All Posts Tagged With: "David Naylor"
Lawyering up impedes progress
There are better ways to deal with an unresponsive administration than sit-ins, violence and lawsuits
(Editor’s note: This post has been updated below)
The legal action a group of University of Toronto protesters hinted at two years ago has been filed. In March 2008, about 35 students staged a sit-in at U of T’s administrative officers hoping to discuss a fee hike to a campus residence building with president David Naylor. Four hours into the protest, campus security was called to remove the protesters.
The students say the officers assaulted them as they were forcibly removed from campus, while a letter from Naylor a week after the incident said the students were removed because they “verbally harassed and attempted to impede staff moving in the halls.”
The students were barred from campus, and 14 of them were arrested and charged. In September 2009, all charges were either stayed or dropped. And now, two of the students who were arrested are suing the university, police, Naylor and other administrators, claiming that the university targeted them because they were student leaders even though they took no active part in the altercation with campus security.
The university is standing its ground, intending to contest the suit. In a written statement to the Globe and Mail, U of T explained their position:
“The University of Toronto, and its staff members who have been unfairly targeted by the plaintiffs, will be defending the claim vigorously. Remarkably, the claim goes so far as to sue the innocent victims who were confined in an office against their will in an incident inside Simcoe Hall in 2008. The university believes the claim to be entirely without merit, and it will be seeking to have it dismissed, with costs.”
While it seems the university’s actions did indeed go to far having students arrested rather than engaging in discussion is a bit of an overreaction — a judge has ruled as much (Update: The charges were stayed “on the grounds that the over 17 month time-period between their arrest and the scheduled trial date has been a breach of their Charter right to a trial within a reasonable time“) — protesters that use a big scene to make a point rarely get remembered for the point they are trying to make. Rather than engage in a constructive discussion with the university about an important student issue, this attempt to reverse a fee increase is now only remembered for the aggressive assaults and lawsuits that have embroiled it for the past two and a half years.
Stories like this only serve to make things more difficult the next time a student group tries to effect change. What administrator is going to engage in a meaningful conversation with concerned students if the memory of their predecessors is still so fresh? There has to be other ways to deal with an unresponsive administration than sit-ins, violence and lawsuits.
The goal of the student movement is constructive, which is to say that it builds on the work of those who came before. What this conflict achieved was not only a setback for that discussion, but also for the many that are yet to come.
Where you need to go in Ottawa for a good idea
How to attract human capital and find a place for science students in industry
Science and technology minister Gary Goodyear was at the MaRS Discovery District in Toronto to fulfill a commitment the feds made in their most recent budget: he launched a review of Canada’s policies regarding business R&D. As David Akin points out in his Sun Media column today, the problem is simple enough: Canadian researchers are far better at producing new ideas than Canadian businesses are at implementing them. (Here’s a column I wrote in which John Manley expounds on similar themes.) Far too much effort has gone in recent years into fine-tuning (read “fiddling clumsily with”) the research that goes on in university laboratories. This review attempts to get things right: it looks at the very substantial federal aid on offer to businesses that want to engage in R&D, and asks why so little of that assistance is taken up and why it hasn’t produced a culture of constant innovation.
My very strong hunch is that Canadian industry doesn’t need more help so much as it needs to be made to worry, through a set of policies designed to expose Canada more directly to global competition. So I like this quote from John Manley in David’s column: “Quite frankly, if there is an innovation problem in Canada, that’s the responsibility of the management and boards of directors here in Canada.” I’m really pleased to see that UofT president David Naylor is on Goodyear’s panel; he’s good at the kind of blunt talk that will be needed.
There’s another guy on the panel who will not be familiar to just about anybody, but should be. His name is Arvind Gupta, he runs an organization called MITACS, and I’ve had a story about him ready to run for the past couple of weeks in one of our upcoming university issues. We’ve plucked that story out of our queue so you can read about Gupta now.
Here it is:
Much of the debate over innovation and productivity in Canada focusses on ideas: the search for a new research breakthrough that changes the way we see the world. Governments’ R&D policy concentrates on steering dollars toward types of research that might produce the kind of discovery that can pay off in the marketplace.
But what if the most valuable product from higher education isn’t the ideas but the people who generate them—the superbly educated graduates with advanced math and science degrees?
