This is a silly article. It dutifully parrots the usual excuses of universities not having enough money, but this isn’t quite true.

The slide was happening even when Canadian universities were flushed with money. In fact, Quebec and B.C. saw some of the largest increases in public funding from the mid‑2010s to mid‑2020s, yet universities in those provinces (Laval, Montreal, SFU, Victoria) are among those that declined across multiple ranking systems. In other words, higher base funding did not translate into better performance on research impact, reputation, or international engagement metrics.

There are far bigger culprits at play here:

• Governance and risk aversion: Universities are structurally conservative, with Senate and Board cultures that reward compliance and incrementalism rather than experimentation in pedagogy, research models, or community partnerships.
• Over‑reliance on traditional metrics: Promotion, tenure, and resource allocation are still tied heavily to conventional publications and grant culture, which discourages interdisciplinary risk‑taking, industry collaborations that don’t fit neat categories, or new modes of knowledge production.

So when governments or lobby groups respond to ranking drops with “we must invest more in research and innovation,” what they usually mean is “more money into the same pipelines and incentive structures that are already underperforming.”

No guts; no glory.