Knowledge Matters: Essays in Honour of Bernard J. Shapiro 9780773572485

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knowledge matters

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Knowledge Matters Essays in Honour of

bernard j. shapiro

Edited by

paul axelrod

Published for McGill University by McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston · London · Ithaca

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2004 isbn 0-7735-2830-x (cloth) isbn 0-7735-2831-8 (paper) Legal deposit fourth quarter 2004 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp ) for our publishing activities.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Knowledge matters : essays in honour of Bernard J. Shapiro / edited by Paul Axelrod. Essays originally presented at a colloquium held Nov. 2002. Includes 2 essays in French. Includes bibliographical references. isbn 0-7735-2830-x (bnd) isbn 0-7735-2831-8 (pbk) 1. Education, Higher – Canada – Congresses. 2. Education, Higher – Congresses. i. Shapiro, Bernard J. ii . Axelrod, Paul Douglas. lb2301.k55 2004 378.71 c2004-903562-2 Typeset in New Baskerville 10.5/13 by Caractéra inc., Quebec City

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Contents

Contributors vii Foreword xi Heather Munroe-Blum Introduction xiii Paul Axelrod historical perspectives 1 Quelques formes de l’idée d’université au Québec, 1770–1970 3 Claude Corbo 2 McGill’s Role within Canadian Higher Education 16 Peter F. McNally the university and public policy 3 What, Why, and How? The University and Public Policy in a Networked Society 27 Janice Gross Stein 4 Toward a New Understanding of Knowledge Transfer: The Role of Experts in Shaping Public Policy 37 Chaviva M. Hosˇek

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learning and partnership in knowledge development 5 Universities and Industry in Canada: An Evolving Relationship 53 Arnold Naimark 6 Research: A Partnership Opportunity for Universities, Business, and Government 62 William R. Pulleyblank 7 Producing Knowledge for Society 74 Bruce G. Trigger international perspectives 8 L’autonomie des universités françaises et les enjeux de la décentralisation 85 Jean-Michel Lacroix 9 The Challenge of Leadership and Governance in the University 93 Hanna Gray an individual perspective 10 The Educational Journey of Bernard J. Shapiro 103 Paul Axelrod

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Contributors

paul axelrod is professor and dean of the Faculty of Education at York University, where he has also taught in the Faculty of Arts in History and Social Science. He has published widely on the history and politics of schooling and higher education, including, most recently, Values in Conflict: The University, the Marketplace, and the Trials of Liberal Education (2002). He has received awards for his scholarly writing from the Canadian History of Education Association, the Canadian Society for the Study of Higher Education, and the Canadian Association of Foundations of Education. claude corbo est professeur titulaire au Département de science politique de l’Université du Québec à Montréal (uqam ), établissement dont il fut recteur de 1986 à 1996. Il a notamment publié L’idée d’université au Québec. Une anthologie des débats sur l’enseignement supérieur au Québec de 1770 à 1970 (2001) et La mémoire du cours classique. Les années aigres-douces des récits autobiographiques (2000). En 1996 l’Université McGill lui a décerné un doctorat honoris causa en droit. hanna gray was president of the University of Chicago from 1978 to 1993 and is now president emeritus. She is a historian with special interests in the history of humanism, political and historical thought, and politics in the Renaissance and the Reformation. She taught history at the University of Chicago from 1961 to 1972 and is currently the Harry Pratt Judson Distinguished Service Professor of History in the University of Chicago’s Department of History. She holds honorary degrees from a number of colleges and universities,

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including McGill, Oxford, Yale, Brown, Columbia, Princeton, Duke, Harvard, and the universities of Michigan, Toronto, and Chicago. chaviva m. hosˇ ek is president and chief executive officer of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Previously the Director of Policy and Research for Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, she also served a term as Minister of Housing for the Province of Ontario. A former professor of English at the University of Toronto, she holds a PhD from Harvard University. A longtime champion of Canadian education and human rights, she has served as president and executive member of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women and has held senior governance positions at the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia. jean-michel lacroix est recteur de l’Académie d’Aix-Marseille. It est professeur de civilisation nord-américaine à la Sorbonne Nouvelle, Université de Paris III, et il a créé un Centre d’Études Canadiennes en 1990 dont il est directeur. Agrégé d’anglais, Docteur d’État ès lettres, il a publié plus d’une centaine d’articles dans le domaine de la civilisation et de la littérature et une vingtaine d’ouvrages sur le Canada et les États-Unis, dont certains en collaboration. Ses travaux lui ont valu de recevoir le prix Northern Telecom des Cinq Continents en 1986 et le prix Champlain en 2001. Deux ouvrages parus en 1998 et 1999 sont consacrés à la littérature canadienne; un recueil d’articles critiques sur Margaret Atwood a obtenu en 1999 le prix du meilleur livre sur Atwood décerné par la Margaret Atwood International Society. peter f. m c nally is professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies, and director of the McGill History Project, McGill University. He is past-president of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, and the convenor of the Library History Interest Group of the Canadian Library Association. Current scholarly activities include: volume III of the History of McGill, biobibliographical studies of the Redpath family, and analyses of the book collections of Sir William Osler, Sir Charles Siemens, and Judge Robert McKay. arnold naimark is a distinguished medical researcher, educator, and administrator. He is currently professor of Medicine and

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Physiology at the University of Manitoba and director of its Centre for the Advancement of Medicine. Dr. Naimark is the founding chairman of the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation and of the Canadian Biotechnology Advisory Committee and serves on the Council of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, as director of the Robarts Research Institute and Genome Canada, and on the National Statistics Council. He is a former head of the Department of Physiology, dean of the Faculty of Medicine, and president and vice-chancellor of the University of Manitoba. william r. pulleyblank is the director of Exploratory Server Systems in ibm ’s Research Division and the director of the ibm Deep Computing Institute. From 1995 to 2000 he was director of Mathematical Sciences. He has also served as the Research Relationship Executive responsible for the Financial Services sector in ibm , Utility and Energy Services industry, and for the Business Intelligence Group. Before joining ibm in 1990, he held the Canadian Pacific Rail/nserc Chair of Optimization and Computer Applications at the University of Waterloo. He is a member of the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Advisory Committee of the National Science Foundation, the Science Advisory Board of the National Institute of Aerospace, and is a fellow of the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences. janice gross stein , a Trudeau Fellow, is Belzberg Professor of Conflict Management in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto and the Director of the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto. A fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, she is the author of numerous publications on intelligence, international security, negotiation processes, peace making, and public policy, including the widely acclaimed The Cult of Efficiency (2001). She is the winner of the Mershon Prize for an outstanding contribution to public education on issues of national security. She appears regularly as a commentator on cbc Television and tvo . bruce g. trigger is a professor of Anthropology at McGill University. He is the author or co-author of numerous books and several hundred papers dealing with Iroquoian history and prehistory, African archaeology, the history and theory of archaeology,

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and the comparative study of early civilizations. He is the recipient of many honours, including the Cornplanter Medal for Iroquois Research, the Innis-Gérin Medal of the Royal Society of Canada, the Prix du Québec, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Toronto. He serves on the Board of McGill-Queen’s University Press and edits its Natives and Northern Series. A former member of the McGill Board of Governors, he has long spoken out on questions relating to university autonomy and public financing.

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Foreword

I offer a foreword to this volume in honour of our distinguished colleague and friend, Principal Emeritus Bernard J. Shapiro, my predecessor as principal and vice-chancellor of McGill University. I do so with pleasure and gratitude, as one of the many who have benefited from his intellect, insight, creativity, and determination, and from his transformative impact on McGill University and our broader community. The subject of the seminar from which this volume has grown, “Knowledge Matters,” could not be more timely nor more reflective of the values of the man who inspired it. And the question: “Whither the contemporary university?” which framed the discussion, mirrors both the deep concern for the integrity and relevance of the academic mission and the inquiring, forward-looking vision that Bernard Shapiro always brings to his work. The distinction of the contributors and their range of perspectives speak to the respect in which Bernard Shapiro is held by his peers and to the contribution he has made to the cause of higher education throughout his career. Dr. Shapiro’s career encompasses a wealth of experience and broad fields of endeavour. He has proven himself a leading scholar and gifted teacher; a distinguished civil servant and academic administrator; an authoritative writer with a deep knowledge of educational theory and practice, policy, and politics; and a visionary with a sustained belief in the power of education and the institution of the university to benefit both individuals and their communities. In short, he has dedicated his enormous talents and entire career to the advancement of public education.

