Town hall discusses Mintz report and university funding

On April 8, Public Interest Alberta and the Parkland Institute, a research centre based out of the University of Alberta, hosted a post-secondary education town hall. The event was held virtually, moderated by Brad Lafortune, the executive director of Public Interest Alberta.

Ricardo Acuña, the executive director of the Parkland Institute, and Nazak Birjandifar, an assistant professor of history at Mount Royal University, were the two key speakers at the town hall.

Acuña began by recounting some of the history of post-secondary funding in Alberta. He characterized government funding for post-secondary institutions (PSI) as “decades of neglect.”

The most recent provincial budget included a small increase to PSIs’ funding, but it “does not even come close to covering the extra costs associated with inflation, growing enrolment, and the negotiated salary increases across the system,” he said.

He added that he doesn’t believe the current funding environment for PSIs is due to a lack of money, rather it’s “about political will and ideological priorities.”

Birjandifar said going to university in Alberta now means more debt, larger classes, and less access to professors for students. For teaching staff, it means heavier workloads, less time for research and mentorship, and pressure to justify their work by economic means.

Birjandifar said that the 2025 Mintz panel report recommendations reinforced tying PSIs and their funding to labour market outcomes and performance metrics. 

“They shift universities away from independent inquiry and toward alignment with economic and political priorities of the government,” she said. “That’s the moment we need to stop and ask, what are universities for?”

“We’re not just losing programs and funding. We are losing the conditions that make education meaningful,” Birjandifar said. 

Mintz panel recommendation for institutional neutrality “very concerning,” Birjandifar says

Lafortune asked Birjandifar and Acuña about the idea of institutional neutrality presented in the Mintz panel report and the implications for open debate.

Birjandifar said she finds the report’s recommendation of institutional neutrality “very concerning.”

“The way that the report actually understands neutrality is kind of a selective use of it,” she said. “So it’s like using it selectively to justify prohibiting institutions from taking public stances on political issues.”

She added that this risks silencing universities as civic actors and could chill discourse about matters that the government disagrees with. This could include conversations around Alberta separatism. 

Acuña added that even without the report’s recommendations being enforced, there is already an effort to silence professors and academics.

“We start to see some of that here when Danielle Smith personally calls up the university presidents and encourages them to call in the police to clear out the Palestine encampments,” he said.

An attendee at the town hall asked a question regarding deconsolidation amidst an increased budget. “If the U of A isn’t financially autonomous, how can they be autonomous at all?”

Acuña said universities are not allowed to run deficits, and this gives more control to governments. The government is able to fund specific projects and programs, such as enrolment growth in targeted programs. 

“This is how the government is exerting control,” he said. 

He added that a shift towards a managerial approach to university management has meant that PSIs see themselves as deployers of government requirements.

Value of liberal arts, humanities needs to be reframed, Birjandifar says

Another question asked was how can people advocate for the value of humanities and arts disciplines in the context of the Mintz report and other factors like global competitiveness.

Birjandifar said that there needs to be a shift from defending these disciplines to reframing their value. She added that democratic institutions and freedoms have been built on decades of critical inquiry. 

“The outcomes we produce are less visible until they’re gone, and then they become a real issue.”

Acuña added that “it’s no coincidence that these types of attacks on the liberal arts, on the humanities coincide with times when democracy struggle and facism is ascendant.”

Lafortune asked another question from an attendee about if it’s realistic to talk about free tuition and changing the split of how much of the costs governments and PSIs themselves cover.

Acuña said that PSIs need government funding and that people shouldn’t water down that message because it’s in the public interest. 

“If Alberta is refusing to invest and we stop fighting for proper funding and public education, what will happen is that as the system struggles to figure out how to do this, we will lose the best and the brightest in terms of instructors, in terms of graduate students, in terms of students,” he said. “The programs will fizzle out on their own because people are going to go to places where they have made investments in public, post-secondary education that we’re refusing to make.”

Acuña added that the cost of free tuition for students would be less than the revenue lost from the four per cent corporate tax cut the Alberta government implemented.