Continuity, retrenchment and renewal
Subtitle: the politics of government-university relations in Ontario, 1985--2002.
Published: 2005
Language: eng
Number of pages: 425
Description: This thesis examines how ideas and institutions shaped the Ontario government's relationship with the province's universities between 1985 and 2002. Using documentary research and elite interviews, the thesis shows how the relationship was dominated by two government commitments from the postwar era---ensuring access to university for every qualified student and maintaining equality among the universities---commitments that governments from all three political parties in the late 1980s and 1990s accepted, even as they attempted to revise or add to them. Applying the concepts of paradigm shifting (Hall), bounded innovation (Weir) and institutional layering (Thelen), the thesis shows how this dominant paradigm was embedded in institutions established in the 1950s and 1960s, placing boundaries on the range of available policy options and protecting universities from externally-imposed restructuring during a period of fiscal restraint.The thesis reviews four institutionally-based models of policy continuity and change (by Hall; Baumgartner and Jones; Pierson; and Coleman, Skogstad, and Atkinson) and assesses the merits of each in explaining the observations in this case. It argues for a synthesis of these models and suggests its potential for explaining how commitments made during the development of the Canadian welfare state fared during a period of fiscal retrenchment and economic globalization. The resilience of the dominant paradigm suggests the future possibility of achieving gains in access for students who are disadvantaged, renewing financial accessibility programs, and integrating educational quality goals into the paradigm.Significant policy changes are shown to be consistent with the existence of a dominant paradigm. The Ontario government adopted new research policies by layering them on top of the paradigm in response to pressures from the federal government, which felt no responsibility for the paradigm and had the support of the fragment of the university system with resource-intensive research missions. Tuition and student aid were changed through a series of incremental adjustments, all justified within the paradigm, but eventually provoking debate over whether the paradigm was changing from a public model to a student-financed model. Government decisions to expand selected programs for economic reasons and to permit the opening of private universities show that, within the paradigm, opportunities existed for actors from outside the policy network to attract political attention and win support.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-10, Section: A, page: 3797.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2005.

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