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Let me quote Dr Shapiro, speaking at the Learning Partnership in May 2003: I continue to believe that Education – for both knowledge and character rather than, for example, either lifestyle or the self-indulgence of the pedagogy of joy of its own sake – is the “sine qua non” for the society we wish to become. Why, however, public education? Because our public schools, public colleges, and public universities are – aside from the patently frightening models of the television set and shopping mall – our only option of creating for our young people the common socialization experience that is so vital if we are to have any hope of resisting the centrifugal forces so characteristic of modern, multicultural, technical and essentially urban societies.

Dr Shapiro’s leadership of McGill during the eight years of his tenure was one of lasting accomplishment – from a reform of academic programs to deficit reduction and administrative restructuring, and the renewal of relationships with decision makers, donors, and Quebec society. Throughout, his prime concern was to reaffirm McGill’s tradition of academic excellence across Canada and around the world. This volume does him proud. heather munroe-blum Principal and vice-chancellor McGill University

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Introduction

Whither the contemporary university? This question engaged the vigorous minds of a group of distinguished thinkers who gathered at a conference in November 2002 in honour of Bernard J. Shapiro, upon his retirement from the principalship of McGill University. The participants’ presentations drew from their vast experience and accomplishments in the worlds of scholarship, university administration, and the public and private sectors – all important facets of the life and career of Bernard Shapiro himself. The authors, whose revised conference papers comprise this volume, generally avoid the language of “crisis” in their analyses of university life. They are, by inclination and conduct, people of action, devoted to problem solving in theory and practice. They are neither despairing nor sanguine about the future of the university. But they do offer a variety of cautionary notes because they believe that much is uncertain in the world of higher education. Universities have always been multi-purpose and contested institutions. Conceived in medieval times as sanctuaries for scholars in search of religious knowledge and truth, they also served utilitarian purposes by training professionals and administrators. Subsequently, theological divisions emerged within Christian scholarly communities, whose notions of liberal education were challenged, in turn, by secular and other “Enlightenment” thinkers. In the midnineteenth century, the English churchman and scholar Cardinal John Henry Newman contended that while the university should steep students in an orthodox Christian education, it should also expose them to ideas arising from the secular world. “Knowledge,” he contended, “is capable of being its own end.” At the same time,

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he warned against the tendency toward specialized academic study, which threatened to undermine the principles of general education. By the early twentieth century the span of higher education widened, and internal academic debates deepened. Those engaged in scientific research frequently faced off against “humanists” who disliked the division of the university into intellectual silos. Recalling earlier conflicts between “ancients” and “moderns,” academics from various disciplines held different views on what constituted essential knowledge, a debate taken up in Robert Hutchins’s famous book The Higher Learning in America (1936). As the scholars argued, students – primarily from middle-class families – had their own agenda. They set out to accumulate credentials from a range of undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs which would enable them to improve their lives in the competitive marketplace. In the three decades following World War II, the university emerged more prominently than ever as a significant institution in the social and economic life of industrial nations. Human capital theory reinforced the belief that those with high levels of education would prosper, and that society itself would derive material benefit from their labours. Post-secondary education, in short, was considered a valuable public and private investment. Facing demographic pressures from the baby boom generation, governments poured unprecedented amounts of funding into the construction and operation of universities and colleges. Post-secondary educational participation rates rose significantly, particularly in North America, where the university assumed an important role both in sustaining class privilege and in encouraging social mobility. Indeed, the rewards of higher education were so valued that those long excluded from or marginalized within the university now sought access and equitable treatment. Women, religious minorities, and people of colour invoked human rights principles and laws to secure places in university classrooms. Admissions policies, especially those employing affirmative action instruments, were themselves the subject of internal debate and even legal challenge. As the cultural and racial identities of their constituents diversified, particularly in institutions located in large urban centres, universities increasingly offered new academic programs and courses that were less male-oriented and “Euro-centric” than in the past. This, too, provoked much controversy, symbolized by Alan

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Bloom’s sweeping critique of the contemporary university in The Closing of the American Mind (1987). In recent years economic instability has added to the aura of uncertainty in university life, particularly in countries like Canada with a long tradition of publicly funded higher education. Periodic recessions, government policies emphasizing deficit reduction, and the competing costs of other social services, especially health care, have led universities to seek alternative sources of funding, including significantly higher tuition fees. The forces of the marketplace have penetrated the walls of higher learning, arguably with greater influence than ever. Arnold Naimark, a contributor to this volume, expresses cautious support for business-university partnerships because of the collaborative research opportunities and important social and economic benefits they offer. Similarly, drawing on his experience in both the university and the business world, William R. Pulleyblank offers suggestions for producing fruitful interaction between educational and corporate cultures. By contrast, Bruce G. Trigger worries about the threat to the humanities and social sciences, and to independent scholarly inquiry generally, in the face of market pressures. He believes that the value and integrity of the university rest in its ability to address critically the economic and technological forces that envelop it. The humanities and social sciences “must play a vital role in any effort to shape a sustainable future for human beings.” Indeed, Janice Gross Stein and Chaviva M. Hosˇek contend that the “knowledge society” now craves what universities have to offer. By cultivating intellectual networks across institutions and borders, or by demonstrating the originality and pertinence of interdisciplinary research, university academics, working with others, can provide vital intellectual leadership in many policy areas. What’s more, argues Stein, the university avoids this opportunity at its peril. As Hosˇek demonstrates, other knowledge agencies and communities are already developing social policy plans and options; the implication is that universities may be rendered irrelevant if they do not fully engage in this process. The university’s ability to respond creatively to the multitude of challenges it faces depends to a great extent on the quality of leadership at its helm. In order to manage relations with government and industry, effectively balance teaching and research, maintain

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academic quality, and reconcile the need for accountability and autonomy, a university president requires, in Hanna Gray’s view, breadth of vision and political skill. Even then, success is uncertain. Were presidents better able in the past to affect the direction of their institutions? In a review of McGill’s history, Peter F. McNally implies that this was the case. Three principals who led the institution for a total of eighty-five years not only left their distinctive stamps on McGill’s academic culture but they helped “cultivate a national consciousness of higher education as a Canada-wide concern.” Universities have certain common, enduring characteristics, but educational change occurs, as well, within distinctive cultural and regional contexts. Claude Corbo traces the development of several intellectual traditions in the history of Quebec universities – the theological, the humanist, the functional, the utopian, and the revolutionary. Currently, if the functional idea is most prevalent in university life, the humanist perspective continues to offer much that is pertinent in the world of human affairs. Indeed, suggests Corbo, the integrity of the university itself may well depend on the strength and endurance of the humanist ideal. In his exploration of university life in France, Jean-Michel Lacroix examines the persistence of, and tensions among, the forces of centralization, university autonomy, and regionalism. All of these influences are likely to continue in some (as yet undetermined) form as French authorities, like their North American counterparts, grapple with “la compétition internationale et de mondialisation économique.” These authors explore, from various perspectives, the life of the mind – a preoccupation of Bernard J. Shapiro throughout his illustrious career. I attempt to offer a preliminary glimpse – by no means a full history – of the multi-faceted components of Bernard Shapiro’s academic and professional experiences. A man of diverse and eclectic interests, he has been fascinated by the process of how humans attain knowledge. As an administrator and public servant, he sought to create conditions that would improve learning and understanding, both in educational institutions and in the community at large. This book, and the colloquium that led to it, are testimony to the impact he has had and the respect he has earned. This volume would not have been produced without the commitment and efforts of Provost Luc Vinet, and Béatrice Kowaliczko,

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director of the Office of the Provost, McGill University. Danielle Anisef, a McGill graduate, offered invaluable research assistance. I am also grateful to Tina Sposato and Emily Tjimos of the Faculty of Education at York University, who helped prepare the manuscript for publication. paul axelrod

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historical perspectives

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1 Quelques formes de l’idée d’université au Québec, 1770–1970 claude corbo It is a privilege to contribute to this tribute to Bernard J. Shapiro. He certainly deserves the honour for his excellent service to McGill and to the university community at large during a very difficult decade. I also value the occasion provided by the theme of this colloquium to reflect on some basic questions concerning the fate of the contemporary university. Despite my being the academic equivalent of the foot-soldier waging a kind of trench warfare in favour of undergraduate education and trying to find some time and energy for research and scholarly pursuits, I am nonetheless aware of the great issues facing our universities. The conflicting opinions I hear on these issues have some resonance with me. Those who fear that universities risk their very soul if they agree to the Faustian pact proffered them with dollars, often very big dollars, by enterprises and governments remind us with some wisdom that earthly powers usually have agendas quite distinct from the disinterested pursuit of knowledge. Others rightly remind us that universities, throughout their long history, have proven quite resilient in surviving formidable opponents and in escaping the potentially crushing embrace of worldly powers. Thus, they say, getting involved in partnerships with business and government is a manageable risk. Such issues lead us to basic questions: how should universities evolve and adapt to changing circumstances? To what extent should they seek partnerships with the outside world? How should they deal with their partners? In discussing the issues of the evolving university, it may prove useful to explore different concepts of the university. I will do so by examining various forms taken by the idea of the university in

