documents in June 1966 to signal the beginning of the CAAT system in Ontario. This document carries in it many of the continued discourses of our time – namely the “technological revolution” and the “need for skilled workers” for the “workforce”. But it also identifies a “knowledge explosion” and a “population explosion” as principal drivers for a new system of education. And, buried deep inside the document is one of the key reasons for the CAAT’s founding – accessibility: It is not feasible, nor indeed desirable, that all graduates of our high schools should go to university. The real needs of a very substantial number of our young people lie elsewhere; they would be served poorly and fare poorly in the traditional university programs. (Ontario Department of Education, 1967, p. 6) Indeed, accessibility would sit alongside the concept of community and local determination of need. Herein lies a neo-Platonic vestige of the sentiment expressed in the Republic that people at birth are fixed with souls containing gold, silver, or bronze and that these classes must never mingle. There is the inherent idea that some should not waste their time becoming educated but rather focus on being trained, on becoming operatives of the economy. A technology is set in motion that simultaneously appeases the elitism of university systems and rationalizes its existence in economy. But the elitism and economic rationale were situated originally amongst discourses of community. To this end, Davis adds, I would hope to see [a] range of offerings in most if not all Colleges of Applied Arts And Technology, the choice to be determined by local circumstances, as indicated … and extended where a particular need exists in a community. (p. 7) Choice and freedom are called forth alongside the training and economic rhetoric. Of significant interest is also the “social identity” of the college designation as informed, only in part, by business and new technologies. In the Basic Documents we have terminology that includes cultural aspirations and cooperation with social and public agencies, blended with vocational terminology, as the following text exemplifies: If the Colleges Of Applied Arts And Technology in Ontario are to establish social identity, they must be based on four principles: (1) they must embrace total education, vocational and avocational, regardless of formal entrance qualifications, with provision for complete vertical and horizontal mobility; A. Arvast / The New CAAT 109 (2) they must develop curricula that meet the combined cultural aspirations and occupational needs of the student; 3) they must operate in the closest possible cooperation with business and industry, and with social and other public agencies, including education, to ensure that curricula are at all times abreast, if not in advance of the changing requirements of a technological society; (4) they must be dedicated to progress, through constant research, not only in curricula but in pedagogical technique and in administration. (Ontario Department of Education, 1967, p. 33) I draw attention to the language of “total education, vocational and avocational,” “provision to complete vertical and horizontal mobility,” and “cultural aspirations.” I will not dwell on the original charter but wish to point out the ways and places where access for students, community needs, and other discourses tied to social justice and education (rather than training for employment) orientations are presented frequently. OCAAT: Current Policy Documents In 2002, Ontario colleges were provided a new charter via the Ontario Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology Act (OCAAT Act). Central to this charter was the belief that colleges needed to operate more autonomously in a free market system – to a larger extent than was previously permitted, defining what their educational products would be and ultimately linking the choice of citizens for their education with the ability of individual institutions to respond in the market (Arvast, 2006). Perhaps most significantly, the OCAAT Act of 2002 removed the formal concept of catchment areas that previously defined the communities served by a community college. Even though colleges had already moved in more competitive directions, this legislation formalized the shift from community to market. Colleges, it seemed, were to enter into competition more significantly with each other, while still guided by bodies that would maintain some control over the nomenclature and overall outcomes of diplomas and degrees. They were largely left to determine what the market wanted in terms of educational products and to presumably service these needs. Implicit in the removal of the catchment areas concept are notions of boundlessness, freedom, and progress. The original charter identified colleges as “dedicated to progress” but defined this as “in curricula, pedagogy and administration.” The new charter spells progress in quite different terms, tied to the production of individuals who can sustain an economy. Without the “population explosion” referenced in the original basic documents, the boundlessness of the new territories has translated into a global marketplace that must be wooed over. 110 CJHE / RCES Volume 38, No. 1, 2008 Curriculum as Destiny Conventional curriculum models in higher education have tended to figure educational tasks, processes and elements - most often as a structural connection between a set of courses, related time and credit framework; this framework therefore delineates the number and types of credits requisite in a particular degree or diploma (Doll, 2002; Conrad & Haworth, 1995; Stark & Lattuca, 1997). Historically the models tend to distinguish and identify eight elements: purpose, content, sequence, learners, instructional processes, instructional