That question fascinates Arvind Gupta, a professor of computing science at Simon Fraser University. He is also CEO of MITACS, a federally funded Centre of Excellence in information technology.
MITACS (Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems) was one of more than a dozen Centres of Excellence set up by the Mulroney and Chrétien governments to encourage industry and academia to work closely together in specific areas. And it didn’t attract much attention outside computer-science circles until it launched a little internship program in 2003.
That year, 18 doctoral students in maths and science were placed for four-month internships at Canadian companies. The students’ mandate was to tackle a technical problem the company was facing. But science students are problem-solvers born and bred; as often as not, they found other ways to improve the work their host companies were doing. Both sides had to make a real investment: the company paid $7,500 for the extra help, and the students had to report back to their PhD advisors on the work they’d done.
The internship program, dubbed Accelerate, took off. From 18 internships in 2003 it grew to 608 in 2009 and doubled again to more than 1,200 this year. That growth is not artificial. It is demand-driven. As word spreads about how creative these young recruits could be, businesses lined up to get involved. “Our goal is to get this up to 10,000 projects a year,” Gupta says.
College presidents: gaining on their more highly paid university peers
The pay of college executives still trails that of universities, but they’re catching up
Colleges are often unfairly seen as the second tier of the higher education universe—and, as we noted last year, that extends to the compensation of college administrators, who have long been paid substantially less than their university peers
So did anything change in 2008? Yes. Ontario’s Sunshine List salary disclosure was released today, and the tally of Ontario college employees earning more than $100,000 (the threshold for inclusion on the list) is, as always, much shorter than the count for universities. However, the number of college senior administrators earning more than $200,000 has grown by nearly two-thirds, and several highly paid college heads are taking home university-president-sized paychecks.
The highest paid college president in Ontario is Frederick Miner of Seneca College. With a salary of $406,000 and taxable benefits worth $5,000, his compensation is enough to put him squarely in the upper tier of university administrators. Miner’s salary is more than that paid to the president of the largest university in the country, David Naylor of the University of Toronto. (The latter’s salary was $380,000).
Conestoga College president John Tibbits was paid $387,000. That’s more than the president of neighbouring Wilfrid Laurier University. (The president of the other university just down the road, the University of Waterloo was however paid about $101,000 more).
The presidents of five other Ontario colleges — Humber, Sheridan, George Brown, Mohawk and Algonquin — earned over $300,000. Their pay is below that awarded the presidents of large Ontario universities, but in line with the compensation given to presidents of smaller Ontario universities. For example, Dennis Mock, president of Nipissing University, Ontario’s second-smallest public university, was paid $271,000. Bonnie Patterson, president of Brock, last year received total compensation of $338,000.
The pay gap between colleges and universities appears to be larger in Western Canada. According to BC public sector salary disclosure, as compiled by the Vancouver Sun, there were 182 employees of the BC university and college system earning more than $200,000. (Data is for either 2006-07 or 2007-08). Of those 182 highly paid individuals, only two were from the college or institute system: the acting and outgoing presidents of BCIT. (What’s more, hardly any of the 182 members of the over $200K club came from the former university college system; almost all worked at one of the province’s four traditional universities, in particular UBC).
U of T wants fewer students
President says education will be improved by reducing undergrad enrolment on downtown campus
David Naylor, President of the University of Toronto, mused about reducing enrolment on his downtown mega-campus, in today’s Globe and Mail.
U of T is by far the largest university in the country, with most of its nearly 60,000 full- and part-time undergrads (yes, 60,000) going to school on the downtown St. George campus. Downtown is also home to most of the university’s more than 12,000 graduate students.
RELATED CONTENT Naylor has a vision. The rest of us don’t
“We believe we can be better at undergraduate education on the St. George campus if we just reduce the numbers,” Dr. Naylor said. “Right now we have an awful lot of undergraduate students relative to our faculty and staff.” And Naylor noted there is no enthusiasm on his part or from his faculty for stuffing more undergrads into the downtown campus, or for building a third suburban satellite campus. (U of T has suburban campuses at U of T Scarborough and U of T Mississauga). According to the Globe, “in the short term, the university will increase undergraduate spots by adding spaces at its two growing suburban campuses. But over several years, Dr. Naylor says the plan is to cut undergraduates downtown by more than those extra spots.”