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Quebec since the late eighteenth century. Two facts, I believe, make Quebec’s case interesting. First, Quebec has had a dualist university tradition: one English-speaking, with a Protestant background; the other, French-speaking with a Catholic background. Second, Quebec universities have drawn inspiration from diverse university experiences: English, Scottish, German, American, and French, for instance. It seems to me that in Quebec different conceptions of the university have evolved. They can be described as theological, humanist, functional, utopian – and even revolutionary. Such ideas have been expressed elsewhere in a different context, and some of them are still active in today’s debates about the university, and not only in Quebec. Ces idées de l’université ne se retrouvent généralement pas à l’état pur dans les discours sur l’institution. On retrouve le plus souvent des alliages d’idées différentes. Mais, dans ces alliages, on retrouve aussi le plus souvent une idée dominante. Aussi, la typologie qui suit, si elle durcit un peu les choses, permet tout de même de discerner des courants d’idées majeurs et de bien caractériser les diverses formes de l’idée d’université. L’idée théologique de l’université a dominé le siècle qui va des débuts de l’Union de 1840 jusqu’à l’aube de la Révolution tranquille. Cette idée est maintenant passée à l’histoire – du moins dans notre partie du monde. L’idée théologique veut que l’université, sous la supervision des autorités ecclésiastiques, serve avant tout la promotion de la foi religieuse et perpétue le caractère chrétien ou catholique de la société. Dès 1845, sous l’instigation de l’énergique évêque de Montréal, Mgr Ignace Bourget, les évêques du Canada réclament la création d’une université catholique capable de “dispenser un enseignement complet … avec toutes les garanties d’orthodoxie et de moralité que demandent les intérêts de la foi.”1 Cette idée théologique de l’université est principalement, quoique non exclusivement, associée à l’Eglise catholique. Elle est défendue principalement, quoique non exclusivement, par des gens de l’Eglise catholique québécoise: des dirigeants majeurs, Mgr Bourget, les cardinaux Rodrigue Villeneuve et Paul-Emile Léger, des ecclésiastiques ayant aussi statut d’intellectuels comme Lionel Groulx ou Alphonse-Marie Parent, et aussi des universitaires s’efforçant de réconcilier l’idée théologique avec la modernisation de la société et de l’institution universitaire, par exemple, le jésuite spécialiste de

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littérature Pierre Angers ou les sociologues Jean-Charles Falardeau et Philippe Garigue. Pour les plus anciens défenseurs de cette idée théologique dont Bourget lui-même et son allié ultramontain, Mgr Louis-François Laflèche, l’université est un prolongement de l’Eglise et de son travail d’évangélisation. Elle est aussi une machine de guerre vouée à la défense de la foi catholique contre les idées modernes condamnées dans le célèbre Syllabus du pape Pie IX, à la protection des jeunes générations contre les effets néfastes du protestantisme, du libéralisme, du positivisme, du socialisme – bref de la modernité. L’université est encore le lieu de formation d’élites laïques capables d’exercer leurs professions ou leur leadership social et politique en pleine fidélité avec les enseignements de l’Eglise. Il faut ajouter que certains Anglo-québécois du dix-neuvième siècle voulaient aussi inscrire leurs universités dans la mouvance spirituelle du protestantisme. Au vingtième siècle, l’idée théologique de l’université s’efforce d’intégrer le prodigieux développement des sciences et la modernisation progressive de la société québécoise et de ses institutions. Au cours des années 1950, par exemple, le cardinal Paul-Emile Léger s’emploie à plusieurs reprises à démontrer que les universités, tout en faisant leur pleine place aux sciences positives et aux savoirs professionnels de pointe, doivent permettre à la théologie d’occuper un rôle intégrateur des connaissances dans une vision complète de l’être humain et de l’univers comme créatures de Dieu. Cette conception théologique, même à la veille de la Révolution tranquille, réclame le maintien d’institutions universitaires chrétiennes dans leurs valeurs fondamentales et assure la réconciliation de la science et de la foi. Par opposition à cette vision théologique se déploie aussi, depuis la deuxième moitié du dix-neuvième siècle, une idée de l’université que l’on peut décrire comme humaniste. L’idée humaniste veut que l’université soit avant tout un temple de l’esprit humain, la maison du savoir cultivé pour lui-même, le lieu où l’intellect poursuit en toute liberté son exploration de tout le réel, et aussi le jardin où se réalise la maturation des jeunes intelligences. La conception humaniste de l’université est exprimée principalement, mais non exclusivement, par des laïcs et des universitaires de carrière. On peut citer, à titre d’exemples, le grand principal de McGill durant la deuxième moitié du dix-neuvième siècle, Sir William Dawson, et son successeur, William Peterson, les premiers

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grands universitaires du Québec francophone, comme l’économiste et sociologue Edouard Montpetit et le botaniste Frère MarieVictorin, ou ceux de la génération suivante, de l’écologiste Pierre Dansereau au chimiste Cyrias Ouellet et au politologue Léon Dion. Pour les tenants de cette idée humaniste, l’université constitue le lieu par excellence du développement de la connaissance, de la recherche scientifique libre et désintéressée, de la promotion de l’érudition, et de la culture. L’université permet à la société québécoise de participer à la république internationale des savants et des lettrés. L’université humaniste est aussi vouée à la formation des jeunes générations. Cependant, à ce titre, l’université doit faire baigner la formation professionnelle dans un environnement façonné par l’influence dominante des facultés scientifiques et culturelles qui constituent le cœur vibrant et l’âme essentielle de l’université. Celle-ci est humaniste, en matière de formation, dans la mesure où elle privilégie l’acquisition d’une riche culture et d’une forte capacité de comprendre et de repenser le monde et la société. L’idée humaniste de l’université, ici comme ailleurs, se caractérise encore par l’attachement à la science positive, à la pratique de la recherche scientifique et de l’érudition. Pendant les années 1930, alors que les établissements vivent de très grandes difficultés financières, Marie-Victorin, le botaniste de réputation internationale, proclame qu’il n’y a pas d’université si ses professeurs ne publient pas. Dans le sillage de Marie-Victorin plusieurs générations successives d’universitaires s’emploieront à persuader la société et le gouvernement qu’il faut, d’une part, respecter la liberté académique et l’autonomie des universitaires et des universités et, d’autre part, leur procurer le soutien financier nécessaire à l’accomplissement de leur mission de développement de la science et de la culture, sans les obliger à s’inféoder à des objectifs utilitaires ou rentables à court terme. Cette idée humaniste de l’université n’est pas nécessairement anti-religieuse. Elle fait de la religion une affaire individuelle et non un principe d’organisation institutionnelle. Cela est bien différent de la vision théologique. Mais, comme le dit encore Marie-Victorin, à la fois savant et homme d’Eglise: “Ne pas prêcher mais rayonner, imposer le christianisme vrai par la valeur de ceux qui le professent.”2 Pour cette vision humaniste, la connaissance, la science, l’érudition, sont des valeurs en elles-mêmes et doivent être servies pour elles-mêmes. Il n’y a pas nécessairement incompatibilité de