resources, evaluation and adjustment. That final component of the process - evaluation and adjustment, which also reflects upon the other components - is most often viewed from an ontology that holds fast to the idea that by collecting just the right and most objective data, the purpose of education can be met in the adjustment of curricula. But what is the purpose for education? Outcomes based curricular models that dominate the landscape of community college curriculum planning models are dependent upon the same paradigms of what is inevitable, attainable and desirable – an end goal of a promised land. An emphasis on measured outputs, performance indicators, quality assurance measures, and academic audits are maintained within a global neoliberal environment. In the words of Olssen and Peters (2005), “the role of higher education for the economy is seen by governments as having greater importance to the extent that higher education has become the new star ship in the policy fleet for governments around the world” (p. 1). Public management discourses frame the “knowledge economy” as governments encourage institutions to forge more and stronger links with industry, substantiate economic viability, and promote entrepreneurial skills of learners and institutions. A new “vocationalism” is called forth by this new economy; it signals universities to provide “training” and “job security” as an end goal at the same time that it signals colleges that its role is to ensure worker production is Job #1. Foucault presents the argument that the liberal (or neoliberal) end goals of freedom, choice, consumer sovereignty, competition, and individual initiative are positioned as a technology of governmentality – a prescription for rule in the development of techniques of auditing, accounting, and management. Discourses of the Ontario CAAT Act of 2002 and Postsecondary Choice and Excellence Act of 2000 The Post-Secondary Choice and Excellence Act of 2000 set the stage for a new way of considering the CAAT. The college would now be a site for the pursuit of college degrees (formally termed Applied Degrees in Ontario) tied to applied education. In an advisory function, the Postsecondary Education Quality Assessment Board (PEQAB) (Commission d’évaluation de la qualité de l’éducation postsecondaire) would review degree programming and make recommendations to the colleges and Minister for the alteration and/or approval A. Arvast / The New CAAT 111 of programs. While this paper does not review the PEQAB documents or the Act itself, it is important to consider the new role of colleges in the development and delivery of degree programs. The degree-level standards that govern college degrees have been taken up by the Ontario universities as well. According to the PEQAB web site, the Postsecondary Education Quality Assessment Board has identified the major categories of degrees offered in Ontario and the degree-level standards appropriate for each. The Council of Ontario Universities, which is made up of the public universities of Ontario, has agreed on the same wording for its degree-level expectations. (Postsecondary Education Quality Assessment Board, 2007) Degree-level standards that are now being adopted by Ontario universities as identified by PEQAB promise that the community college is not the only location in higher education where the outcomes oriented discourses come to dominate. Hence, those who suggest that the community college is merely meeting its original mandate to provide vocational training are missing the broader threat that is potential to higher education everywhere. That is, education becomes an end-point, a destination, a port rather than journey. Language used in the documents of the Ontario CAAT Act of 2002 and the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities (MTCU) information available to the public about colleges also connote an inevitability and desirability of certain phenomena which align with economy, including vocationalism, the market, progress, globalization and neoliberalism, choice, performativity, standards, and the knowledge economy. I now turn my attention to these documents which shape the development and review of formal curricula for Ontario colleges which come to us through legislation, policy of the MTCU, and the formal expressions made by the colleges through their own advocacy body of the Association of Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology of Ontario (ACAATO, now Colleges Ontario); the CAAT Act, 2002; the Post-Secondary Choice and Excellence Act of 2000; the College Diploma and Certificate Program Standards; and the Essential Employability Skills Standards. As previously stated, The Post-Secondary Choice and Excellence Act of 2000 provides an opportunity for colleges to offer degrees. The PEQAB body operates as the assessment body of college degree programs and so both Act and body are extensions, in a sense, of the CAAT Act. The CAAT Act reframes some of the key objectives of the college as follows: Objects (2) The objects of the colleges are to offer a comprehensive program of career-oriented, post-secondary education and training to assist individuals in finding and keeping employment, to meet the needs of 112 CJHE / RCES Volume 38, No. 1, 2008 employers and the changing work environment, and to support the economic and social development of their local and diverse communities. Carrying out its objects (3) In carrying out its objects, a college may undertake a range of education-related and training-related activities, including but not limited to, (a) Entering into partnerships with business, industry and other educational institutions; (b) Offering its courses in the French language where the college is authorized to do so by regulation; (c) Adult vocational education and training; (d) Basic