Acting on Conviction: Universities at Centre Stage

Head Table Guests

Douglas Todgham, Vice-President, The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and Second Vice-President, The Empire Club of Canada; Grace Iyirhiaro, OAC Student, Monarch Park Collegiate Institute; Bob Milne, Group Vice-President, Corporate Markets, Bell Canada; John Bankes, Managing Director, Artemis Management Group, Vice-Chairman, York University and a Past President, The Empire Club of Canada; Clara Will, Executive Director, Adventure Place; Dr. Claude Lajeunesse, President, Ryerson Polytechnic University; Veronica Lacey, Deputy Minister of Education, Ontario Government; Marnie McGarry, Director of Development, Adventure Place and a Director, The Empire Club of Canada; The Rev. Greg Kerr-Wilson, Rector, Holy Family Anglican Church; Russell R. Merifield, Q.C., Past President, McGill Society, Toronto; Dr. Susan Mann, President, York University; Louis Ducios, Head of Quebec Government Office; and John Cleghorn, Chairman and CEO, Royal Bank of Canada.

Introduction by Gareth Seltzer

As I gradually get my feet wet as President of The Empire Club, I am amazed at the vast number of dynamic individuals, particularly Canadians, who not only illustrate excellence in service to one's community, but who also come from a varied background and upbringing.

We are honoured to have as our guest today Dr. Bernard Shapiro to tell us about McGill University, the diverse character of the school, and the challenges that lie ahead. McGill is the oldest of the four Montreal universities. Founded in 1821, McGill celebrated its 175th anniversary in 1996. I should point out that Dr. Shapiro has not been with McGill since inception--only since 1994.

McGill has over 30,000 students enrolled in 12 faculties and the Centre for Continuing Education. An English-language institution in predominately French-speaking Quebec, McGill offers courses in more than 30 languages. In fact, there are over 120 countries represented in the student body and the faculty. Perhaps the culture of the university is best illustrated in the coat of arms of McGill. The top of the shield is an open book, the symbol of an institution of learning. The silver crowns on either side of the book refer to Montreal's royal name and the inclusion of the fleur-de-lis is a reminder of the city's French origin.

Dr. Shapiro's responsibilities cover a downtown campus of more than 70 buildings covering approximately 32 hectares of land. The Macdonald campus occupies 640 hectares on the western tip of Montreal island and includes a cattle complex, a state-of-the-art computer-controlled greenhouse, a research farm, orchards, and the Morgan Arboretum.

How does Dr. Shapiro tackle such a daunting task? Is it a result of his years as Deputy Minister of Education for Ontario, or Deputy Minister of Skills Development, Ontario, or his service as Secretary to the Management Board, Ontario, his service as Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Western Ontario, or his service in so many professional and academic offices? What I found out from a colleague of mine is that it actually is a result of the Shapiro family breeding techniques. It turns out the Shapiro family is geared to producing hybrid academic overachievers, Dr. Shapiro's brother Harold being the President of Princeton University, which is celebrating its 250th anniversary this year.

Sir, it is a pleasure to have someone so distinguished with us today, and I am delighted that you are bringing the issues of public policy and development to our centre stage. Dr. Shapiro.

Bernard Shapiro

I am from Quebec, but I am not here to talk about language, head office locations, real estate values or, despite the hurly-burly and obvious importance of the current election campaign, politics and our constitutional arrangements.

I am, however, from Montreal, the most stimulating university environment in Canada and I am here to talk about Canadian universities. The particular title of my talk today, "Acting on Conviction: Universities at Centre Stage," is deliberately chosen although I will approach my topic in reverse order, beginning with Universities at Centre Stage and going on to Acting on Conviction, outlining from my point of view some of what we (both universities and the wider society) must do if the best of our future, whether within academia or within the broader society, is to be realised.