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principe entre science et foi, mais il faut se garder de mêler les genres. Et, comme le dit un grand universitaire québécois, le dominicain Georges-Henri Lévesque, la liberté, dont celle des universitaires, est aussi un don de Dieu. Par ailleurs, pour l’idée humaniste, l’université n’est pas, par sa nature même, indifférente aux grands enjeux de société, comme la préservation et le développement de l’identité québécoise ou la justice dans les rapports économiques et sociaux. Cependant, la meilleure façon pour les universitaires de bien servir les causes sociales ou politiques méritoires, ce n’est pas en se plongeant dans les discours patriotiques ou l’agitation sociale ou politique, mais en accomplissant le mieux possible leur tâche spécifique. Si la science, la connaissance, la culture sont vigoureuses au Québec, il en rejaillira de soi des avantages et des bienfaits pour la société sans que les universitaires aient à devenir des politiciens ou des activistes sociaux impliqués personnellement dans tous les combats de l’heure. L’université servira le mieux la société québécoise en l’arrimant au mouvement scientifique international et en apportant une contribution originale au patrimoine scientifique et culturel commun de l’humanité. L’idée humaniste de l’université se manifeste aussi par une sensibilité très attentive à l’évolution de l’institution universitaire ailleurs dans le monde. Pour développer leur vision de ce que doit être le devenir de l’université québécoise, les défenseurs de l’idée humaniste cherchent à connaître et à adapter ici les innovations les plus prometteuses mises en œuvre par les universités étrangères au Canada, aux Etats-Unis, en Europe. Il leur est essentiel de faire évoluer au rythme du monde l’université québécoise et de l’insérer au centre du flux toujours mouvant de la modernité de pointe. A ce titre, l’idée humaniste se démarque de l’idée théologique; celleci, si elle est attentive aux enseignements de Rome et des universités catholiques étrangères, accueille avec beaucoup de réserve ce qui vient d’ailleurs et qui ne participe pas de sa foi. Une troisième forme de l’idée d’université traverse toute l’histoire de l’institution au Québec. Il s’agit de l’idée fonctionnelle (pour ne pas dire utilitaire) de l’université. Elle apparaît dès 1770 dans ce qui semble être le texte québécois le plus ancien sur l’enseignement supérieur. Un groupe de nouveaux sujets de Sa Majesté britannique réclament du gouverneur Carleton, au moment où il s’apprête à se rendre à Londres, d’obtenir des autorités britanniques la

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création d’un véritable enseignement supérieur dans la colonie du Québec. Ils écrivent notamment ceci: “Elever la jeunesse dans les bonnes mœurs, dans la probité, dans la vertu, dans l’étude des langues, dans les sciences de philosophie, de mathématiques, du génie, de la navigation, du droit civil, et généralement dans tous les arts et dans toutes les sciences qui rendent l’homme utile à la société, et qui font l’honneur d’une nation, a de tout temps été le but et la fin des collèges.”3 A la même époque ou peu après, d’autres pensent que l’université peut protéger les jeunes hommes de la colonie du néfaste républicanisme que diffusent les Etats-Unis. L’université est donc conçue comme un instrument de progrès économique et social et aussi de cohésion politique et idéologique. Cette conception fonctionnelle de l’université est très souvent proposée par des groupes extérieurs à l’institution. A certains égards, l’idée théologique de l’université témoigne d’affinités avec l’idée fonctionnelle dans la mesure où elle voit dans l’université catholique canadiennefrançaise une machine de guerre contre le protestantisme, l’anglicisation, plus tard l’américanisation, et contre la désagrégation de l’identité nationale, thème apprécié par plusieurs intellectuels du vingtième siècle. Dès le milieu du dix-neuvième siècle, les libéraux de l’Institut canadien, que Mgr Bourget combattra sans relâche, associent enseignement supérieur, développement de la société et promotion professionnelle et sociale des diplômes. Par exemple, le journaliste libéral Etienne Parent fait de l’enseignement supérieur la base d’un système méritocratique visant à assurer à la société de bons gestionnaires publics. Avec le développement de l’industrialisation, l’idée fonctionnelle gagne en vigueur. Dès les années 1870, le principal William Dawson voit dans l’enseignement supérieur des sciences appliquées, du génie, une clé du développement économique par la mise en valeur des ressources naturelles du pays. En 1905 son successeur, le classiciste William Peterson, prononce une allocution, significativement intitulée “The University’s Place in a Commercial City,” dans laquelle il plaide pour la mise en place à McGill d’études en commerce. Il ne s’inquiète pas qu’on le considère comme “utilitarian” et ajoute: “It is quite possible not to lose sight of the humanities and yet be practical.”4 Tout au long du vingtième siècle, comme en ce début du vingtet-unième, l’idée fonctionnelle rayonne dans toutes les directions.

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De la création de “Business Schools,” comme l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales, en 1910, à celle du réseau multi-campus de l’Université du Québec, avec les années 1970, dans le discours des milieux d’affaires, des gouvernements, du mouvement syndical même, on retrouve cette idée qui voit en l’université d’abord et avant tout un rouage central de l’économie et de la société, la condition de la productivité et de la compétitivité des individus et des nations, un levier de promotion économique et sociale pour des groupes moins favorisés. Ainsi, cette idée fonctionnelle fait du développement et de la transmission du savoir et de la culture des moyens de puissance et de prospérité économique, dont découlent tous les autres biens sociaux. L’autonomie universitaire et la liberté académique s’apprécient essentiellement à la lumière de leur efficacité dans la production et la diffusion de savoirs utiles. Par ailleurs, on n’hésitera pas à conscrire l’université à la défense et à la promotion de causes sociales et politiques. Le mouvement nationaliste traditionnel demande aux universités de se consacrer à la défense de l’identité canadienne-française. Pendant la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, les universités sont associées à l’effort national de guerre. Il se trouve même un journaliste libéral, Jean-Charles Harvey, qui propose la création d’une université fédérale consacrée à la défense de “l’unité canadienne.” En 1947 le directeur du Devoir, Gérard Filion, invitera les Canadiens-français à contribuer généreusement à la campagne de financement de l’Université de Montréal en mettant en lumière les importantes contributions des universités au progrès de l’agriculture, de l’industrie, de la médecine. A la veille de la Révolution tranquille des années 1960, l’influent intellectuel québécois André Laurendeau appellera les universités à agir comme creuset du renouveau de la société. Cette idée fonctionnelle et utilitaire de l’université commande, aux yeux de ses tenants, un très généreux financement de la société et des gouvernements. La Commission royale d’enquête sur les arts et les sciences au Canada (Massey-Lévesque) et la Commission royale d’enquête sur l’enseignement dans la province de Québec (Parent), à quinze ans d’intervalle, exhortent les gouvernements à investir massivement dans l’enseignement et la recherche universitaires en invoquant leur substantielle, nécessaire, et prometteuse contribution au progrès économique, social, et culturel du pays. Il y a, à cette générosité envers les universités, une contrepartie qui s’accommode très bien avec l’idée fonctionnelle. L’université doit

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quitter sa tour d’ivoire, s’impliquer activement dans la société, pendre en charge de façon prioritaire les besoins collectifs, s’engager dans des partenariats étroits avec les grands décideurs économiques et, surtout, politiques. Depuis les années de la Révolution tranquille québécoise, il est donc de plus question de planifier le développement des universités, de concerter plus efficacement leurs forces et de mieux coordonner leurs efforts, de confier à l’Etat un rôle de supervision des affaires universitaires, d’élaborer une “politique des universités.” Dès 1967, faisant écho à ces idées véhiculées dans le milieu, le Conseil supérieur de l’éducation du Québec propose les premiers éléments d’une politique des universités voulant que leur développement s’effectue en coordination avec les autres grandes politiques de l’Etat québécois. Aujourd’hui, si je ne m’abuse, cela s’appelle les “contrats de performance.” L’évolution accélérée des récentes décennies vers une économie du savoir tout comme la féroce concurrence entre les économies nationales qu’impose la mondialisation nourrissent l’idée fonctionnelle de l’université. Cette idée s’efforce de séduire les universitaires et les universités. Elle insiste sur l’importance potentiellement considérable de la contribution universitaire au bien-être collectif et elle offre tant des moyens financiers généreux que des partenariats flatteurs avec les puissances de ce monde. Cependant, pour plusieurs, cet intérêt dont les entreprises et les gouvernements honorent les universités a toutes les apparences d’un pacte faustien. Cette conception fonctionnelle de l’université, dont les racines sont anciennes, se trouve évidemment au cœur des vigoureux débats actuels sur la nature et le rôle des universités. A l’heure actuelle, le monde universitaire est très largement sollicité par ces deux visions : humaniste et fonctionnelle. Seule une résurgence majeure du sentiment religieux ou la montée du fondamentalisme ou de l’intégrisme religieux pourrait redonner vie à la conception théologique de l’université. Cela paraît peu probable encore que l’histoire soit fertile en rebondissements imprévus. Mais la domination des conceptions humaniste et fonctionnelle de l’université n’est pas absolue. Il y a eu et il existe encore d’autres façons de concevoir la nature et le rôle de l’université. On peut d’abord évoquer une certaine idée utopique de l’université, entendant par là une conception qui s’inscrit résolument en opposition aux idées dominantes au moment où cette utopie prend forme. Au fil des décennies, la vision utopique a pris des formes