skills and literacy training; (e) Apprenticeship in-school training; and (f) Applied research (The Ontario Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology Act, 2002). By positioning the objects and bodies in a terminology which (1) primarily identifies economic and vocational purposes for education (and removes relationships with social and community organizations), and (2) suggests that partnerships with business and industry are necessary relationships for the carrying out of objects, the colleges are shaped primarily by economic and vocational discourse. That is to say, as Foucault acknowledges, since discourses constitute the very “objects” and in the practice of doing so conceal their own invention, community college education is constricted into ways of knowing framed by economic and vocational narratives; as such, the marketplace of education is normalized. Any other ways of knowing education may, and I would argue do, become marginalized as would the very people who cannot or do not want to be constituted by these discourses. This positioning applies to both diplomas and degrees. According to the new Act, new bodies would be developed to transfer the governance of curricula from the Ministry to individual colleges. The decentralization of approval for curriculum gives an appearance of greater autonomy and authority at the local level within discourses of freedom. The Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities explicitly stated that the new college charter would “allow the colleges to be more flexible, entrepreneurial, responsive and market-driven” (Association of Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology of Ontario, 2001). A. Arvast / The New CAAT 113 From the advocacy body of the Association for Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology of Ontario (ACAATO, now Colleges Ontario), chair Susan Bloomfield pronounced, “a new charter will give the system greater flexibility to meet the needs of our students, our communities, the job market, and the provincial economy in the context of the global marketplace” (Association of Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology of Ontario, 2001). Democracy and freedom (and by extension “good education”) are synonymous with neoliberal discourses of globalization. What is important to recognize is that the Ministry was responding to a drive by the colleges for this autonomy. Government functions as Foucault’s notion of governmentality suggests, which I will explain shortly. The Global Marketplace The “global marketplace” referenced by ACAATO is one of the primary changes introduced by the new CAAT charter. Numerous researchers argue that globalization has significantly changed the milieu of higher education by focusing the institutions on global competition and a marketplace orientation (e.g., Levin 2001. 2004; Marginson & Considine, 2001). The signing of international trade agreements such as NAFTA and the establishment of trade cartels such as the World Trade Organization, the European Economic Community, and the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation signal our increasingly borderless world where the market economy paradigm rules. The removal of boundaries globally is mirrored in the CAAT charter’s removal of catchment areas. But let us consider what the global implications are so that we can best understand how we may be impacted locally. Robertson (1998) reminds us that countries with the worst environmental standards, highest unemployment, lowest wages, and an absence of labour regulations provide the ideal milieu for corporations that are seeking to maximize profits. Transnational corporations require a skilled labour force, not an educated labour force. As Hyslop-Margison (2000) contends, an education that fosters social critique, for example, may generate subsequent social unrest, whereas a more passive model of education focused on meeting instrumental objectives will be more likely to generate social compliance. (p. 207) So global market economy principles that appear initially harmless, even desirable, begin to impact education and curriculum in deleterious ways. Never mind that Ontario colleges are more and more driven to seek out the wealthy international students in developing countries as market principles and borders come down. The effects of the market discourse strike much closer to home in the very curriculum that is delivered. 114 CJHE / RCES Volume 38, No. 1, 2008 Standards, Performativity, and Accountability In order to receive funding for offering particular programs, Ontario colleges must develop programs using standard nomenclature and standard learning outcomes. These learning outcomes identify entry-level skills graduates would “need to be successfully employed in various vocational fields” (MTCU, College Diploma and Certificate Program Standards, p. 1). Of the key public documents available on the MTCU website, the College Diploma and Certificate Program Standards documents provide us insight into the discourse of “standards.” Program standards apply to all similar programs of instruction across the college system. The standards are applied specifically to vocational expectations as well as to what are currently called “essential employability skills.” In the Overview of the College Diploma and Certificate Program Standards document, we read, CAATs throughout Ontario deliver a wide range of postsecondary programs designed to provide graduates with the entry-level skills they will need to become successfully employed in various vocational fields. These programs must be of high quality and relevant to the needs of both employers and students. All college graduates must have the key vocational skills that will help them find employment in their field of study. . . The MTCU oversees the