Ontario’s Universities: An act of public imagination

Jennifer Murphy, Cheryl Green, and Ian Rolson

Ontario’s public universities are experiencing structural fatigue and a growing sense of irrelevance. Once envisioned as civic infrastructure supporting knowledge, inclusion, and innovation, many now resemble fragile systems sustained by precarious funding, hierarchical governance, and declining public trust. Recent calls for reform, such as the Blue-Ribbon Panel on Postsecondary Education, have underscored the urgency for structural transformation (Ontario Ministry of Colleges and Universities, 2023). The research draws on systems thinking, participatory, foresight, and design methodologies to surface the deeper patterns shaping the sector. The map integrates insights from semi-structured interviews, timeline analysis, scenario development, and wind tunnelling. It visualises the evolution of higher education in Ontario from the 1800s to 2050, highlighting structural constraints, cultural narratives, feedback loops, and future possibilities. The mapping process was informed by Margaret Wheatley’s Two Loops model of systems change, enabling the visualisation of declining institutional logics alongside emergent patterns of regeneration.,

Four divergent future scenarios were developed to explore uncertainty and generate strategic insights. These were stress tested to assess the resilience of seven proposed pathways for change, including shifting from performance-based to purpose-driven metrics, positioning, imagination as strategic infrastructure, and promoting distributed leadership through relational governance., Rather than focus on institutional reform through conventional levers, the project argues for cultivating new architectures of imagination, relational trust, and adaptive capacity. The systems map functions both as a product and a process, helping decision makers and interest, holders visualise complexity, surface tensions, and locate new leverage points for transformation., This submission contributes to the RSD14 theme “Arcs of, Impact” by demonstrating how visual and systemic methods can reveal decline while illuminating the conditions for emergence. It connects across subdomains of governance, social systems, and systemic design education. Ultimately, it invites a shift in how we understand universities, not as legacy institutions to preserve but as civic platforms to reimagine. Futures are not inherited. They are cultivated through the relationships we build, the questions we ask, and the systems we dare to redesign together.

KEYWORDS: systemic design, foresight, higher education, systems map, institutional transformation, relational governance, Two Loops model, social innovation, public purpose