One of the most surprising features of universities, as we reach the end of the twentieth century, is that they have become centre stage. It would never have occurred to most of my 15 predecessors at McGill University that universities would be the central, almost defining features of our society that they have become. That they have become centre stage is a reflection of a number of factors, primary amongst which are two. First, there is the extent to which knowledge and therefore the discovery of new knowledge, the dissemination of knowledge and the development of knowledge workers have become critical factors in economic production. We all recognise that an educated adaptable work force will be the key to success in an information age shaped by technology and global rivalry. Second, we must recognise that for many citizens the real function of the university, while related in some way both to cultural inheritance and the development of new knowledge, is primarily a kind of vocational sieve through which pass those to whom society will allocate the better-paying jobs. Before the late twentieth century, a university degree was not by and large how one got on in life. Now the universities function, in fact if not always in intention, as a kind of social mobility ladder, a place where the cultural capital acquired has, whatever its intrinsic worth, real cash value in the marketplace. Therefore, it is not surprising that in our society where social mobility is increasingly seen as a right of fully expressed citizenship, there will continue to be a growing demand for access to these institutions, or at least--in what will surely become a "flight to quality"--to those of them who offer the likelihood of this outcome.

Thus, universities, for the first time in their long history, have become not only central to public policy but also central instruments of public policy. It is, therefore, all the more important for us to remember that universities, their curricula, their scholarly and other programmes are all, whatever the source of their funding (i.e., whether a public university funded primarily by highly subsidised tuition fees or a private university funded to no small extent by public tax expenditures and public support for research and student assistance) designed to serve some civic purpose. Teaching and research are a public trust. It is the civic purposes served by universities that provide the only foundation for their social legitimacy.

For those of us within academia, civic purpose at centre stage is not as simple nor as straightforward as it might have been when we were at the margin. Now, we must not only focus on but welcome the rules of engagement between ourselves and the broader community on whose support we all depend. Scholarship is not a private pursuit but a public trust, and further, not only is service a societal obligation but teaching is a moral vocation whose end is not just knowledge of technical competence but also of character and will.

If ever the monastic cloister or the ivory tower were an appropriate model for university life, it cannot now be the case. It is now not only inevitable but desirable that universities be drawn into the debates about the relationship of our programmes and commitments to the changing needs of society. It is equally important that these debates focus on real issues of purpose and content rather than what have proved to be the arid and unreal issues of faculty tenure, staff job security, sabbatical leave policies, etc. In any case, we cannot and should not avoid such discussions. In particular, we cannot view such a dialogue as undermining our traditions. Rather it is only through such dialogue that our most important values can be reinforced. We must be prepared not only to teach, to discover and to publish in ever more highly specialised learned journals but also to be public advocates for the research enterprise and to engage more actively in both its public explanation and its application. Scholarship is not to be understood as completed when it is published, exhibited or performed for other agencies, other enterprises, and the wider public must become much more active partners in what we within academia regard as a great enterprise.

The importance of this understanding cannot be overestimated and it is not simply a question of resources. Thus, the only long-term value of the recent federal initiative to assist in the restoration of Canada's and the universities' research infrastructures will be in the higher levels of trust that can be built up between Canada's universities and their private-sector partners.

We must, of course, also be prepared to face our own shortcomings. Although the capacity of Canada's universities to re-imagine and re-invent themselves over time is in itself quite stunning (nothing else would account for our survival), there are areas in which a very great deal remains to be done.

It is only fair to add that the dialogue to which I have been referring needs to be understood as a two-way street, for among the civic purposes of the university is the need to act as a social critic. We must be able to hold up a mirror of society to itself in such a way as to make clear not only the gap that continues to exist between our society's rhetoric of its soaring objectives and the less impressive reality of its actual achievements, but also the inadequacy of the objectives themselves as compared to the alternatives that may be considered. I am convinced, and I must therefore act on the conviction that it is the university's obligation to engage with the wider community, to refrain from regarding our colleagues interested in public policy as simply those who are not serious about scholarship while still maintaining to a larger degree than is currently the case an anti-establishment mentality--not easy to do when occupying centre stage. I am also convinced that it is your obligation to tolerate and even welcome the discomfort that we all experience when even your most sacred ox is gored.

We, of course, must be prepared for the same, for we within the universities have our own, to mix the genders, sacred cows. As Thomas Sowell has pointed out: "Educators ... have proclaimed their dedication to freedom of ideas ... while turning educational institutions (even sometimes within that most cherished of our processes, i.e., peer-review of research) into bastions of dogma."

Teaching is, of course, another civic purpose of the universities, and some, although I am not myself among this group, would see it almost as the civic purpose of our universities. Whatever your own position on this question, I am convinced that the quality of the encounter of our undergraduate students with the university is crucial, not only for them as individuals but for both the universities themselves and our society at large.