development and the review of standards for programs of instruction, in order to clearly identify the essential skills and knowledge that graduates of that program must acquire. Each college is required to ensure that its programs and program delivery are consistent with these standards, and must assist students to achieve these essential outcomes. (Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities, 2006) The term “standards” implies quality and a level of excellence accepted as a norm and against which attainments are judged. Historically, a standard is also the commodity or commodities on which the value of a currency or monetary system is based. In all definitions of standards, we meet the terminology of “norm” and the concept of “normalizing.” Again, we also meet with the etymology of the market and money. Moreover, though not essential to my main argument here, the principles of choice and freedom which seem to run through both the CAAT Act and the Postsecondary Choice and Excellence Act are further submitted to question. This is so because Ontario’s publicly-assisted universities hold the monopoly on the granting of secular degrees, and because the standards for entry into universities are set and applied by the institutions themselves and not by the state. The very conscious design of elitism in the current system of higher education and the maintenance of the two divides further serve to obfuscate concepts of freedom and choice. As Skolnik (2003) summarizes, A. Arvast / The New CAAT 115 the legislative acts pertaining to universities in Canada have served largely to codify in pretty general terms common Western ideas about the purpose of the university, and these provisions are quite similar across the country. The colleges, in contrast… were established to serve as instruments of government policy. While they have been given a substantial amount of procedural autonomy, their substantive autonomy, including particularly control over their own missions, is tightly circumscribed by government. (p. 1) The universities in Ontario continue to argue very aggressively keeping favour of keeping Ontario colleges focused on “training”. Still, it is worthwhile to note that both sets of institutions must rise to calls for accountability. In considering higher education’s current conditions, Pratt (1995) adopted what Lyotard called “performativity” – describing the essentials of how academia has been adapting to the demands it has encountered to act in more “accountable” commercial ways (Pratt, 1995, pp. 35-40). Barnett (2000) utilizes the concept of performativity to argue that marketization has become a new universal theme, commodifying teaching and learning and the various ways in which higher education must meet performative criteria with an emphasis on measurable outputs. Among the popular cries “We want our institutions to be accountable,” what is missed is the implicit un-countability of education. Again if we delineate and deconstruct simply the word “accountable,” we recognize that the term necessarily oversimplifies and limits education to a dollars and cents way of knowing. Olssen and Peters (1995) distinguish two types of accountability: Bureaucratic: professional accountability, is ex-ante, where rules and regulations are specified in advance and accountability is measured in terms of process; formatted in terms of standards, based on expertise of those who work in a particular area. Consumer: managerial accountability, associated with market systems, based on price; which works in terms of contracts in which the performance is rewarded or punished according to the achievement of pre-set targets and externally imposed objectives. (p. 328) Both forms of accountability then actually take on the role of punishment/reward – of governmentality. The imposition of standards becomes yet another technology of governmentality, discipline, and surveillance. As Vidovich (2001) contends, standards, quality, and excellence are often conflated in policy documents, in practice and in literature resulting in mechanisms of surveillance, “where particular constructions of accountability relating to managerial and market forms predominate over democratic and professional forms” (p. 342). She adds, arguably, in higher education, systematic mechanisms of pseudo-quantitative forms of accountability spanning research, teaching, and, to a 116 CJHE / RCES Volume 38, No. 1, 2008 lesser extent, administration and service activities have proliferated to satisfy the demands of governments. (p. 342) While Vidovich refers to trends in the university systems away from the traditional notions of excellence as judged by peers to the greater performativity models, we cannot afford to think that community colleges should not also have opportunities to define excellence in ways outside of these technologies. Performativity is a principle of governance that establishes strictly functional relations between a state and its inside and outside environments. It is ultimately a steering mechanism – a form of indirect steering or steering at a distance that replaces intervention and prescription with target setting, accountability, and comparison. In Ball’s (1998) words, “performativity provides sign systems which ‘represent’ education in a self-referential and reified form for consumption” (p. 6). What’s wrong with Vocation and Employability? “Vocation” typically means occupation, but consider its Latinate root that implies the notion of a calling (voice), an inherent or manifest, predestined profession. I was recently challenged by a colleague who said “but training for jobs is the very essence of a college mandate. . . why wouldn’t you expect to find vocational and employability discourses?” The response to the question is that the limitation of the institution is in this