Petrified Campus: The Crisis in Canada's Universities

Alexander D. Gregor is Director, Centre for Higher Education Research
and Development, University of Manitoba, and the co-editor of
Postsecondary Education in Canada: The Cultural Agenda.

David Bercuson’s The Great Brain Robbery: Canada’s Universities on
the Road to Ruin (1984) was criticized for failing to pay heed to the
literature in the field of higher education, and for characterizing the
Canadian university’s past as a golden age that experts argue never
existed. Petrified Campus acknowledges these criticisms without acting
on them in any significant way. It provides not so much a systematic
overview of the Canadian university as insights into the conservative or
traditional stance on such issues as the collapse of academic standards,
the abuses of tenure, the travesties of political correctness, the
deficiencies of planning and financing, and the sad state of scholarly
publication. To understand the university fully, we have to understand
the world views of the competing stakeholders; Petrified Campus provides
useful insights into the vision and values of an important constituency.