Low Blow From `Top Five’ Universities
by James Turk, Executive Director of the CAUT (excerpted from the Toronto Star, September 1, 2009).
There is a fundamental crisis facing all of Canada’s universities and colleges today, and that crisis is chronic underfunding.
Most institutions understand this, as do students and their families, but the point seems to have been lost on the presidents of the so-called “top five” (Toronto, UBC, Alberta, McGill and Montreal).
Instead of demanding much-needed investment in post-secondary education and academic research as a whole – or a bigger pie – they want a bigger slice of the existing pie for themselves, at everyone else’s expense.
The real problem is obvious. In the early 1980s, the federal government contributed one-half of one penny of every dollar earned by the Canadian economy to post-secondary education. Now, the federal government contributes less than two-tenths of a penny. Just to bring us back to the funding levels of the early ’80s would require an additional investment of more than $4 billion per year.
But rather than calling for a solution to the real problem, the “top five” university presidents say they want a bigger share of existing research money and graduate student education, and that other universities should focus on undergraduate education. Only this, they argue, will help Canada raise the international standing of some of its universities.
A disturbing implication of their proposal, of course, is that undergraduate teaching is somehow a lesser activity, to be carried out in institutions without a serious focus on scholarly work and research.
University of Toronto president David Naylor says we need more “differentiation” among universities. He says we need to move away from what he calls the “Canadian way,” which he says has been to “open the peanut-butter jar and spread thinly and evenly.”
Nothing could be further from the truth – there is already significant differentiation among institutions. Resources may be spread thinly due to underfunding, but they are not spread evenly. Naylor’s university alone already gets about 15 per cent of all research funding in Canada. Together, the big five already get about 40 per cent of the total available funding, and award about 45 per cent of doctoral degrees.
To read the rest of this article, click here.
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Toronto Star Editorial: Survival of the Biggest, September 2, 2009
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