Although Canadian universities describe themselves as engines of discovery and public service, the material conditions under which they operate increasingly tell a different story. 

Students encounter larger classes, fewer writing-intensive courses and instructors employed on short-term contracts, while administrations emphasize efficiency, performance metrics and employability. These shifts are often framed as unavoidable adjustments to fiscal reality, yet they reflect a deeper transformation in how higher education is understood: not as a public institution oriented toward knowledge, but as a competitive service provider operating within market constraints.

This transformation is best understood through the ideology of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism does not oppose the state outright; rather, it redefines the state’s role. It emerged as the intellectual successor to mid-20th century market liberalism, emphasizing austerity, privatization and deregulation as default responses to public-sector problems. Public institutions are expected to function according to market principles, competition, efficiency and cost-benefit justification, even if their core purposes cannot be meaningfully priced. Within the university context, this means funding is tied to measurable “outputs,” research is evaluated for its commercial relevance and education is framed as a private investment rather than a collective good. Knowledge still remains valued, but primarily insofar as it produces immediate economic returns.

Canada’s universities did not always operate this way. For much of the post-war period, public funding for higher education expanded on the assumption that universities served national and civic purposes: training professionals, advancing basic research and cultivating an informed public. 

This sentiment reached its height under postwar Keynesian governments such as that of Lester B. Pearson, whose approach to state-building treated public institutions broadly as national infrastructure, creating the fiscal and political conditions under which sustained public funding for universities expanded through federal–provincial cost-sharing arrangements. Provincial operating grants formed the backbone of university budgets, allowing institutions to plan long-term, support fundamental research and maintain academic independence. 

Beginning in the late 1970s and accelerating through the 1990s, this settlement began to erode as governments increasingly adopted market-oriented approaches to public institutions. Government transfers declined in real per-student terms, and universities were encouraged to supplement funding through tuition increases, private partnerships and external grants. Over the same time period, government funding did not increase in proportion to rising student enrolment, leading to a sustained decline in per-student public support for Canadian universities, while student fees now make up a substantially larger share of institutional revenue.

This shift did not occur in a vacuum. Canada has its own intellectual tradition advocating market-oriented governance, most visibly associated with the Calgary School, a group of influential conservative academics at the University of Calgary who rose to prominence in the 1990s. Influenced by thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises, this tradition emphasized skepticism toward public institutions, opposition to expansive state spending and faith in market coordination. While its proponents did not target universities specifically, their ideas shaped Canadian political culture, particularly in Western provinces, by normalizing the view that public institutions should justify themselves primarily in economic terms. Universities, as publicly funded bodies, were increasingly expected to demonstrate efficiency, productivity and return on investment rather than intrinsic public value.

The consequences of this shift are visible at the University of Saskatchewan. In recent provincial budgets, operating grants to Saskatchewan universities have been reduced in real terms, with the 2023–24 budget alone cutting millions from post-secondary institutions. Although overall budgets have grown, provincial operating support for Saskatchewan universities has declined by $41 million (8.7 per cent) over the past decade with an additional $14.1 million cut in 2023-24 alone, reducing public support relative to rising costs and enrolments. These reductions force universities to rely more heavily on tuition revenue and externally funded research, narrowing institutional flexibility and reshaping priorities.

Research funding illustrates the paradox this creates. USask regularly reports strong research revenues, exceeding $400 million annually, driven by Tri-Council grants, infrastructure programs and industry partnerships. Yet university leadership has also warned that Canada is falling behind peer nations in sustained federal investment in research, particularly in basic and curiosity-driven science. 

While countries such as the United States and Germany expand long-term science funding, Canadian support has grown more slowly and is increasingly tied to targeted, short-term initiatives with commercial or strategic conditions attached. The result is not the lack of research activity, but a system in which inquiry must constantly justify itself economically, weakening the institutional capacity to defend knowledge as a public good.

The effects of declining public funding are especially visible in how research priorities are reshaped. As core operating grants stagnate, universities are pushed toward funding models that privilege projects with clear, short-term economic or medical returns. Commercializable research, industry partnerships and applied biomedical work are easier to justify to governments and donors because their benefits are legible, measurable and politically defensible. By contrast, basic research, long-term inquiry and work in the humanities and social sciences struggle to compete precisely because their value unfolds over time and cannot be reduced to immediate outcomes.

