Our universities can be smarter
Canada’s ‘big five’ presidents have an ambitious plan for fixing our schools, says Wells
Perhaps we are not putting too many words into the mouths of the presidents of Canada’s largest universities when we say something is nagging at them. A sense that things have become skewed in Canada’s higher education system, and more broadly in the way Canada’s economy and society face an uncertain future.
How else to explain the decision by these five top university presidents to approach Maclean’s for an interview? And how else to explain that—after their aides and helpers took care to assure us that the five presidents had “no specific ask” when they offered to talk—they showed up with an agenda for major change in their own institutions and in Canadian society at large?
Over the course of a 90-minute video conference, the big five presidents said their institutions must be given the means and mandates to set themselves still further apart from the rest of Canada’s universities—to pursue world-class scientific research and train the most capable graduate students, while other schools concentrate on undergraduate education. The vision they described would be a challenge to the one-size-fits-all mentality that has governed Canada’s higher education system.
But these five are not only concerned with their own institutions’ place in the pecking order of Canadian higher education. The presidents called for what one of them, David Naylor of the University of Toronto, called a “first ministers’ conference on the innovation economy.” The question that would face the Prime Minister and the provincial premiers at that conference would be: how can Canada improve its performance at putting new ideas to work in the private sector?
Such a summit-level attempt to grapple with Canada’s lagging competitiveness would amount to another sea change. And it reflects a growing consensus among academic leaders that the biggest failure to adopt new ideas doesn’t lie with universities or governments but with a timid and risk-averse corporate culture. That’s why, if first ministers do meet to discuss innovation and the knowledge economy, “having industry leadership there with government and universities is absolutely crucial,” said Heather Munroe-Blum, principal of McGill University.
If anyone is occupationally bound to worry about the future, of course, it’s these five, superb academics and gifted administrators. Along with Naylor and Munroe-Blum, we talked to Stephen Toope, the president of the University of British Columbia; Indira Samarasekera of the University of Alberta; and Luc Vinet of the Université de Montréal.
They have had a bit of a wild year. The economic crisis has played havoc with the endowments that pay some of their bills. Governments looking for shovel-ready stimulus projects have more than made up the difference, but the presidents can’t be sure that taxpayer-funded largesse will last: in the 1990s, the last time federal and provincial governments got serious about eliminating budget deficits, they did it through painful short-term cuts to university and college budgets. Will that happen again?
It certainly will if political leaders continue to regard universities as a nice place to cut ribbons, but not as important resources in addressing Canada’s broader challenges. The big five presidents worry about drift and lack of direction in our higher education system. That direction can only come from political leaders. So all of the presidents, even Montreal’s Vinet, called for Ottawa to pay more attention to what happens on Canada’s campuses.
So, we’ve given the ‘Big 5′ much of the federal research funding over the past decade, and they come back and tell us that in order to do any good they will need even more? Not only that but we should apparently be cutting funding to other university’s research programs? Maybe tear down a few laboratories and ship the staff off to Vancouver or Toronto?
And the argument that supports this redistribution of research efforts to the largest universities is what? Apparently simply because they are the largest universities. Large = good.
Nevermind that the world’s most renowned research schools have significantly smaller enrollments that our ‘Big 5′.
Nevermind that many of our own smaller universities have substantial research investment and infrastructure.
I’m all for improving our research and development, but I find it difficult to believe that these Presidents are motivated purely by a driving concern for Canada. It is just a coincidence that their remedy for our ailing PSE system is give more money to the largest universities.
L
[...] for less undergrads and smaller liberal arts colleges to handle the rest of us. A recent Macleans article discussed the pressing needs of Canada’s higher education, in an apparent approach by the ‘big [...]
The so-called “Big 5″ presidents make good points about the need to focus more resources on graduate education and research, but the essence of their argument remains utterly self-serving, something most in evidence with their desire to charge higher tuition.
UofT, McGill, UdeM, UofA, and UBC are not the only large research universities in the country, and I am not clear on whether their presidents wish resources to be concentrated on their institutions exclusively or on “research-intensive” schools general.
