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The University of Ottawa.

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When the University of Ottawa announced this week that it was suspending admission to the journalism program it has jointly run with a pair of colleges for the past decade, there were optimistic noises about just taking a temporary break to "restructure" it.

Around Queen's Park, though, at least a few people are likely hoping the program is kept permanently shuttered.

Provincial policy-makers have long complained that Ontario's 20 universities exert too much effort trying to be all things to all people, instead of focusing more narrowly on what they're good at.

Many of the schools, they argue, are unwilling to adapt to a looming funding crunch; at the same time, the resistance to specialization means they fail to play the roles that they could in helping rebuild the province's struggling economy.

The program in the spotlight this week appears to be a prime (if somewhat extreme) example. Ontario already has a couple of well-established and respected journalism schools, at Ryerson and Carleton – the latter of which is in the same city as U of O. Much as some of us may wish it were otherwise, journalism is not a growth industry that requires greater numbers of practitioners than previously. And in trying to establish its own niche, the university wound up with what its own annual report dismissed as a series of failed experiments that are damaging to its reputation.

Other attempts by universities to play in crowded fields have not been as troubled, but there is still much grumbling about them being injudicious uses of resources. With highly-ranked engineering schools at the University of Toronto and the University of Waterloo, for instance, was a new $112-million facility at the University of Windsor really the best possible investment?

More broadly, there is a perception that smaller universities are trying in vain to compete with the University of Toronto. When the minister then responsible for post-secondary education, Glen Murray, asked each of the schools for mandate letters last year, the governing Liberals came away with the impression that too many of them aspire to be research institutions geared largely toward graduate students, and have not given enough thought to how they can set themselves apart.

There are exceptions, Waterloo's success with both technology and engineering being the most obvious. But former premier Dalton McGuinty made little secret of his frustration with trying to get more campuses to show greater focus, and his successor Kathleen Wynne is likely to soon find herself grappling with the same thing.

Ultimately, it will fall to the government to decide just how much it wants to use funding as a lever to force change on the universities – only providing resources for new programs that fall within more narrowly defined mandates, or pulling back dollars from existing programs deemed to fall outside them.

While their hand may soon be forced by their deficit struggles, there are few signs of the Liberals moving aggressively as of now. Mr. Murray, for whom consensus building is not a strong suit, managed to cause all manner of friction in the sector by prematurely pushing reform plans that never went much of anywhere; his successor, Brad Duguid, is more a managerial sort of minister than one put into a job to drive major change.

The ball, then, remains primarily in the universities' court. It's probably too much for advocates of greater differentiation to expect the University of Ottawa's journalism-school decision to be the start of some broader trend; the best they can hope for on that front is that it won't be accepting new students again in a year or two.

Adam Radwanski is The Globe and Mail's columnist covering Ontario politics.

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