Can higher ed reach higher?

There’s a paradox to being the president of a large Canadian university: on most days you get to feel more influential and more powerless than most people can imagine.

In next week’s Maclean’s, we’ll talk with the presidents of Canada’s five largest universities about the challenges they face, and what they think needs fixing in our university system. It’s first worth examining, however, just how big a footprint these five make in Canada, and how Canadian universities in general stack up internationally. The institutions in question—the University of British Columbia, University of Alberta, University of Toronto, McGill University, and the Université de Montréal—are an elite bunch. They have nearly 22 per cent of Canada’s undergraduate student enrolment and produce nearly 45 per cent of the country’s doctorates.

There are nearly 100 universities in Canada, depending how you count it, but these five alone receive 46 per cent of all the money Canada’s main granting councils disburse for research every year. They receive an even larger share—47 per cent—of the money the Canada Foundation for Innovation pays to build new labs and research infrastructure.

At their best, Canada’s largest universities—call them the “G5” as they sometimes refer to themselves in private—have shown a dedication to quality, not just quantity. All by itself, the University of Toronto counts 17 of the 27 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences who serve on Canadian university faculties, and nearly half the country’s Gairdner International Award winners and Guggenheim Fellows. The future is built in these institutions.

Which is not to say they are immune to the headaches of the present. First, they face the problem every university president faces, which is that the extent they can be said to “run” anything is open to debate. Universities are highly decentralized organizations dedicated to the free pursuit of knowledge. Almost all their cherished conventions—tenure, peer review, academic freedom—are designed to safeguard against central control. Within the university gates, presidents must contend with faculty associations, student unions, and boards of governors; beyond the gates they are buffeted by the whims of city, provincial and federal governments.

But the challenges of academic administration are eternal, as are the fiats of governments. The bigger, institutional challenges facing Canada’s big five universities could perhaps be divided under two big topic headings.

First, they are hobbled by one-size-fits-all rules and mandates even as they have begun to try to compete, not against other Canadian universities, but against the best in the world.

Second, they have begun to realize that it matters little how well universities perform their role as incubators of new ideas if those ideas never take root in a broader, innovative society.

David Naylor, the deceptively soft-spoken medical researcher who has served as the University of Toronto’s president since 2005, has been a leading spokesman on both sets of issues. In a December 2006 speech to the Women’s Canadian Club of Toronto, he called for Canada to unabashedly seek to have some of the world’s greatest universities. And since they can’t all meet that goal, Naylor said our generic distribution of roles and resources has to end.