All Posts Tagged With: "Big Five"
In support of smaller-scale learning
Bigger isn’t necessarily better, at least when it comes to the university experience
I just read this article by Margaret Wente, which got me thinking about my school. She brings up a number of good points about a shifted focus in the post-secondary education system — a focus on articles, not students. Graduates, not undergrads. Classes the size of small towns, it seems.
I, quite frankly, can’t figure out how anyone can learn in a giant lecture-style setting. Actually, I’m lying; I can’t relate to it. A situation where I read and see someone talk from 20 rows away, rinse and repeat twice a week and never discuss the material almost seems to defy the purpose of university.
Why bother leaving your room? Listen to podcasts of lectures. I could even download lectures from universities around the world and do the reading and listen to them and learn just as much. A friend of mine, before I left for university, suggested to me that if I ever had a bad prof for a common course, to check podcasts from other universities. Why even bother joining any one university when you could theoretically pick and choose among professors from universities around the world and never even see them?
This trend concerned me when I read this post by a mom of two university students about her son and daughter’s swine flu protection plan:
“They’ll be doing two of their electives by distance education and, with the exception of two labs – where their physical presence is required – their other courses could easily be done by podcast if necessary.”
Darn those pesky labs — if not for them her children could spend all year in their residence rooms mainlining caffeine and Tamiflu. I think we’re all forgetting what I think is the most important part of the learning experience. It all comes back to that same reason why King’s students return: community. A growing, learning community of academics, one that starts in first year with an intense year living, eating, and learning together, complete immersion in learning.
Imagine: professors, TAs and undergrads all living in the same place. There would be class lecture/seminar/discussion-style classes, but then those discussions would spill out of the classroom and to the dining hall. You’d challenge your professor’s position over a drink in the campus bar. You would find common ground somewhere like the dining hall, or even the chapel because in this community, everyone is learning and learning from each other.
This is exciting. This is my experience of school, every day. At the University of King’s College, the faculty don’t live on campus as they used to but they may as well, they’re around so often; I see them in meal hall, in the bar, on the quad, at club and school functions. My biggest class this year is 25 people, since I take all courses offered at King’s and none through the King’s-Dalhousie partnership. I just find this a stimulating, exciting way to learn.
So, “Big Five”, here is what I propose to you. Smaller, not bigger. Be inspired by the Oxfordian model, the one we aim for at King’s. Our education system needs work, and I believe this is a better direction.
I can’t really speak to the experience of attending a large university like Queen’s or U of T, because that isn’t my experience, but I do encourage you to avoid isolating. What is the point of being a part of a community of academics if you never access any of this? And I do include other students in the category of academics. So take small classes, introduce yourself to your professor, go to tutorials, get involved in clubs, in student government, but please, please engage in your university.
Reality check for a big idea
What the provinces think of the Big Five’s revolutionary ideas for university reform
Diane McGifford, Manitoba’s minister of advanced education and literacy, has a bone to pick with Canada’s “so-called big five” universities. She’s not alone.
Last month, the presidents of five of Canada’s largest universities approached Maclean’s for an interview. Over the course of a 90-minute video conference, the presidents of McGill University, the Université de Montréal, and the universities of British Columbia, Alberta and Toronto, outlined their vision for a veritable revolution in Canada’s post-secondary system—one that could, they claimed, launch our universities to the top of the international ranks. The one-size-fits-all-mentality that governs higher education policy, they argued, must be replaced with a model that funnels research dollars to top-performing schools and lets the rest focus on undergraduate education. And to get there, they went on, Canada needs an aggressive, national innovation strategy.
These bold propositions, coming from five of Canada’s most distinguished academics, have created a buzz, not least among other universities who are unwilling to cede research hegemony to a handful of large schools. But one thing is clear: without support from the provinces—which, more than any other sources, fund post-secondary education—the Big Five’s big ideas are unlikely to be translated into action. So Maclean’s asked provincial education ministers to give us their impresssions of the proposals.
In short, they’re not impressed.
All the ministers interviewed were adamant that no “strategy that zeroes in on just five” institutions is likely to be championed by the provinces, as John Milloy, Ontario’s minister of training, colleges and universities, explained. But the degree of opposition ran the spectrum from more to less muted criticism. Milloy “has trouble with the idea” that Canada has fallen behind in the first place. Rob Norris, Saskatchewan’s minister of advanced education, employment and labour, finds “the specifics [of the proposal] a little bit adrift.” And Manitoba’s McGifford is “skeptical” of what she feels, quite simply, is “not a very good idea”: the division of universities into research and non-research institutions.