This is not an argument against medical or applied research, both of which are essential and have delivered undeniable public benefit. The problem arises when these areas become the default justification for research funding as a whole. When universities must constantly demonstrate relevance through commercialization, knowledge is treated less as a public good and more as a speculative investment. Research agendas narrow, risk-taking declines and questions without rapid payoff are quietly sidelined, even when they are foundational to scientific progress or public understanding.

These pressures are reflected in concrete program-level decisions across Canadian universities. Humanities and social science programs, which do not easily translate into immediate economic returns, have often been among the first to face cuts or restructuring during budget shortfalls. At institutions such as the University of Alberta, 20 Arts programs have experienced reductions or pauses tied to financial pressures, with administrators citing restructuring even as students and faculty warn of long-term intellectual loss. 

National enrollment trends reinforce this pattern: Statistics Canada data show a nearly 19 per cent decline in humanities majors between 2002–03 and 2022–23, a shift that both reflects and accelerates program contraction as governments and students prioritize fields with clearer vocational pathways. Together, these developments signal that research and teaching not immediately tied to commercial outcomes are increasingly treated as expendable.

Federal research funding structures further entrench this tilt toward short-term utility. Analyses of Canada’s research budget show a long-term erosion of base funding for granting councils once central to investigator-driven inquiry, even as resources are redirected toward targeted initiatives and talent-attraction strategies. Adjusted for inflation, base budgets for agencies such as the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research have stagnated or declined, while funding streams that once supported broad basic research have been repurposed. The discontinuation of programs such as the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowships, which supported early-career researchers across disciplines, including the humanities and social sciences, further illustrates this shift. 

As research support becomes increasingly contingent on immediate applicability or economic return, the space for slower, speculative inquiry contracts is declining, reshaping not only what universities study but how the public understands the purpose of research itself.

These institutional pressures intersect with broader cultural shifts in how knowledge is received. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Canada witnessed rising vaccine hesitancy, protests against public health measures and growing suspicion toward expert institutions. While trust in science remained comparatively high, surveys and public discourse revealed significant skepticism toward government-linked expertise and scientific authority. Organized anti-vaccine advocacy groups, alongside social media ecosystems that reward certainty over nuance, contributed to an environment in which scientific language circulated widely while scientific method remained poorly understood.

This is what is meant by a post-literate environment. It is not an absence of information, nor a rejection of science outright, despite sowing the seeds of such sentiment later on. It is a condition in which knowledge is evaluated through the lens of narrative, intuition and affect rather than the rigorous processes and empirical evidence. Scientific claims are accepted or dismissed based on perceived motive or identity, and not methodological reliability. In such an environment, expertise becomes just another opinion, and one’s disagreement is flattened into personal belief.

The United States offers a cautionary example of where these dynamics can lead. Figures such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have demonstrated how anti-science rhetoric can gain traction without denying science altogether, by selectively questioning institutions, elevating anecdotes over consensus and framing expertise as elite self-interest. Over the past year, this has translated into public scandals, the denial of decades-long vaccine consensus, growing suspicion toward long-established medications such as paracetamol and the rejection of evidence-based nutrition guidelines. Canada has not experienced these developments to the same degree, but the structural conditions that enable them, such as eroded institutional trust, marketized education and weakened public funding, are increasingly present here.

Universities are uniquely positioned to counter post-literate culture, but only if they retain the capacity to do so. Teaching students how to read complex texts, evaluate evidence and tolerate uncertainty requires time, resources and institutional confidence in the value of those practices. When universities are governed primarily by market logic, those capacities are the first to be strained. 

Canada is not yet facing a crisis of higher education, but it is facing a choice. The neoliberal redefinition of public institutions, shaped in part by Calgary School politics, has produced certain efficiencies, but also fragility. The question now is whether Canadian universities will continue down a path that treats knowledge as a commodity, or whether they will reassert their role as institutions capable of sustaining literacy in the deepest sense: not just the ability to read information, but the capacity to understand how truth is made, tested and revised.