In an interesting twist, Naylor told the Globe’s Elizabeth Church that a big, research-intensive school is not best for all undergrads, and that students benefit from having the option of attending small undergraduate-focussed institutions, such as those in the Maritimes.
“Some students come here and have the time of their lives but it is not the easiest experience compared to a very small undergraduate institution,”Naylor said. “In the final analysis you’ve got to be a self-starter and you need to have a real sense of who you are and what you are about because there is not a lot of spoon-feeding.”
The U of T, like many other large research universities, has generally performed poorly on measures of undergraduate satisfaction and engagement. Smaller universities that focus on undergraduate education,in contrast, have generally performed quite well on these measures.
Update: Maybe David Naylor is a (relative) bargain
U of T says president’s house is included in compensation. That means the head of the largest university in Canada is paid less than several of his colleagues
As we reported yesterday, U of T president David Naylor appears to be underpaid relative to his colleagues at other Ontario (and Alberta) universities. (Or, depending on how you look at it, his colleagues are overpaid). Despite heading the largest university in Canada, and coming to the position a few years ago from the already traditionally high-paying (by academic standards, at least) job of dean of medicine, Naylor makes less than the heads of such smaller institutions as McMaster, Waterloo and Guelph. He even makes less than the man who manages the U of T’s money.
RELATED CONTENT Who is Canada’s top paid academic? AND Academics compared to CEOs, politicians AND Professor pay varies greatly by discipline AND McMaster goes to court to block release of president’s pay package
But, we asked yesterday, does Naylor’s compensation disclosure include the taxable benefit of living in the president’s residence, a large Rosedale mansion owned by the U of T? We asked, and the U of T responded that… it wouldn’t respond. Said the U of T spokesman, “The University of Toronto does not discuss or disclose confidential employment matters regarding any member of faculty or staff.”
Which left me speculating in yesterday’s post that Naylor’s $50,000 in other “taxable benefits”might not be comprehensive number, and might not include the value of the benefit of living in the residence. As I wrote, “we can’t see how that $50,000 (which would likely also cover such things as the university’s contribution to the president’s pension) can fully account for more than a small fraction of the value of the house, which would rent for a significant five-figures-per-month sum on the open market.”
But apparently it does.
U of T spokesman Rob Steiner told me in an email this morning that, “The current number under benefits/allowances DOES include the house benefit and a fixed car allowance.” He also told me that “the sunshine disclosure does NOT include pension benefits.”
How can $50,000 (or less, since the amount includes the aforementioned car allowance, and we know not what else) cover the rental value of a large, ravine-edge house, in the most expensive neighbourhood in the city? According to Steiner, you have to keep in mind that while the residence is a place where the president and his family live, it’s also a building used for a lot of university business. Steiner told me that “the ground floor (a good half of the house) of the President’s house and the main gardens operate as institutional space for meeting, receptions, and other events. The President and his family enjoy some great space in the off hours, obviously, but there’s regular traffic.” And Revenue Canada would no more consider that portion of the property to be a taxable benefit than would it consider an employee’s company-provided office space and desk to be taxable benefit.
Steiner notes that Naylor’s compensation for 2007 barely differs from him 2006 compensation, and that Naylor said that he “could not justify accepting any increase to an already high salary with generous housing perquisites given the intense financial
pressure on the institution.”
One final interesting sidebar to all of this: Naylor is married to Ilse Treurnicht, the CEO of the MaRS Discovery District, a research and commercialization centre. And according to the sunshine disclosure, in 2007 she was paid $437,500 —or just slightly more than the president of U of T.
Who is Canada’s most highly paid academic?
Surprise: Ontario’s salary leader isn’t a university president.
Who is Ontario’s highest paid university administrator? Surprise: New figures released by the government of Ontario, under the province’s decade-old “sunshine law,” suggest that the province’s most well-compensated university officer isn’t a president, the traditional top university job. That’s just one of the discoveries revealed in the Ontario’s salary disclosures, which were supposed to be released tomorrow morning, but were posted late this afternoon on a provincial government website.
