No Risk, No Reward - Innovators Needed | Sheldon Levy

Sheldon Levy, guest · [01:17]Well, it's, it's absolutely true. Everything was a bit of serendipity. My background was, mathematics and statistics, and I was, had a, a job offer, right out of university to go to Ottawa in Stats Canada. I ended up as a summer student in, the dean's office at York University. And this is right at the beginning of computing, but, very early on. And I saw they were doing, the budget on Selectric typewriters. And I, commented that this was not the way to do it. You should use these new thing called computers, pre, Excel spreadsheets by decades. The dean at the time said, okay, do it. You could never get that offer today. And then one thing led to the other, and then I was there, and, they said, how would you like to stay? And so I ended up as an employee of York University, and they said, well, we can't pay you what StatsCan pays unless you teach in the, in the mathematics department as well, and then you could earn your eight thousand dollar salary. It was serendipity, and then from there, it was just different opportunities that became available, moved from there. To be president to Sheridan, from Sheridan moved to, U of T as a vice president, spent, a year at Ontario Tech, went to, Ryerson for ten years, deputy minister, private university in Vancouver, but it all started never, never with a plan, let me put it that way.

Sheldon Levy, guest · [05:15]The uniqueness of it goes to, its fundamental governance structure under which, by law, The, the public universities are bicameral, and therefore the, what you could, you could say is that fifty percent or some, of, of the business is managed by the employees called faculty members, and in a senate, and they control what you, what might be called the products, the courses, the evaluation, who takes it, not the students admission, et cetera. And then the fiscal issues are about the board of directors or the board of governors. But a president has a very, very difficult job of making sure these are in harmony. So just put yourself in a position of, private sector. You want to open up a, a new product line, and your employees say, no, we're not going to do that. In fact, we want to maintain the product line that no one is buying. I, it's not that extreme, but it's not far from that. And, and therefore, when you have people criticizing the universities, their inability to move, their inability to adjust to the economy, et cetera, the truth of it is, look at the governance structure and ask yourself, how, how does leadership actually adjust in time when the laws establish this bicameral nature? The other difficulty, people don't want to talk about very often is that there is, in my view, a conflict between the role of the Senate, which is the governing body, and the role of the representatives in the union. You have people sitting on, Senates that are at the same time union members, and union members have a particular important role, but it conflicts. With the role, or it could conflict with the role of a senator. And, this has be- there's been a lot of jurisprudence on this, a lot of debate on this, but it's never been sorted out, and it's very difficult to talk about it because if you're a sitting president and you've- you feel like finishing your first term or even pretend that you'll have a second term, you begin to go in those directions. It- it becomes very, very difficult. And the other big difference is that the- in many institutions, the, presidents, the choice of the president or the choice of the vice president academic has a lot of input by the employees. And for sure, you can't have your board of directors just fly in, in quotes, a president. President is- and the vice president academic in particular is seen as colleagues. And then at the end of their term, they, many of them return back to the colleagues, their colleagues. So just try to compare that with, the private sector where you would never have the, the president of the corporation being chosen by the employees, maybe in some rare circumstances, and universities collect a lot of KPIs, and probably too many, but do they really shape, the performance of the institution? Do they really shape the compensation agreements? Are there penalties and rewards? That type of thing, in my experience, has been not.

Sheldon Levy, guest · [16:35]What I saw in government, what I saw in universities, is that the only way you're not going to make a mistake is do nothing new. Because almost by definition, the moment you try to do something new, there isn't a, a formula for it. You're, you're inventing the new, and you're going to make mistakes, but we don't allow universities to make any mistakes. And as a result, they become, in government too, so risk-averse, beyond anything imaginable, because they're not allowed to make, any, any errors. And I think that's probably, for government and universities and colleges, the biggest problem we have. We should applaud a university or a college by saying, you know, boy, they really tried this. They got it 70% right. Holy mackerel, the other 30% they're gonna improve upon. I've never heard anyone say anything like that. What they jump on is the 30%, and everyone with a rearview mirror is smarter than the president that they should have seen that 30%, or smarter than the minister, smarter than the deputy minister.

