My take on these cuts and others has been an attempt to eliminate competition in the marketplace of ideas. Harper is well known to be waging a communications war – e.g., look at the so called bloggers on the Globe and Mail boards that are taking speaking notes from the Conservative web site to obfuscate discussion on issues of importance to our society.

SSHRC’s health porogram was added by former president Marc Renaud – a sociologist of health – during the growing pains of the CIHR’s early days when it appeared that SS&H researchers were not getting the CIHR grants quickly enough (following significant pressure from the research community). It shoud never had been made a standard program but should have been a temporary stop over as the CIHR worked out its bugs. As such the funds for it were never earmarked for transfer to the CIHR. If Gaffield had made this change before Strategic Review, the loss might have been different.

That said, it’s not like the CIHR doesn’t already receive 3-4 times as much as SSHRC and significantly more than NSERC. Moreover, many health researchers, SS&H based or the Disease and Body-parts types get funding from the USA and have done so for decades. The health research industry will see this as a bliip. Those SS&H health researchers that for one reason or another have not already moved over to the CIHR, which is mandated to support them (and should given the reformation of the MRC to CIHR was justified in so doing), can only blame themselves for their delay and the dificulties this may bring to their work.

CIHR did not get off lightly, their cuts are the same percentage as the rest. What is troubling is that the $11 million of money removed from SSHRC because it was ‘health” research was not transferred to CIHR, it was cut. There was no double-dipping so this is a net loss to the health research sector.

CIHR has cut its team programs (in an age where teams are widely seen as effective ways to tackle multi-disciplinary problems). This is a significant loss (why not cut one of the 13 Institutes?). It’s also less than straightforward to end by saying that the budget of CIHR has increased when $7 million is for 400 x 1 year MSc scholarships and the rolled up decreases in years 2 and 3 are not counted.

The bottom line is that the government mandated cuts to the tricouncils at the same time that the Obama administration added $10 billion to the NIH budget. The enormous contrast defies even the most adept spin-artist.

Let me give some for instances: Gaffield took the whole first year of his appointment to come up with this strategic plan, which was basically to say SSHRC is going to do less of the same. It’s a shame that he is such a good Tory toady that he turned his and SSHRC council’s collective backs on the vision and leadership demonstrated by Marc Renaud. Now SSHRC has little choice but to do less.

Another example, Gaffield and co. knew at least 12 months in advance that SSHRC would be subjected to Strategic Review in 2008-2009. Yet they hid their heads in the sand, by all accounts, and refused to manage the situation until it was too late. So what did he do when the cuts came? 1) He killed off the RTS, which he was already on record saying it was not SSHRC’s job to ensure that researchers had the time they needed; 2) he killed off the health research funding – which should have never been put in place once the CIHR was up and running (Renaud was not perfect) – but it took Gaffield over 3 years to do so. Gaffield does not justify the businesses strings to the Tory funding increases (BTW, all Tory funding increases were met with Tory downsizing) not because he cannot (the least experienced SSHRC program officer could do this) but because he wants not to – perhaps he is fearful he might loose that very significant increase to his pension that accompanies a DM level salary as compared to a full prof. at the U of Ottawa.

In the case of the CIHR and NSERC, the cuts announced are on the whole to programs likely considered to be of marginal utility by their respective council members. The Intellectual Property Mobilization program is of greater importance to NSERC and CIHR strategically than it is to SSHRC (who never increased their funding of this partnered program over $150K per year and only very, very reluctantly (a pre-Gaffield decision); meanwhile NSERC and CIHR collectively invested some $15M). This is a program that tries to help universities take inventions to market – just the sort of thing that the 2008 Federal Science and Technology Strategy called for (there’s some irony in this cut, then). The problem with IPM is that it basically provided business grants to university intellectual property offices (IPOs), many of which have been in existence for over 25 years and have very little to show for it (academics don’t necessarily make good business people – nor public service senior managers). My guess is that the funding needed for the IPOs will be found elsewhere – perhaps an Industry Canada program (the NSERC officer that managed the program moved to Industry Canada three years ago to set up something of this nature).