RELATED CONTENT Academics compared to CEOs, politicians AND Update: Maybe David Naylor is a (relative) bargain AND Professor pay varies greatly by discipline AND McMaster goes to court to block release of president’s pay package
We gave the list a quick eyeball, and the highest paid individual we could find was not the president of Canada’s largest university, the University of Toronto—but rather Felix Chee, the President and CEO of University of Toronto Asset Management Corporation, the body that oversees the university’s endowment and pensions. Chee was paid a total of $562,000 in 2007, comprised of $549,000 in salary and $13,000 in other taxable benefits. David Naylor, the university president, received $430,000 in salary and taxable benefits.
The highest paid Ontario president appears to be McMaster’s Peter George. In 2007, he was paid just shy of $505,000 in salary in benefits. David Johnston of Waterloo earned nearly $482,000. York’s Lorna Marsden was paid $487,000 in 2007, though she retired in the middle of the year. Her successor, Mamdouh Shoukri, earned $179,000 for the approximately half-year that he was York’s president. Alastair Summerlee, president of Guelph, received nearly $447,000
The fact that Naylor is paid less than the presidents of other, smaller universities is surprising. He runs the country’s biggest university, located in what is by far the province’s most expensive city. But we don’t yet know if the disclosed “taxable benefits” portion of Naylor’s compensation—listed as $380,000 in salary and nearly $50,000 in taxable benefits—fully accounts for one important perk of the office: the presidential residence, a large Rosedale ravine mansion owned by the U of T. We can’t see how that $50,000 (which would likely also cover such things as the university’s contribution to the president’s pension) can fully account for more than a small fraction of the value of the house, which would rent for a significant five-figures-per-month sum on the open market.
The University of Toronto declined to provide us with information about the breakdown of the disclosed taxable benefits, or to explain to what degree they account for the notional rent on the presidential residence. “The University of Toronto does not discuss or disclose confidential employment matters regarding any member of faculty or staff,” said U of T spokesman Robert Steiner.
Ontario universities have been sensitive about disclosing the details of pay packages, as the Hamilton Spectator discovered when it filed this access to information request against McMaster.
The highest paid university administrators would appear to be not in Ontario, but in Alberta. According to the University of Alberta’s fiscal statements for year ended March 31, 2007, U of A president Indira Samarasekera was paid $591,000 in salary and benefits. Her Number Two, provost Carl Amrhein, earned even more: $599,000.
Included in the above total were “non-cash benefits” for Amrhein ($209,000) and Samarasekera ($177,000) that are both far larger than anything awarded to Ontario senior administrators. That may reflect higher compensation—but it may also reflect the fact that Alberta has very stringent and highly transparent disclosure laws. It may be that the Alberta figures are higher in part because Alberta law is simply more stringent in its definition of what universities have to measure and disclose under the grab-bag of “other compensation.”
“We do not accede to thuggish tactics by mobs”
U of T president responds to campus protest; says charges may be laid
University of Toronto President David Naylor’s response to last week’s protest and sit-in at the university’s administrative building, Simcoe Hall.
* Click here to read the original story.
* Click here for video of the incident
* For an analysis of the New College fee increase that sparked the protest, click here.
President’s Statement on the Events at Simcoe Hall on March 20th, 2008
to the University of Toronto Community
By David Naylor, President
March 24, 2008
Introduction
On the afternoon of March 20th, a small group of protesters entered Simcoe Hall and conducted themselves in a fashion antithetical to the University’s values and traditions of peaceful assembly. This statement addresses the background to this incident, reviews the unacceptable conduct, summarizes the actions that will be taken by the University, notes with concern the alleged role of some recognized student organizations in this incident, and re-states certain basic principles for general reference.
The Role of Students and the Right to Dissent
The University of Toronto has long upheld its fundamental belief in freedom of expression. We have done so in the basic belief that debate is a central and historic role of any university in a free society. The right of students to assemble peacefully and to express support for, or opposition to, courses of action taken by the University is similarly protected.
To ensure that students are heard systemically, the University also ensures that literally hundreds of students are actively engaged and consulted in the broadest range of university affairs, from setting budgets — including tuitions and ancillary fees — to setting codes of research ethics and planning building projects.
