A system of winners and losers, in other words? Naylor is quick to argue the opposite. “Canada would probably be well-served to have a large number of small liberal arts universities, more than we have now. And to see those as somehow losers in a game of higher education strikes me as wrong.”
So: more resources for the large research universities to support their ambitions. And more latitude for smaller liberal arts universities to excel at that mandate. But if the small schools would worry less about research, the big ones would put less of their resources to undergraduate education. The University of California at Los Angeles, a big public research university in the U.S., has three undergraduates to every graduate student, Samarasekera said. At the University of Alberta, it’s five to one. “That’s not a good ratio.”
Funding needs to reflect the fact that grad students, who use specialized labs and other materials and need close attention from leading scholars, cost more to educate than undergrads do. Right now in British Columbia, it doesn’t, Toope said. He’d like to welcome fewer undergrads, send those students to new universities the provincial government has created in the past three years, and then put more money toward graduate education and research. “I think we can get to a much healthier balance.”
An hour into our conversation, the five presidents had called for more research money, the ability to concentrate more on graduate education, fewer undergrads, more international students, and the right to charge higher tuition in return for increased financial assistance to the least affluent students. It’s a tall order. And yet, Toope argued, “over the course of the last 20 years we have seen the creation of programs that actually move in the directions we have been suggesting.” The only problem—and it’s a big one—is that there’s been “no overall strategy,” Toope said, no “overarching commitment that relates to what the feds are doing and what the provinces are doing.”
So the discussion was moving from ends to means—from the world the presidents would like to move in, to the mechanisms for getting Canada there. A decade ago, Jean Chrétien was meeting with the premiers every few months to address strains in the health care system. Was that the sort of thing this crew wants now? Were they calling for a first ministers’ conference on higher education?
Naylor’s answer about instead having a first ministers’ conference on the innovation economy was surprising. What’s the difference? Well, a meeting about universities, given Canada’s constitutional niceties, quickly becomes a jurisdictional dispute. A meeting on broader questions avoids that pitfall.
But the five presidents were also eager to recognize that Canada’s most pressing problem is the ailing economy, and that universities are only part of the solution.
“Right now the heat is on economic recovery,” Naylor said. “A big part of the issue is how we move discoveries and innovation from university bench tops out to the marketplace. And I’ve said it before and I’ll say again, universities don’t commercialize. Commercialization is done by companies, not by universities. So much as I’d like to be party to a lot of special pleading about post-secondary, I think the heat right now is on the innovation economy, and we’re part of that. But we’re not a driver.”
Munroe-Blum is a member of the federal Industry Department’s Science, Technology and Innovation Council. That group’s first report, in May, showed that Canada’s private sector performs far lower than comparable countries in implementing new ideas in manufacturing and services. Hence her insistence that any innovation summit must also include industry leadership along with government and universities.