NSERC’s Centres for Research in Youth, Science Teaching and Learning was a brilliant idea, when first stolen by a NSERC VP, that would bring together people from faculties of education and mathematics to ‘discover’ new pedagogical methods by which high school maths education could become better and encourage more students entering university to follow this discipline. The original beauty of this program was the desire to target Aboriginal secondary school students. Unfortunately this innovative aspect of the program was lost and never implemented.

One can understand the discomfort ‘hard’ science NSERC council members would have with this program – just as one can imagine the discomfort of the Disease and Body-parts CIHR council members have when it comes to dividing up their funding-pie to support social determinates of health research, for instance, which fortunately seems to have been overlooked in the CIHR’s response to Strategic Review. But then given that health concerns are almost always one of the top three of public opinion issues and given how easy it is to justify health research as opposed to, say the importance of literary studies, it is not too surprising that the CIHR appears to have gotten off fairly easy.

Much more can be said but one thing seems to me to be an overriding theme – the lack of leadership shown by people like Gaffield and Fortier. BTW, why did Gaffield find it necessary to hide behind Tom Kierans’ name in his letter to his ‘colleagues’? By all accounts, (alphabetically, hierarchy) his should have been first and probably solely present, like was the case for Fortier and Beaudet.

Why does the taxpayer do this? Economically it is clear that those juristictions that use taxpayer’s monies to fund state of the art pre-competitive research gain a disporportionate share of the new industry as it emerges. Aside from economics, a great university enhances the value of the surrounding community.

As an aside, the teaching versus research issue is a little old-fashioned. Current trends at major universities are to train undergraduates to appreciate and understand new research results as they are being generated. McMaster was ahead of the curve on this one, first with the medical school and later engineering but Toronto, Waterloo and Guelph all have good programs based on this premise.

Since NSERC, SSHRC, and CIHR have existed. Are you saying these programs should be cut to zero?

Seriously, if you want to do nothing but research you should get a private sector job. Since when is it the taxpayers’ duty to subsidise peer-reviewed research?

But robert is right, in the sense that the modern Canadian university considers these sorts of questions irrelevant. It assumes that somebody, somewhere else will do all these things, and the university’s grad programs will cream off the best students, of which there will be plenty to go around.

Richard Feynman once said that he liked teaching because it made him feel like he was accomplishing something, especially when his research was going badly.

Nonetheless, Discovery grants — probably NSERC’s most important program, and one that benefits virtually every science and engineering department in the country — have been in a consistent decline over the past few years. I’ve heard that this is a result of a growing number of professors chasing a static pool of funds, rather than any cuts per se. However, it would have been far nicer to see the money from these fringe programs being rededicated towards Discovery, or some similar broad-based funding program.

If you think that the best way for universities to educate students is by teaching undergraduates, rather than producing research, then you’re irrelevant to the modern university, which means that you’re helping to make Canadian universities irrelevant.

The SSHRC letter doesn’t try ti justify studies that aren’t business-oriented.

It does seem a trend, doesn’t it?

RTSs meant that the SSHRC winners had reduced course loads, which in turn meant that part-time profs were hired to teach the courses that the SSHRC should have been teaching.

That was good for the SSHRC winners, since it gave them extra time to write and research. But it was bad for undergrad students since the best profs (in terms of research potential, at least) were no longer teaching as many undergrad courses.

Now SSHRC will need to convince cash-strapped universities to buy-out their courses for them and hire sessionals at full-cost. It’s unlikely that the universities will be keen on that in many cases.

So, the SSHRC winners will write fewer articles and books, but they’ll be teaching more undergrad courses.

Whether this is good or bad depends on what you think the purpose of universities is. If you think universities primarily exist to do research, then it’s bad. If you think universities are primarily there to educate students, then it’s good.