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fort diversifiées. Certains ont rêvé d’une université ouverte à tous sans exception, même à des adultes n’ayant pas suivi le parcours scolaire préalable jugé indispensable au succès de la formation universitaire. D’autres ont voulu donner une préséance absolue au projet personnel de formation des individus sur les programmes formels élaborés par les facultés. Il y a eu à la fin des années 1930 l’idée d’un ecclésiastique québécois proposant que les universités se dotent d’un “département de culture populaire” pour donner au “peuple les moyens de se sauver lui-même,” département qui serait “dirigé par un comité mixte de représentants des universités, des syndicats ouvriers, et de quelques autres associations à but éducatif.” Cette idée utopique se retrouve aussi dans le mouvement étudiant des années 1960. C’est le rêve de créer une chaude et authentique communauté des professeurs et des étudiants où les pouvoirs des administrateurs et des groupes externes seraient réduits au strict minimum, où les étudiants seraient même salariés pour étudier. L’idée utopique de l’université veut aussi transformer les rapports entre professeurs et étudiants, briser le pouvoir des maîtres pour y substituer une quête partagée et fraternelle de savoirs nouveaux. Cette conception conduit à une remise en cause radicale des formes de l’apprentissage: en rupture avec l’enseignement magistral, l’université utopique est conçue comme essentiellement une bibliothèque ou, mieux encore, une vaste banque de savoir où chacun peut puiser pour réaliser son projet personnel de formation. L’idée utopique veut “réinventer” l’université pour éventuellement “réinventer” la société et la vie humaine individuelle et sociale elle-même. La commission d’enquête sur l’enseignement des arts au Québec (1966–1968), instituée en 1966 par le gouvernement sous la présidence du sociologue Marcel Rioux, a formulé certains éléments d’une vision utopique de l’université en s’efforçant d’imaginer l’université de l’ère “post-industrielle.” Il faut y intégrer, à côté des sciences, des humanités, des formations professionnelles, l’ensemble des disciplines artistiques; it faut y faire une place, en parallèle à la recherche scientifique, pour la création artistique sous toutes ses formes. L’université nouvelle, préfigurant une société nouvelle, doit former un être humain nouveau, pleinement créateur, capable de s’auto-diriger et d’inventer ses normes et ses valeurs, un homme multidimensionnel par opposition à l’homo oeconomicus unidimensionnel du capitalisme technocratique. La vison utopique de l’université s’est manifestée avec éclat durant le fameux mois de mai

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1968 en France, mais elle a pénétré tous les campus universitaires occidentaux durant ces années-là. Des slogans comme, “Prends tes rêves pour des réalités” ou bien, “Soyez réalistes: demandez l’impossible” témoignent d’un état d’esprit qui veut que l’université soit le creuset d’une culture nouvelle et d’un monde nouveau. C’est le rêve à jamais inassouvi d’une université vraiment nouvelle. Cette vision utopique abhorre l’idée fonctionnelle de l’université comme elle se méfie de l’idée humaniste, la première parce qu’elle signifie l’asservissement de l’université aux puissances économiques et la seconde parce qu’elle consolide le pouvoir des professeurs et masque leur association avec les pouvoirs de ce monde. L’idée utopique de l’université a la vie dure; elle résiste aux efforts déployés pour la discréditer ou l’anéantir. Je suis personnellement convaincu que, plus s’affirmera l’idée fonctionnelle, plus l’université s’associera étroitement aux entreprises, plus l’idée utopique se manifestera comme contrepoids ou comme mécanisme de défense. Par nature, l’utopie exprime à la fois la range de ceux qui se sentent dominés ou dépossédés et aussi le rêve d’un monde radicalement différent et meilleur, cela se trouve aussi dans ce microcosme du monde qu’est l’université. L’idée utopique de l’université est sans cesse nourrie par le triomphe du modèle de l’économie de marché, par une mondialisation profondément inégalitaire et exploitrice, par la volonté même d’intégrer sans cesse plus étroitement l’université à l’ordre socio-économique dominant. L’idée utopique connaîtra des périodes de latence et des moments d’éruption bruyante, mais elle perdurera, ne seraitce qu’au sein de petits groupes marginaux mais vigoureux. L’effondrement du monde soviétique et la fin de l’affrontement planétaire entre modèles socialiste et capitaliste semblent avoir relégué aux oubliettes de l’histoire une autre conception de l’université, la conception proprement révolutionnaire voulant que l’université soit à l’avant garde de la révolution prolétarienne. Cette conception a été clairement formulée par un personnage qui a laissé un sombre souvenir à McGill, Stanley Gray, qui prêchait l’alliance de l’université avec toutes les forces anti-capitalistes et anti-impérialistes pour établir la société sans classes enfin purgée de l’exploitation de l’homme par l’homme. Influencée par le marxisme, par des philosophes comme Herbert Marcuse, cette conception révolutionnaire paraît aujourd’hui bien dépassée par l’évolution du monde. Mais, nous observons aussi dans

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les manifestations contre la mondialisation la présence de drapeaux rouges et de ces drapeaux noirs de la tradition anarchiste qui rappellent que l’université est sollicitée par certains de ses membres de servir la cause d’un monde radicalement différent de celui qui a pris forme depuis la fin de la Guerre froide. Cet examen des diverses formes prises par l’idée d’université au Québec depuis deux siècles me suggère quelques réflexions en guise de conclusion. En premier lieu, l’idée fonctionnelle d’université, si elle est très irritante pour certains, n’est certainement pas une idée neuve. Au contraire, elle traverse toute l’histoire de l’université au Québec. L’université québécoise a toujours été pressée de se consacrer au service de diverses causes jugées prioritaires par différents groupes de la société. Même l’idée théologique de l’université a des aspects utilitaires très déterminés. Aujourd’hui, les attentes de la société à l’égard des universités sont plus élevées que jamais parce que le savoir est, plus que jamais, le moteur du développement économique et la condition de la productivité et de la compétitivité des individus et des nations. Les appels au partenariat émanant des entreprises, des gouvernements, et des groupes sociaux iront vraisemblablement en croissant ; ces appels trouveront, au sein même des communautés universitaires, des partisans qu’on ne peut légitimement qualifier de traîtres. Dans ces conditions, en second lieu, il ne faudrait pas se surprendre de la résurgence périodique d’une idée utopique de l’université, de l’appel à une université autre et différente. Plus se fera forte la vision fonctionnelle de l’université plus il se trouvera des membres des communautés universitaires pour rêver d’une université qui prenne ses distances avec les puissances de ce monde et qui affirme sa volonté d’échapper à une étouffante étreinte du milieu. Evidemment, l’idée utopique de l’université ne propose pas une approche administrative très pratique. Cependant, elle se présente comme la forme la plus pure et la plus dure que puisse prendre l’opposition à une vision fonctionnelle triomphante de l’université. Même les tenants de la conception humaniste de l’université, angoissés par la force de la conception fonctionnelle, pourront se découvrir des affinités avec la vision utopique. En troisième lieu, je suis enclin à penser que les défenseurs de l’idée humaniste ont probablement intérêt à repenser la façon de

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promouvoir leur idéal. Invoquer la “tradition universitaire” ou se référer à l’époque où l’université aurait été le pur temple de l’esprit humain et la maison du savoir désintéressé n’émeuvra sans doute pas beaucoup les gouvernements ou les entreprises; le présent et l’avenir les intéressent davantage. En plus, ces derniers pourront rétorquer que, tout au long de son histoire, l’université a le plus souvent été liée de très près aux puissances de ce monde. Une meilleure ligne de défense pour la conception humaniste consisterait probablement à en appeler aux propres intérêts des gouvernements, des entreprises, et des groupes sociaux. Certes, l’université peut s’intéresser aux besoins de l’heure, aux questions qui préoccupent aujourd’hui ses partenaires extérieurs. Mais, il est vrai aussi que le progrès de l’humanité doit beaucoup à ces esprits rebelles qui ont défié les idée reçues, qui sont allés au-delà des frontières des savoirs constitués, qui sont intéressés à des questions que la sagesse conventionnelle considérait farfelues, gratuites, inutiles. Les événements du 11 septembre 2001 nous ont montré comment le monde évolue de façon souvent très imprévisible et comment des recherches, en apparence gratuites et désintéressées, sur des phénomènes tels la pensée et les sentiments religieux peuvent tout à coup revêtir une brûlante actualité. Exception faite des universités, il n’y a pas beaucoup d’institutions dans nos sociétés où les esprits rebelles peuvent transgresser les frontières de savoir, déployer un regard neuf sur le monde et réaliser ces percées scientifiques et conceptuelles novatrices qui peuvent puissamment contribuer au progrès humain. L’idée humaniste de l’université a le mérite de nous rappeler que le développement du savoir requiert le libre exercice de l’esprit humain et une bonne dose de ce que l’on appelle ailleurs le capital de risque. L’université ne sert jamais mieux la société que lorsqu’elle se fait assez vaste pour accueillir et encourager des pratiques diverses de l’enseignement et de la recherche, de la création, et de l’érudition. Au risque d’être peu orthodoxe, je rappellerai ce mot du président Mao Tsé-toung qui disait, lors de ce qui fut peut-être le meilleur jour de sa vie: “Que cent fleurs s’épanouissent! Que cent écoles rivalisent!” Nos sociétés peuvent-elles traiter autrement leurs universités? Enfermer l’université dans une seule idée de sa nature et de son rôle, c’est courir des risques également néfastes: soit l’asservir aux puissances de ce monde, soit l’isoler du soutien et de la complicité indispensables de son milieu.