Sheldon Levy, guest · [21:39]the way I like to describe it, Daniel, is like a bit of a skit. Okay? So I'm, the president of university XYZ or college XYZ. And the vice president knocks on my door and says, president, I need $50 for a for sale sign. I say, for a sale sign? What, what? He says, well, we have no more, our tuition is, frozen. In fact, it was reduced by 10%. We have no more government grants. We are, we are, we don't have mandatory retirement. We have, legitimate union demands for inflation, et cetera. The costs of, operating are going up by CPI. We don't have the, the money, the, the money, and we, we can't continue to cut, give me the money for the for sale sign, right? And the president is worried, worried, worried, and then someone else knocks on the door and says, says, I have an idea. Why don't we recruit 500 international students, and we will take the profit from those international students, and we will fund those things that aren't being funded by domestic fees or by government grants. President says, well, boy, I sure like that. That is an option, but your two comes. You've now got five hundred students and, that's, that's in your base budget. The same recurs. What are we gonna do next year? What are we gonna do next year? Well, we'll go from five hundred to a thousand. The next year, a thousand to fifteen hundred. And then how many international students do you have after eight or nine years? And what was the reason for those international students? Was it that you needed their tuition to give them a great experience, blah, all those things? Or was it truthfully you needed that, that money to be able to pay the normal inflation that was not being covered in the normal way? And you could say you could cut your way to that too. But I don't know any university that was going to say I'd rather have budget cuts. Then, take on international students. I think this is heroic, but very few would do it. And then you turn around and you look five, seven years, and you all of a sudden have new problems that be created by the numbers of international students, whether they are that I didn't build the residence, whether they are housing or whatever. And the federal government, who had the responsibility for, bringing students in, wakes up one day and says, holy mackerel, there's a million international students. Almost all of them are a very large want, a postgraduate work permit, but we have already a limit on, how many, work permits we have, and we got a big, big problem. And then what happens is, again, the one size fits all solution. Let's just Hack it away, right? And now all of the years that the institutions have been patching the infl- lost inflation are coming home to roost. And so why are the cuts so large is that they are accumulative of multiple years that were being papered over by international students. And, and then you say, well, who's to fault? And my answer is everyone. Don't tell me that governments, federally, provincially, institutions, colleges weren't to fault.

Sheldon Levy, guest · [28:17]I knew I wanted to go east. I didn't know that I wanted, that the final destination was going to be in Montreal at the coffee shop and I was gonna have a latte. I just knew I wanted to go east. But there is an expectation on government boards, et cetera, that the president can actually navigate To the latte place in Montreal, when in fact, all I knew I was going east. And if I got to Kingston and I got to Kingston and I had, to, to take a trip up to, had to stop at, and had to go off the 401 and, and make a detour, all of that was trying to take advantage of the opportunities that were there and the new experiences that I had in my travel to finally get to a better location. The idea that people have, that, that you know exactly where you're going and, and that you can control the future, it's only good on paper, put it on the shelf, never look at it again. The challenge is to, to have a, your community, including the students, sharing that you want to go east. Big, general, Ideas, not micro ideas. I used to say, I never did a strategic plan because my strategic plan was simply, I wanted to be the best at something that mattered to society. And that was going east. So when institution, and institutions are under tremendous pressure to be able to answer the question you asked me. And the only guidance I can give them is that you have to be open to the opportunities that are available and navigate with your community to the opportunities that you see. But if government isn't going to step up with funding and the gov, and government isn't going to relax on, on fees, and you continue to have no mandatory retirement, the, the box, you're going to be boxed in to To cutting and, and, ensure you can navigate, but I never had to navigate in an environment of huge negative numbers. I navigated with, with the biggest number minus eight, but most of them were zero or a small positive. How do you create something new in this environment when you're cutting is extremely, extremely difficult, but I would, I would, I would say the, the, the most important thing institutions can do, not the most important, one of the things is to have clarity on the one or two things that will make them better. And don't, don't try to micromanage that definition. Look at the real problems the country is having and ask yourself, can we make a difference in solving one of those problems? By the institution who we are. Can we align ourselves to the needs of the society that we have by making the choices that are more in line with what society needs today? And so you can't only point your finger at government. We have to begin to point our finger at ourselves where it's relevant.

Sheldon Levy, guest · [33:14]But really what happened, Daniel, was a few students and a faculty member came to my office and said, look, we're, I'm doing this and I need, one of the students said, I'm doing this create, this interesting thing. I got a small business and it's in, it was in, in, digital media space and that I need a place to hang a camera or something like that. Another student came and, told me that they wanted to be able to build a exoskeleton and like, like these ideas that students were having. And then I went to an engineering faculty member's office, met a PhD student that was doing really interesting things. At that time, it was a nap, but no one had a nap, but he was building a nap. And I thought, oh my God, this is really exciting. Why don't we Give the students a place for this. And I, I then, went after, tried to get government money for ages, for a year. No success. Thank God I didn't get it, because I would have had to write a proposal that says you had to go and get the, the latte at the Starbucks in Montreal, when all I knew was that there was an idea. But I also knew that if it was an idea, you had to show it off, and it couldn't be in the basement of the building as you take the broom closet and make it available. If you were going to do it, then do it boldly. That started DMZ, but ultimately it was getting the right people like Val Fox, Saint Romano to, to run it. What you learned was that that if you trust students, you're gonna win. Just trust them. Yeah, they're gonna screw up, they're gonna do a lot of things, but get rid of the rules. And that's why it had to be the president, because the president is the only one that could get rid of the rules. The institution just wants to smother people with a reason not to do something. I was accountable for being the rule breaker. And when they were policy rules, I would go to the board. But when they were habits, I'd break the habits. But it was all about students. It was never about anything but helping students be successful. That was the only thing that mattered. And it didn't matter if the student was in engineering or social work. It did not matter. And then trust students. And, and then, and then make mistakes. Let, let things develop. It was, that was the, the cultural change. That was how change was brought. It was, it was getting out of all the rules that stifle you, trusting students, not being prescriptive of, of the future, letting people define their own future, let people make mistakes.