expectation. If individuals – students, faculty and staff – govern themselves according primarily to vocationalism and employability discourses, any “other” learning becomes insignificant, perhaps even undesirable. In no text is this clearer than in the “Essential Employability Skills” document which delineates essential skills in six categories: communication, numeracy, critical thinking and problem solving, information management, interpersonal, and personal skills. Essential employability skills have always been outlined as learning outcomes for college programs, but they were, until very recently, called “Generic” skills. The new nomenclature does more than suggest that learning in these six areas is ultimately important so that individuals can work. Gone are the concepts of education as essential to develop civic responsibility and social participation in the community. Where are the discourses of, say, social justice, accessibility, diversity, equality, and character, to name but a few? As Hyslop-Margison (2000) reminds us, through prevailing discursive practices, people are deceived into believing that a socially constructed economic system, a cultural artifact, operates like an inexorable natural force (p. 203). Because the economic paradigm is treated as physical reality – with laws of supply and demand perceived as akin to the law of gravity – any discourses which do not mesh with economic laws (for instance, laws which imply unemployment and poverty are necessary derivatives), must necessarily be marginalized or, worse, democratic utterances not even articulated. A. Arvast / The New CAAT 117 Progress, Choice and the Knowledge Economy: Endeavouring to Find a New View I would argue that market driven education structures and standards artificially limit demand for knowledge, in turn leading to knowledge gaps and information deficiencies. Both the MTCU and ACAATO have used language which celebrates the new college charter, and contends that the bodies and texts falling out from the charter have opened the spaces for colleges to operate. However, on further inspection, we recognize that “choice” in the marketplace has not been broadened. The discourse of the “knowledge economy” has become the new manifestation of governance. The decentralization of government does not alter local government because decentralization is tied to various technologies of governance and discipline, primarily affected by the dominant economic discourses presented so far. FURTHER WORK NEEDED This paper has relied upon a series of policy initiatives to contextualize a number of disconcerting current trends in higher education: 1. the ongoing and swelling affection for identifying education as a cure for economic worries; 2. the parallel of beliefs in unlimited resources, freedom, and boundlessness for higher education as commodity; 3. the decentralization of government bodies to give an appearance of “new opportunities” and “markets” as promising greater wealth for our country; and, 4. the understanding that individuals in college systems participate in governing themselves under the actual or imagined authority of a system of “truth” aligned with economic discourses. The discourses of a knowledge economy, of vocational purposes, of standards and performativity, and of global marketplaces, promise to cure all that ails us. Numerous policies, directives, and other texts have not been analyzed in this paper and there is room for far more work to be done here. I would also contend that one more serious challenge needs to arise from the work originated here. We are in need of a deeper discourse analysis of the ways in which dominant economic discourses ultimately are carried out amidst a number of other discourses tied to race, gender, ethnicity, and the myriad of marginalizations that occur either through the use of a certain language or the absence of it. We are in need of a critical examination of economic discourses and their inherent affection for matrices and for the accounting of education in terms of economic service, and how they prevent other ways of knowing. Such an examination can and should be undertaken in a system that was developed exactly for the purpose of engaging in critical inquiry. 118 CJHE / RCES Volume 38, No. 1, 2008 The optimism I might present to conclude this paper lies in concepts of revelation (Foucault’s problematization) and revolution. It comes in the form of knowledge and counter-discourse, in counter-violence to those violations of our sensibilities of education as serving humanity. Educators must be challenged to create spaces where the dominant discourses of the market and expansionism are tested. Even if we believe finding employment is important, we must challenge our students to embrace education as exposure rather than finality, as an environment for questions rather than a path to a job. And we must challenge our institutions to articulate a commitment to a global community rather than to a global marketplace. 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CONTACT INFORMATION Anita Arvast [email protected] University Partnership Centre, Georgian College, Barrie, Ontario L4M 3X9 Anita Arvast has taught and served as an administrator in the Ontario College system for over 15 years. Currently, she teaches literature with the University Partnership Centre and with Laurentian University, both at Georgian College. She is completing her Ph.D. through the Centre for Theory and Policy Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE/University of Toronto). She is working on a book on literary theory and her current interests lie in the intersection of theory and higher education policy and practice. Recent publications may be found in Higher Education Perspectives and The Canadian Journal of Educational Administration and Policy.