For McGifford, the proposal reeks of too much federal influence. A cohesive national strategy on post-secondary innovation, she says, would allow the feds to encroach on a domain that constitutionally belongs to the provinces. “It would almost demand a federal education minister,” McGifford explains, “and that would be a huge political problem.” She concedes that those provinces with a Big Five school might be more inclined to back the proposed reforms. But in her case, the call is clear: “We don’t want a federal minister dictating or directing us in this field of post-secondary education.”
For Saskatchewan’s Norris, the source of discontent is not that the plan entails too much federal co-operation, but that it allows for too little. He wants “a pan-Canadian approach” built on more “inclusive dialogue” among all provinces. A two-tiered initiative that focuses on just a few schools, he says, can’t serve as a foundation for a national crusade. Instead, he adds, we need “shared objectives” that jurisdictions can address together.
Reactions from the Big Five’s home provinces were decidedly more mixed. Ministers from B.C, Alberta and Ontario (Quebec’s education ministry declined to comment) were in agreement that universities are not the breeding grounds for innovation that they could be. B.C.’s minister of advanced education and labour market development, Moira Stilwell, summed it up with the example of Finland—“the poster country of national innovation.” “They hire 16 R & D [research and development] people per 1,000 workers,” she says. “In B.C., we hire about 4.5.” The ministers also concede that a more focused national discussion would be helpful.
Still, the ministers tempered those concessions with the more politic observation that each institution is special and has a place in Canada’s post-secondary family. Sure, big universities, with their more extensive infrastructure, are likely to attract research dollars. But Alberta, B.C. and Ontario argue that the best strategy for directing funds is still the current peer-review system, which evaluates every research proposal on the basis of its merit (and under which, by the way, the Big Five already attract a substantial portion of funding). “I have trouble with the idea of somehow carving out a sum of money for particular institutions,” Ontario’s Milloy cautions. “I prefer to have the situation that’s in place.” The three also touched on a range of other concerns: that specialization would diminish the quality of undergraduate education, for example, or that a national innovation strategy would threaten universities’ intellectual autonomy.
Small but smart
Why some schools don’t want a Big Five monopoly on research
The University of Waterloo has emerged as one of the leading research centres in quantum computing and digital media. Its computer science and mathematics faculty is the largest in the world. In terms of the number of grants and funding it attracts per faculty member, it is among the most research-intensive universities in the country. But Waterloo is not one of the so-called Big Five universities, who recently proposed in an interview with Maclean’s a radical rethinking of the higher education system: boosting government research funding and resources to the biggest universities—i.e., them—while having other schools shift focus toward undergraduate education.
The proposal of the Big Five—British Columbia, Alberta, Toronto, McGill and Montreal—understandably doesn’t sit well with Waterloo’s president, David Johnston. “How sad it would be to say, ‘We don’t see Waterloo being of high priority for funding because you don’t happen to be in the Top Five universities,’ ” he says. “Simply because you’re big doesn’t mean you’re great.”
Waterloo isn’t alone in its unease with the ideas of the Big Five. The notion of creating a two-tier system, which would favour a select group of big schools, has caused concern among many smaller but highly regarded research universities, like McMaster, Queen’s, Carleton and Victoria. “To say universities of this size can’t compete on an international stage is at best misleading,” says Fiona McNeill, associate vice-president of research at McMaster University in Hamilton, which has done leading research in stem cells and robotic surgery. More than just controversial, the Big Five’s proposal now threatens to pit universities against one another—and potentially launch Canada’s system of higher education into a drawn-out, divisive fight.
Critics acknowledge that, at least in theory, there is some merit to the Big Five’s idea. Large schools might be best equipped to become major centres of research. In the U.S., a few prestigious schools—many of them private—dominate research, while hundreds of smaller liberal arts colleges feed them with well-trained undergrads. By contrast, Canada produces fewer Ph.D.- or master’s-level graduates, and fewer qualified undergraduates.
In reality, however, Canada’s higher education landscape appears to many to be ill-suited to the Big Five’s proposal. Of 95 universities, 40 to 45 do competitive research through their Ph.D. programs. Daniel Woolf, the incoming principal of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., points out that schools like Queen’s already excel in both research and undergraduate education. Like the heads of several other universities, Woolf says that rather than focusing on a few schools, “the dollars should follow excellence in research.”
Yet deciding how to divvy up funding is otherwise problematic. Canada’s system of publicly funded universities is not as flexible as the more heavily private U.S. system, where research centres enjoy large private endowments. In Canada, boosting funding to a few big universities means taking it away from others.