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notes 1 Claude Corbo, L’idée d’université. Une anthologie des débats sur l’enseignement supérieur au Québec de 1770 à 1970 (Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2001), 50. 2 Ibid., 178. 3 Ibid., 26. 4 William Peterson, Canadian Essays and Addresses (London: Longman’s Green and Co., 1915), 266.

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2 McGill’s Role within Canadian Higher Education peter f. mcnally In preparing this presentation, I found myself contemplating the continuities and discontinuities of McGill’s evolution. This contemplation was assisted by the choice of Redpath Hall as the venue for the colloquium. The University’s most impressive architectural space, it was built by people confident in the future. With its doublehammer beamed ceiling, recalling generations of students who formerly studied under it – and today sheltering the portraits of University worthies – the hall is redolent of continuing achievement. It seems an appropriate setting to consider the university’s past, present, and future – specifically McGill’s role within Canadian higher education. While recognizing the importance of the university’s local – Montreal/Quebec – and international roles, I would maintain that McGill’s Canadian role has long been central to its self-definition, which has traditionally chafed at jurisdictional boundaries. Indeed, the board of governors urged unsuccessfully that universities be placed under federal jurisdiction in the British North America Act (1867) establishing Canadian confederation. Instead, education, including higher education, came under provincial jurisdiction. Despite failing to achieve the board’s stated goal, this episode stands as an early instance of McGill’s taking a stand on national issues. Two factors may help explain why Canadian higher education has frequently received leadership from McGill: first its having received little government funding until the 1960s; and second, its being virtually the only university in the country existing as neither a religious nor a provincial foundation. This account is, therefore, not about McGill über alles, or McGill triumphant, but rather about leadership in the true sense of the term.

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Contemplation for this paper was also assisted by Jeffrey Simpson’s article in the Toronto Globe and Mail on 9 November 2002, “There’s at Least One Chrétien Legacy: Universities,” which spoke of $6 billion of increased funding directed at such things as the Canada Foundation for Innovation, centres of excellence, and the indirect costs of research. After listing eight of the country’s leading researchintensive universities, including McGill, Simpson finished on this plaintive note: after Chrétien has gone “barely a word will be written about [his] incredibly useful initiatives.”1 Without wishing to enter a debate on the relative merits or “demerits” of Mr Chrétien and his various policies, I set before myself three questions. First, how did McGill become a leading research-intensive university? Second, what role has McGill played in the recognition of higher education as a Canada-wide, not just a local, concern? And third, what role has McGill played in encouraging federal government funding of Canadian higher education? In answering these questions, I have chosen to look at four major areas in the university’s development: academic accomplishment and innovation; standards for high school leaving and university entrance; affiliation with colleges across Quebec and Canada, including assistance in the development of new universities; and the campaign for federal funding of higher education. This review will concentrate on McGill’s three longest-serving principals: Sir William Dawson (1855–1893), Sir William Peterson (1895–1919), and F. Cyril James (1939–1962). All three had a significant impact upon Canadian public policy and possessed national and international reputations as eminent scholars, visionary and gifted administrators, and effective fund-raisers. All three have McGill buildings named after them. In total they occupied the principal’s office for eighty-five years of McGill’s 181-year history. Dawson was a paleontologist and leading Canadian intellectual of the nineteenth century; Peterson was a notable classics scholar who straddled the line between nineteenth- and twentiethcentury attitudes; and James was an economist closely identified with twentieth-century social issues.2

academic accomplishment and innovation An institution does not acquire a significant reputation simply by being old and large, but does so through the important accomplishments of effective people. As such, the history of McGill may

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be characterized as the story of visionary administrators, creative scholars, and generous benefactors engaged in a shared mission. Although ambiguities and overlaps make it difficult to lay claim to being the first or oldest anything in Canadian academic history, McGill can justifiably claim to be older than most Canada’s major research universities – founded as it was in 1821. As well, one may certainly point to a number of McGill events as Canadian firsts, such as the establishment of the faculties of Medicine (1821–1829) and Law (1853). William Dawson introduced important initiatives such as the Scottish curriculum, along with a general approach that was less oriented toward English-style classical education than toward American practical and professional formation. He also widened the range of academic subjects taught, including separate science courses; and he took important first steps toward the full inclusion of women in university life. Medicine built upon its early strength through association with many prominent individuals, among whom was Sir William Osler, whose role in combining research and theory with professional practice was crucial to the development of university-based medical education. Major benefactors such as Peter and Grace Redpath played an important role in McGill’s academic development during this era.3 By constructing Canada’s first specifically designed museum, and its second academic library building, the Redpaths made manifest McGill’s academic strength, thereby giving prominence to Canadian higher education in general. Taken together, these factors propelled McGill – in however embryonic a form – into becoming, along with the University of Toronto, one of Canada’s first research-oriented universities. Certainly, no other university in the country during this period achieved such a prominent research profile. Sir William Peterson, who succeeded Dawson in 1895 and piloted McGill into the twentieth century, introduced the GermanAmerican approach to higher education, whereby a modernized undergraduate curriculum had superimposed upon it graduate programs and professional schools, including nursing, architecture, physical and occupational therapy, and librarianship. Establishment of the school of graduate studies in 1906 was a crucial development, followed by awarding the first PhD in 1909.4 By comparison, the University of Toronto launched its doctoral program in 1897, awarding the first PhD in 1899, but established its school

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of graduate studies only in 1922.5 Among the notable academics of the era were Sir Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy, who won Nobel Prizes for their seminal work on the atom undertaken while at McGill. It was during Peterson’s tenure that there emerged the full generosity of one of the greatest benefactors in the entire history of higher education, Sir William Macdonald, whose gifts included Macdonald College and the science and engineering buildings on the main campus. Lord Strathcona was also remarkably generous, providing among other things the Medical Building, and Royal Victoria College for the education of women. During World War II and the postwar years, Cyril James guided a university whose academic accomplishments continued to shine. Of course, science and medicine were particularly prominent, with the Eaton and Foster laboratories and their state-of-the-art equipment supporting the focus for much research. McGill also developed an international reputation in atomic research with Robert Bell, and in psychology with Donald Hebb. Among other innovations, the Islamic Institute and the McGill University Press were established. Into the 1960s McGill was one of the few Canadian universities granting PhDs in a wide range of fields. In several disciplines and professions, the university was at times the only one – or one of a few – in the country offering programs and degrees. Consequently, outstanding students and faculty from across the world were attracted by the institution’s teaching and research reputation. McGill’s benefactors remained a central element of its continuing success; the most important in this era was undoubtedly J.W. McConnell, whose munificence rivalled Macdonald’s. As a result of the academic strength and private financial support acquired during the Dawson, Peterson, and James years, McGill – despite limited government funding – contributed greatly to enhanced visibility and prestige for Canadian higher education, and was also able to provide leadership in three major areas: standards, affiliation, and federal funding.

standards for high school leaving and university entrance Because of its unique circumstances, McGill was well situated to function across jurisdictional boundaries in a number of academic areas. Beginning in an era before provinces and territories invariably

