“Of course it is a touchy issue given the jurisdictional aspects,” Vinet said, referring to the way Canada’s Constitution assigns education to the provinces, not the federal government. “But I really think that as a nation Canada should give itself some standards, some objectives, some goals. This is not, a priori, incompatible with constitutional powers.”
The penalty for drift, Naylor said, is that Canada could be perceived as a second-tier destination for foreign academics and international students. As changing demographics reduce the supply of Canadian-born students, Naylor perceives “very real opportunities for Canadian universities, particularly the leaders, to draw a large number of international students, larger than ever before.”
But for Canadian universities to be attractive, the best among them have to stand out among the best in the world. “Could it be that we simply aren’t producing enough radically disruptive innovators, breakthrough scholars, proportionate to our numbers?” Naylor asked. “It could be that we simply get to a certain point and don’t quite break through the ceiling.”
To produce or lure the world’s best scholars, UBC’s Toope said, universities need to graduate more students with higher degrees. “Both at the level of a master’s but even more importantly at the level of Ph.D.s, we are not producing at the level of our American colleagues, and actually many others in the OECD,” he said. “I suspect that’s an indicator of a relative lack of overall performance at the highest levels.”
But the problem starts even lower, Alberta’s Samarasekera said, with a limited supply of undergrads. “We do very well in terms of statistics on post-secondary education in the OECD,” she said, but those statistics can be misleading because they include Canada’s large population of community college students. “The actual number of university graduates per capita, we’re middle of the pack or lower. And that’s the group that eventually supplies the Ph.D.s and the innovators and the disruptive thinkers.”
But if the pipeline from undergrad to Ph.D. to breakthrough scholars is too narrow, then some universities are going to have to concentrate on that mission of intensive research and scholarship. These five presidents want to volunteer. “Canada maybe is beginning to recognize the need for differentiation,” Samarasekera said. “The view that everybody needs to be equal”—in resources, in academic mission, in mandate—puts fewer noses out of joint. “But the reality is, that doesn’t produce the winners.”
So what are these five asking for? Not special budgets just for being who they are, they insist. These universities already outperform other institutions in peer-reviewed competitions for research funding, infrastructure and research chairs. In the Canada Foundation for Innovation’s latest grant round, for instance, the big five together earned over 40 per cent of all funding. So partly they just want that process to continue.
“If you strongly support the very highest forms of international peer review,” Samarasekera said, “and you drive toward excellence, and you create pools of funding where people can compete at an international standard, you will then encourage and enable certain institutions to differentially excel.”