In this regard, there has never been any widespread agreement on just what constitutes the most appropriate undergraduate curriculum so that the programmes are, naturally enough, always under challenge and under review. Generally speaking, it is worth nothing that, while vastly improved over previous eras, undergraduate education has not improved as quickly or responded as successfully to society's needs as have faculty efforts in research. Undergraduate education is in need of substantial improvement, and it is necessary for all faculty to renew and/or expand their efforts in this area but it must be kept in mind that the very real achievements of undergraduate education are often obscured by:

?The need for advanced education rising more rapidly than our institutions' capacity to respond;

?The fact that being better than ever does not mean being good enough; and

?A curriculum that reflects the disciplinary and scholarly organisation of the faculty rather than the independent imperatives of a successful undergraduate programme.

This, especially the latter consideration, has led to an increasingly inappropriate hyper-specialisation in undergraduate programmes, thus making a mockery of our own rhetoric and professed values with regard to the integrity of the learner's life and his/her lived experience.

If we are now to truly act on our convictions about the importance of the undergraduate experience, we must reaffirm the value of teaching as a moral vocation, one that is a true calling and not just a means of earning a living that allows us to do research. As such, both the content and the method of teaching should attract our attention and our concern a great deal more than it usually does. Many changes might be worth introducing but I would like to cite three that seem crucial to me.

First, we will need to conceive undergraduate programmes not to cover more fields but more of the interfaces between the academic disciplines where so many of the interesting questions arise and where the real challenge of uncertainty exists.

Second, we must also begin to represent the understandings of student groups newly represented in the university community. The attempt to create in Canada a truly multicultural society, indeed the decision by Canada to replace the old national myth of the British Imperial connection with the new national myth of multiculturalism, has its consequences and these must be faced.

Third, I am entirely convinced by Frank Rhodes' argument that most universities must recapture their own curricula, for in many cases these curricula have escaped from the faculty-at-large (to whom it really belongs) and have fallen into the hands of individual faculty members. As a result our students have courses but do they have programmes? That is, do we have models of study that will bring real coherence, not just professional competence but what Professor Langer has referred to as "mindful learning" so critical to the thinking citizen, to the undergraduate experience? Moreover, will we within these programmes exemplify the same creative energy in teaching as we give a great deal more naturally to research? Sometimes of course we do; it is just not often enough.

Others, in thinking about the undergraduate curriculum, focus on the potential transformation of higher education as a result of the development of the new technologies, i.e., the development of a much wider range of software-integrated environments using broadband communication networks. I have a positive but cautious conviction in this area, if only because cyberspace can easily become an inappropriate return to the monastic cloister and ivory tower and, as Jacob Viner once put it:

"There is no limit to the amount of nonsense one can produce if you think too long alone."

Nevertheless, substantial change will occur if only because the new technologies separate, so much more radically than in the past, student learning from the need to be in a specific physical place. Moreover the very democratisation introduced by rapid and effective forms of electronic communication will, in the not too distant future, confront universities with competitive challenges from other knowledge-based enterprises. Why should the universities retain a relative monopoly on libraries and laboratory space, to say nothing of degree granting? Within academia we will have to find ways of attracting and retaining not only students but also the most sophisticated knowledge workers (i.e., those who should constitute our faculty) for those whom we will most want will also be those who will be most in demand by others.

I have another conviction and that is that above all else the university must stand as a quality enterprise. The issues to which I have been referring to up until now (the issues of civic purpose, of social criticism, of scholarship and of teaching) have been intellectual and academic issues. The challenge for Canadian universities is not simply the question of sustaining academic quality--intellectual solvency so to speak. The real challenge is how we are to sustain intellectual and fiscal solvency at the same time.

Mass education, and we have entered the era of mass education at the university level, is expensive. It puts a great deal of pressure on other people's resources. In most developed countries unit costs in both teaching and research (even when adjusted for inflation, student numbers and range of services) have risen and are rising substantially. In this area, it is easy to overlook what I regard as the miracle of Canadian university development in the last half century, i.e., since the end of the Second World War. Not only have our universities been able to expand their student bodies and repertoire of programmes, but the contribution that Canada is making to the development of new knowledge universally is far greater than we have had any right to expect given the limited resources that have been available for its accomplishment.