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had departments of education setting standardized examinations, the university provided students from British Columbia to Prince Edward Island with uniform high school leaving/university entrance exams. From 1858 candidates across the country sat for McGill Senior Matriculation, and from 1913 Junior Matriculation. In 1907, for instance, 550 candidates wrote the exams in sixty schools and colleges throughout the country, with a student in Victoria, British Columbia, receiving the highest standing.6 Dawson and Peterson took full advantage of the need and opportunity to attract good students, provide national standards, and publicize McGill. Even as late as the 1930s, when most provinces were setting their own school leaving/entrance exams, Ontario and Saskatchewan still maintained matriculation equivalence agreements with McGill. Even so, the number of McGill candidates declined steadily from 1,187 in 1931 to 743 in 1944. During 1943–44, under Principal James, in order to emphasize that acceptance into McGill did not automatically follow from passing the exams, the university renamed its matriculations Junior and Senior School Certificates. By now, candidates were coming largely from private schools – mostly but not exclusively in Quebec. Having a standard that transcended provincial boundaries appealed to these schools and their constituencies. The university’s matriculation/certificate exams ended in 1969, when Quebec introduced cegeps or junior colleges as necessary routes for entrance to McGill and other provincial universities.7

affiliation with colleges across quebec and canada, and assistance in the development of new universities McGill’s unique circumstances also permitted it, during the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries, to assist in the attainment of academic respectability by other Canadian universities and colleges. In recognizing their first- or second-year programs as academically equivalent to its own and granting successful candidates advanced standing, McGill helped struggling colleges and supported new institutions in the process of becoming full-fledged universities. Colleges offering the first and possibly second years of McGill-recognized programs stretched across the country from the Pacific to the Atlantic, and included: Morrin College, St Francis Agricultural College, and Stanstead Wesleyan College, within Quebec;

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and, Acadia and Mount Allison universities along with King’s and Memorial colleges outside the province. In British Columbia, establishment of higher education is particularly associated with McGill. In 1899 and 1902 the Vancouver and Victoria high schools became affiliated colleges. Few students, however, could afford to complete their degrees in Montreal. With the financial support of Sir William Macdonald and an enabling act by the Quebec legislature authorizing McGill to operate in other parts of the country, the stage was set for solving the problem. In 1906 government bills were passed by the British Columbia legislature, establishing the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning in British Columbia and authorizing McGill to operate colleges in the province. Vancouver College immediately became McGill University College of British Columbia, with Victoria College joining the new institution a year later. Only in 1915 did this arrangement end upon the inauguration of the University of British Columbia. The role of McGill’s Professor Henry Marshall Tory in this story and the development of other Canadian universities is pivotal. His presence in the province permitted the realization of Peterson’s grand design for bringing higher education to B.C. If in the early years, McGill alone was considered sufficiently free of religious and provincial constraints to undertake such initiatives and affiliations across jurisdictional boundaries, by James’s time in the 1940s this was no longer so. For instance, Memorial College, Newfoundland, negotiated affiliations with several Canadian universities – including McGill. Like other universities, McGill was open to the charge of imperialism – supporting smaller and newer institutions as an easy way of developing feeder institutions – but like them also deserves credit for its altruism in lending a helping hand.8

campaign for federal funding of higher education Money has always been a preoccupation at McGill. For most of the university’s history it received little or no government support but depended on student fees and generous benefactors. Although the bulk of the operating budget now comes from government grants, this has been the case only since 1960. For instance, in 1911 McGill received only $3,000 from the Province of Quebec, whereas the University of Toronto received $750,000 from Ontario; in 1940

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McGill received less than 10 per cent of its operating budget from government, whereas the average for all Canadian universities was 40 per cent. That said, until the 1950s government financial support – federal or provincial – for Canadian higher education was generally meagre. Principal James played a central role in ensuring that federal and provincial money should come to all Canadian universities, including McGill.9 James’s ability to play such a role had its origins during World War II when he chaired the Federal Advisory Committee on Reconstruction, which gave him important insights into postwar demands upon universities. In addition, as an economist he realized that in an age of high personal income tax, fees and benefactors could no longer meet the needs of any university. Between 1948 and 1950, while chairing the National Conference of Canadian Universities (nccu), he met with Prime Minister Louis St Laurent and Vincent Massey – who had just been appointed chair of the Royal Commission on the Arts, Letters and Sciences – and impressed upon them how greatly universities needed government support. In 1951 the nccu launched a public relations campaign for federal government support of higher education, and the Massey Commission recommended federal support for university scholarships and bursaries. The next year direct federal aid to universities began. In 1956 the Canada Council was created by Parliament to support university research in the humanities and social sciences. To help deflect provincial opposition, James devised the Canadian Universities Foundation through which federal funds were channelled to universities. Even so, on the grounds that education is under provincial authority, Premier Duplessis prevented McGill and other Quebec universities from accepting Ottawa’s money. In 1960, with the Quiet Revolution, McGill received $5,866,378, which had been held in trust since 1952 by the federal government. As well, the government of Quebec began assuming its own responsibility for funding higher education. That today both the federal and provincial governments should accept the principle of supporting universities is one of James’s major legacies. To answer the three questions with which I began, I would reply as follows: first, that McGill’s status as a leading research-intensive university has come about thanks to the endeavours of many principals, researchers, and benefactors over the past 181 years, but is

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particularly due to the early efforts and ideals of principals Dawson and Peterson; second, that by developing national university entrance standards along with affiliations to newly emerging institutions, Dawson and Peterson also helped cultivate a national consciousness of higher education as a Canada-wide concern; and third, that in nurturing support for higher education from the federal government – and eventually the provincial government – during the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, Principal James’s role was equally important to McGill and to other universities across the country. What of the future? Prediction is always easy; it’s shaping the future that’s difficult. It is unlikely that any one institution acting alone will ever again be able to assume such a leadership role, cutting across jurisdictional boundaries, as McGill played in the past. Strong provincial departments of education, during the late twentieth century, felt threatened by national university exams, and interprovincial college and university affiliations – and will probably continue to feel threatened into the foreseeable future. That said, who knows what opportunities or needs will arise in the electronic world of the twenty-first century and beyond? The most likely need and opportunity for leadership in the future – as in the past – will be in the areas of academic vision and achievement, secure funding, and recognition of higher education as a Canada-wide concern. As much as ever, McGill has no alternative but to strive for leadership in these areas. If the past is any indication of the future, McGill University is bound to continue its tradition of harnessing its academic accomplishment as a research-intensive university to further and expand not only its own institutional imperatives but also those of higher education throughout Canada.

notes 1 Jeffrey Simpson, “There’s at Least One Chrétien Legacy: Universities,” Globe and Mail, 9 November, 2002, A17 (Montreal edition). 2 Stanley Frost, McGill University: For the Advancement of Learning (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1980, 1984), 2 volumes. 3 Peter F. McNally, “Peter and Grace Redpath: Collectors and Benefactors.” Fontanus: From the Collections of McGill University, XI (2003): 152–73. 4 Frost, McGill University, vol. 2, 82.

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5 Martin L. Friedland, The University of Toronto: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 180. 6 “Qualify for McGill,” Montreal Gazette (10 July 1907), clipping located in McGill University Archives, Information Files, 994, “Examinations, Matriculation, and School Certificate”; Frost, McGill University, vol. 1, 73–4. 7 The McGill University Archives has hundreds of files, which are mostly restricted, on this little-studied topic. Matriculation Board Minutes, from 1895 to 1969, can be found in rg7/5/2144f, rg7/40/2145a, and rg7/145/2146c among others. 8 Frost, McGill University, vol. 2, 73–9; E.A. Corbett, Henry Marshall Tory, Beloved Canadian (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1954), 53–84; Malcolm MacLeod, A Bridge Halfway: A History of Memorial University College, 1925–1950 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990), 236–7; among the many relevant files in the McGill University Archives, rg2/82/1699 on Memorial College is a good representative example. 9 Paul Axelrod, “McGill University on the Landscape of Canadian Higher Education: Historical Reflections.” Fontanus: from the Collections of McGill University, X (1998): 17–33; Stanley Frost, The Man in the Ivory Tower: F. Cyril James of McGill (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991), chap. 10, and 230, 243–5; Gwendoline Pilkington, Speaking with One Voice: Universities in Dialogue with Government (Montreal: History of McGill Project, McGill University, 1983), chaps. 3–5.

