5 universités can. veulent + d'argent pour la recherche...

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Five universities team up to push for the lion's share of research dollars


They say Canada needs an elite group of postsecondary institutions focusing
on research and graduate education



Elizabeth Church

Aug. 24, 2009 12:00AM EDT

The leaders of five top universities have unleashed a raging debate on the
nation's campuses, arguing that Canada needs an elite group of postsecondary
institutions focusing on research and graduate education.

The leaders of the universities of British Columbia, Alberta, Toronto and
Montreal, as well as McGill, are pushing for what they describe as a
national strategy for higher education. But they have run up against
criticism from peers who see their efforts as a less-than-subtle attempt to
get a larger share of scarce resources.

"Report after report tells us Canada is not at the forefront of innovation;
I guess what we are saying is we have got to get people listening," said
Stephen Toope, president of the University of British Columbia. "What's the
point of being in any of these jobs if we don't raise some issues and get
people to talk about them?"

Mr. Toope and the other four university leaders want more money for research
and a greater concentration of graduate students, especially at the PhD
level, at a limited number of campuses, with other schools focusing on
undergraduate education.

They argue that such a concentration of resources is driven by economies of
scale and the momentum created by a critical mass of researchers.

Roughly one-third of money from federal granting councils handed out last
year went to the big five schools.



"You can see very clearly that the more graduate students you have, the more
likely you are to have a rich graduate experience and breakthroughs across
disciplinary boundaries," said Indira Samarasekera, president of the
University of Alberta, which would like to see one graduate student for
every three undergraduates on its campus.

University of Toronto president David Naylor, a physician, said that just as
small hospitals are not expected to perform complex heart surgery, advanced
research and education should be done at larger campuses.

Too frequently, he said, funding decisions are made based not on
international standards or an overarching strategy, but rather on political
factors and a Canadian desire to treat everyone equally.

"We have lots of institutions that are brilliant at lobbying for
back-channel money and some of them are doing very well," he said.

Leaders of the five schools say their efforts are rooted in national
interest rather than self-promotion, but their actions have upset rival
institutions.

Some are dismissing the issue as a summer distraction, provoked in part by
hard feelings about the skirmish for stimulus spending on campus
construction projects.

Others say it is about time that provincial and federal governments make
tough choices about the roles played by the more than 90 universities in
Canada; without a plan to guide their development and set priorities, the
system will lose ground, putting students and society at a disadvantage.

Several university leaders contacted The Globe and Mail to voice opposition
to the model the big five schools are proposing.

"Starving people engage in desperate moves. That's true of starving
institutions, too," said Jack Lightstone, president of Brock University in
St. Catharines, Ont., which has expanded its research and graduate programs
in recent years.

"This is about tiering the university system - essentially investing in them
by divesting in others."

Roseann Runte, president of Ottawa's Carleton University, said any attempt
to direct graduate and research money to specific institutions would stifle
competition and send professors packing to campuses where they do not face
such limits.

Others argue that governments must be cautious not to cut off innovation.
"One wants to be a little careful with a system that simply perpetuates what
you have done in the past 10 or 15 years to help you have a leg up in the
future," said David Johnson, head of Ontario's University of Waterloo, which
has developed a growing research capacity in a short period of time, in part
thanks to partnerships with industry and multimillion-dollar donations.

The big five leaders said they are not trying to limit research or graduate
studies to their campuses alone. There already exists a group of 13
research-intensive universities and likely the number required would be more
in the range of 20 or 25, Dr. Samarasekera said.

Robert Birgeneau, a former head of the University of Toronto and now
chancellor at University of California, Berkeley, said if Canadian
governments covered the full cost of research, it would not be long before a
few leading institutions emerged.

The California system, which limits the role of state campuses and gives
preferential funding to Berkeley and UCLA, is often used as an example that
could be applied in Canada.

But Dr. Birgeneau does not hold out much hope of that, despite what he
believes are significant advantages.

"It would really require a culture change and the federal government to
impose itself in educational matters," he said. "It would be next to
impossible at the provincial level, in my experience, because of the nature
of provincial politics."