What do I do mean by limited resources? Despite the billions that are being invested in Canadian universities, most Canadians do not realise that it has all been done, relatively speaking, on the cheap, that is at less cost/student than has been true for other OECD jurisdictions. The future, however, is very threatening, for in addition to the increasing free trade of goods across national borders, there is now an increasing free trade not only in knowledge but also in knowledge workers. If Canadian universities are not able to participate in this market, we will have provided Canadian students with access to institutions whose quality will not be sufficient to enable our students to compete in the environment in which they will, nevertheless, have to live.

If Canada and Canadian universities are going to effectively participate in the knowledge--intensive and globalised economy of the future, we will have to change. Where, for example, is the Canadian province that is ready to insist that its universities do no less than double their enrolment of international students, no matter what the level of public subsidy? Even more importantly, we will have to find the resources which will enable our universities to attract and retain the faculty that will be necessary if adequate teaching and research programmes are to be made available to our students.

They cannot do so now, for although we appear academically solvent, this objective has been attained by using up accumulated capital reserves rather than by renewing the sources of our talent. More and more, Canadian universities must hope that their present staff will both live and work more or less into the indefinite future, for the institutions simply do not have the resources to replace them at the prices that such highly developed talent can command. I am convinced that given the currently foreseeable range and ordering of government priorities, unless we can succeed in developing a radically different funding model, one far less dependent on government subsidy, university education in Canada may well be facing a long-run situation in which the overall growth in revenues will be lower than would be necessary to maintain, let alone enhance, the quality of the current system.

There is a widening gap between the mission set for Canada's universities and the resources available for fulfilling that mission, and Canadians should not delude themselves into thinking that we can have it both ways for long.

Facing these central issues of cost will not be easy, and universities will have to face the imperatives of increasing productivity, not to do more good things but so as to reduce unit costs, and considering a much wider range of pedagogues and new ideas regarding the structure of university-based programmes.

This will not, however, be sufficient. Quality and competitiveness cannot be sustained by simply reducing costs. If we are to act on the conviction of quality (the middle of the pack is no place for us to be), we will have to find ways of increasing revenue, whether through student tuition, contract research, sale of services, more elaborate philanthropy, etc. Even this will not be enough, The quality of our university institutions will also require the most un-Canadian of public policies, and that is differentiation.

I am convinced that whatever our rhetoric to the contrary, mass higher education systems are best served when there is marked differentiation not only among different types of institutions, as, for example, among polytechnics and universities, institutions and workplace programmes, or community colleges and universities, but also amongst institutions, all of which carry the same generic name. It is clear in both the popular and the academic mind that not all baccalaureate degrees are, or should be, the same and that not all baccalaureate institutions are, or should be, equivalent to each other. In addition, as long as access between institutions and institutional and programme types is not only possible in theory but feasible (if not necessarily easy) in practice, this kind of stratification is entirely appropriate to the heterogeneous systems that we have all become. For one thing, it allows an increasing variety of responses that can better match the increasing variety of both needs and objectives of faculty and students. Further, given the demand for greater accountability, differing programmes and differing institutional missions offer societies a much more finely tuned range of options. Moreover, such differentiation is economically efficient. It does a disservice to everyone to argue that all meaningful higher education requires the kind of wealth and support needed for the relatively small number of great research universities which combine the generation of new knowledge with both liberal and professional education. Differentiation must, therefore, not merely be legitimised. It, as well as a new set of institutional and cultural status arrangements, must be taken up as a matter of deliberate public policy.

Developing convictions is not difficult. Actually acting on them requires a great deal more in terms not only of your own commitment but also of your willingness and capacity to convince and co-opt many others.

There is, of course, a great deal at stake. As Sir Winston Churchill once said: "The empires of the future are the empires of the mind."

For us to sustain the quality of the encounter in the process of teaching and research, we must find ways to engage not only the minds but also the hearts and imaginations of our fellow citizens. The definitions of value and of quality are at least partly an affair of the heart. We must continue to seek value and quality, both intellectual and fiscal solvency, but we must do so with passion and compassion, as well as with a compelling vision that inspires us not only to do our best work but also to connect with one another inside our institutions, between our institutions and with our fellow citizens. After all, as a wonderful classroom poster once put it: "This is a magic place; we are creating the future."

The appreciation of the meeting was expressed by Marnie McGarry, Director of Development, Adventure Place and a Director, The Empire Club of Canada.