convincing, with all of the appropriate evidence, and with great clarity, a key theme underscoring a book by Michael Skolnk and Norman Rowan (1984) entitled “Please, sir, I want some more” – Canadian universities and financial restraint. The Council of Ontario Universities played a central role in lobbying for increased government funding on behalf of its members and it devoted considerable attention to preparing public reports on the financial needs of the system, though these efforts seemed to have little impact on the Ministry. In a move that illustrates the Council’s approach to government relations as well as its frustration, in 1982 the Council updated the detailed materials that it had submitted the previous year and renamed its report “Once More With Feeling.” Levin and Sullivan described the relationship between universities and governments in as a political context in which “The two parties peer balefully at each other across a wide and apparently widening gulf” (1988, p. 1). Convinced that the university sector was underfunded, the OCUA continued to produce an annual advisory memorandum on the financial needs of the system, even though its work seemed to have little impact on the level of government grants. In the early years these calculations discussed both the historical gap in total funding tracing back to 1977/78 (when the government began to provide less that the Council had requested) as well as a precise calculation of recent inflation. The size of the total funding gap since 1977/78 became so large that OCUA concluded it was unrealistic (and politically embarrassing) to continue with its traditional calculations so it modified its approach in order to reduce the size of the total gap to a level that would be less unfathomable, while still attempting to make its point that government funding needed to increase to address the “real” inflationary needs of the system. While the government may not have been convinced by the OCUA’s advice on funding increases, it did listen to OCUA’s recommendations on modifications to the funding formula. In
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