As a further aside, the article notes that UofA has five undergraduate students for every graduate student, which is supposedly an undesirably high ratio. At Dalhousie, the corresponding ratio is about 3.5 undergrad for every grad student. I suppose that would make Dal intrinsically more “research-intensive” even though it has fewer students overall. Or perhaps such ratios are not particularly important.
A fundamental financial problem to raising the graduate student:undergraduate student ratio is that you need undergrads to pay tuition bills and give teaching assistantships that support the graduate students financially. One option would be to rise tuition fees for the fewer number of undergrads, but pay more for a university that admittedly disinvested from undergraduate education, leaving it to “the rest”, and only focus on research?
i.e. “why pay more?”
A number of the above comments point out that most research focused schools in other countries have small undergrad populations and that our G5 clearly do not fit this bill.
I would suggest that the G5 have their hands tied by our system. They only grow large because our government only pays these institutions significant money for the number of undergraduates they have. They are forced to use economies of scale to skim capital with which they can then use to fuel their graduate research.
These schools are only big because their respective provincial governments force them to be so. I think they would love to decrease their undergraduate student body to the benefit of their graduates BUT the money would dry up.
We need to ask ourselves why huge numbers of undergraduates pumped through university every year is a positive. Why do we need undergraduates and why do they need university? The economy is starting to choke on this largesse and the correlation between quality of life and PSE is beginning to get weaker.
Perhaps the research created from our institutions is actually more beneficial to our society than the undergraduates they churn out themselves. Perhaps we do the public a disservice by advocating to treat all PSE institutions as the same.
“Perhaps the research created from our institutions is actually more beneficial to our society than the undergraduates they churn out themselves. Perhaps we do the public a disservice by advocating to treat all PSE institutions as the same. ”
People need to get through undergrad before they can even think of working in research.
@AF,
Yeah, I don’t think the G5 is actually calling for a reduction in the overall numbers of undergraduates in Canada. Likely they want more. They just don’t want to teach them (I guess?).
@ Anonymous,
Obviously working in research is for those who have completed an undergrad.
But I am talking about the benefit of this research (not who directly creates it), the economic and quality of life dividends that it pays to Canadian society.
Since the state (which represents the people) is footing the bill of this research and undergraduate education, the general population should be receiving the net benefit.
Training undergraduates and doing research is only a means to Canadian success not an end. I think you missed this argument of mine.
@L.Miller,
I think the article leaves this unsaid but I think in private the G5 Presidents might argue that funding the education of so many undergraduates is a waste of money (this would be a very unpopular sentiment). If we are putting money in PSE, it should go to make Canada competitive internationally (so that we can reap the dividends of technological and cultural leadership).
Thus, they probably want to see a funding formula that allows them to curb enrollment and increase undergraduate standards. They then want the government to us the savings from decreasing enrollement to better fund research.
[...] to masters and doctoral studies if the ‘Big Five’ have their way. See Paul Wells, ‘Our Universities Can be Smarter’ (Macleans 28 July [...]
People pay a lot of taxes to the government. One portion of these taxes is designated to the general education up to the undergraduate level. So, the Federal government must (not should) support our post graduate students instead of sponsoring foreign post graduate students who will most likely leave Canada at the end of their research. Also, the Federal Government should prioritize and invest in our post graduate resource system instead of involving itself in a senseless war in Afghanistan which costs us a sensless amount of tax dollars. Remember that research costs us very little – a fraction of fruitless war costs – to bring a better life to humanity and to lead us to live peacefully and meaningfully. This means that Canadians could potentially set up an excellent example for the world to follow. Eventually, war or ignorance will cease on its own because knowledge and higher education will sweep away the stains of ignorance.
These five presidents are living in a dream world if they think this type of system will ever be set up in Canada. For starters, the governments of Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Newfoundland, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island would lead an open revolt if the federal government tried to set up some special system for these five universities.
[...] the universities in Canada seems to be heating up. I recall there was some outcry after a 2009 article by Paul Wells for MacLean’s where representatives from the ‘big five’ Canadian [...]