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the university and public policy

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3 What, Why, and How? The University and Public Policy in a Networked Society janice gross stein For the first time in world economic history, a fully renewable resource is the basis of wealth and prosperity. Today, the most important resource is knowledge – the production of knowledge, the multiplication of knowledge, and the creation of a knowledgeable population. Knowledge is the most valuable global resource in today’s global economy and global society. And, unlike previous periods in economic history, use of the most valuable resource does not deplete the available store but multiplies and often generates new knowledge. We hear a great deal both about the information revolution and about knowledge-based economies and societies. Information and knowledge, however, are quite distinct; to use an economic metaphor, the first is the raw resource and the second is the value-added that is generated by processing. To convert information into knowledge requires skilled analysis, interpretation, adaptation, and refinement. It is knowledge, not information, that provides the platform for economic growth and human development.

the networked society In a global knowledge economy, all of our important institutions are changing as they adjust to a global knowledge society that is networked. The network is the defining form of social organization in the global knowledge society. Knowledge networks are not a passing phenomenon; they are fast becoming the most important form

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of production and exchange. “As a historical trend,” observes Manuel Castells, “dominant functions and processes in the information age are increasingly organized around networks. Networks constitute the new social morphology of our societies, and the diffusion of networking logic substantially modifies the operation and outcomes in processes of production, experience, power, and culture.”1 Networks are important not only because of the knowledge they produce and disseminate, but because of the social organization and innovation they enable. A network is a collection of connected points or nodes, generally designed to be resilient through redundancy. It can be one terminal, connected to the Internet, or one expert communicating with another expert in a common network devoted to a shared problem. Knowledge networks, in other words, can be both technological and social. The design of the network determines its resilience, its flexibility, its capacity to expand, and its vulnerability to decay and debilitation. Although networks are most strongly associated with post-industrial society, the network as an organizational form is hardly new.2 Christian religious scholars based in relatively isolated monasteries of Western Europe in the early Middle Ages organized their interaction through distributed knowledge networks. Likewise, the Maghrebi traders of the eleventh-century Muslim world employed networks of information exchange.3 Networks have always coexisted with hierarchical forms of social organization, sometimes prominently, at other times submerged, depending on the historical and cultural context. In post-industrial society, however, enabled by advances in communications and technology, the network has become the most pervasive organizational image and the dominant form of social organization. In an increasingly networked world, institutions are becoming nodes as well as hierarchies. States, for example, are adding to their vertical, top-down bureaucracies the capacity to be “partner” organizations, horizontally linked with other institutions. They contract with other knowledge organizations both to design policy and to deliver services where these other organizations have greater expertise. Our governments are less and less in the field and more and more in the office – contracting, regulating, monitoring, setting standards, absorbing the knowledge they need, and providing the information citizens demand. Governments are contracting out research, partnering with other organizations to

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deliver services, and experimenting with a broad range of publicprivate partnerships. The state is now a central node in an expanding knowledge network.4 Universities, like other institutions in post-industrial society, are changing as well. The university no longer has a monopoly on the production of basic knowledge. In this changing landscape, basic research is being done in corporate laboratories, in independent research institutes, and by non-governmental organizations that are all partnering with each other and with the state in new ways. The university, like the state, is becoming a central node in knowledge networks. Its challenge is to adapt to new ways of generating knowledge, new kinds of partnerships, and new ways of sharing knowledge. In this networked context, two questions are obvious: Should the university, as the most important site of basic research, contribute actively to public policy? And, if the answer is yes – as I believe it is – how can it do so most effectively?

six kinds of knowledge Many within university communities insist that the fundamental mission of the university is to contribute to basic knowledge and that its faculty members are distracted by the time they spend doing research on public policy. There is even greater controversy about time devoted to active engagement in public policy debate. These arguments presume a separation between different kinds of knowledge that is being questioned and challenged as we come to appreciate the contributions that these different kinds of knowledge make. Knowledge is broadly of three kinds: knowledge of what, knowledge of why, and knowledge of how.5 We first describe and, if possible, identify what we are trying to explain. Description and explanation are not completely independent activities, as we sometimes like to think. The way we describe – the “what” – often influences the boundaries of the search for the “why.” Within universities we tend to know more about the “what” and the “why” than we do about the “how.” We know why viruses create illness, but we generally know much less about how to design effective programs of disease control. Knowledge can be formalized – written and codified – or informal. All six kinds of knowledge – formal and informal knowledge of what, why, and how – are important.

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Formal knowledge of “why” is most familiar, since it usually is most widely accessible. Scientific knowledge of the contributing factors to illness, for example, is usually produced in formal, generic terms and is widely shared across a global scientific community. Much of the knowledge used in development – environmental, medical, economic, and technical – is of this kind. We are also beginning to accumulate formal knowledge in social science about the multiple paths to development, a knowledge that has exploded any expectation that changing only one or two variables can push development forward. Promoting gender equity, investments in primary education and health promotion, embedding environmentally sustainable practices in industrial planning and project management, increasing trade through value-added production, and building appropriate legal and regulatory systems all contribute to development, but singly cannot be its engine. Research agendas designed to produce formal knowledge of why some societies develop and others do not are focused increasingly on the interconnections among processes, locally and globally. To continue with the example of development, we need a second kind of knowledge – knowledge that is less formal and contextdependent – of “why” some societies develop much more quickly and effectively than others. Contextual knowledge refers to the “contextual surroundings … that are imbued with and shape collective values, normative behavior, roles, customs … expectations of events.”6 This kind of knowledge shapes the understanding and interpretation of the formal knowledge of “why.” Indeed, it often reshapes formal knowledge by modifying it through culture and norms, and extracting what is relevant to and consistent with community traditions and practices. In our mapping of knowledge, we often fail to capture informal, contextual knowledge; it falls below the radar screen because it is often not written or codified. And even when it is, it usually does not reach global scientific audiences through standard scientific publications and outlets.7 If formal knowledge of “why” stands alone, disconnected from knowledge of context, at best it is incomplete and, at worst, it can be distorting.8 A third important kind of knowledge is knowledge of “how.” It is knowledge of how to do things.9 It too can be both formal and informal. There is growing formal knowledge, for example, of how the preferences of policy makers shape the choice of policy instruments and how policy instruments can, under specified conditions,

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produce unintended or counter-intuitive outcomes. This expert literature, technically called “instrument choice” in the analysis of public choice, is large and growing. There is also informal knowledge of learning by doing, discovering through implicit trial-and-error experimentation how outcomes can best be accomplished. Informal knowledge of “how” is generally based in communities of practice and relies on an accumulation of many partly redundant signals, as people routinely consider multiple indicators that form a pattern. In deciding how to begin a program of education about hiv/aids at a clinic, for example, community leaders used multiple measures of the response. They used several indicators so that they could minimize the risks as they proceeded and make quick mid-course corrections if necessary. Trial-and-error experimentation does not seek the elegant simplicity of formal knowledge but employs richness and redundancy to guard against serious error. This kind of knowledge reflects the collective experience of communities of practice that gives its users the capacity to use knowledge in flexible and adaptive ways. This kind of informal knowledge is often not written and rarely, if at all, reaches the global scientific community. It is critical, however, to the adaptation of formal knowledge and to its refinement. Informal knowledge of “how” is especially important to public policy because of its factored-in redundancy and its capacity to reduce the unknown social consequences built into any public policy. The capacity to reduce social risk is very difficult to capture in generalized, standardized natural and social science. Knowledge of “why” is produced by creating hypothetical standardized citizens to explain large trends and engineer large-scale change. These standardized citizens “have no tastes, no history, no values, no opinions, no ideas, no traditions.”10 The greatest challenge policy makers face in “engineering” change is the management of uncertainty. In many areas of public policy, policy makers struggle less with risk – where probabilities are known – than with uncertainty, where probability distributions are unknown. The outcomes of public policy are changed in the doing by the impact of informal institutions and traditions that produce unforeseen consequences: “Thin social engineering,” James Scott argues, “is constantly remade by thick popular practice.”11 It is this knowledge of thick popular practice that often eludes much of the community that produces formal knowledge.

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Social innovation is dependent on the capacity to produce and integrate all six kinds of knowledge – formal and informal knowledge of “what,” “why,” and “how.”

the university and public policy: the stereotypes The traditional portrait of the relationship between university scientist and policy maker paints the policy maker as the “doer” and the scientist as the “critic,” or the academic as the “producer” and the policy maker as the “consumer.” Even if we accept these stereotypes for a moment, the contribution that critics from all academic disciplines make to public policy is considerable. They discover the unanticipated consequences of policy planners – in the neutral language of economists, the “negative externalities” or complex interactions that were unforeseen, and, if severe enough, force a reconsideration and re-evaluation of policy. At a deeper level, they change the language of discussion to think about policy in new ways. We often underestimate the significance of the informed critic, as policy makers seek new ways of framing policy. In Canada, for example, policy makers developed an agenda of “social inclusion” within the broader framework of the “social investor” rather than “social welfare” state. The academic community was quick to demonstrate the difference in the policy agenda when the issue was reframed as “social exclusion” rather than social inclusion. Universities, through their faculty members and collectively as institutions, routinely contribute to public policy in both these ways. Universities can – and do – contribute to public policy beyond their role as critics. Often, however, they appear to run up against their different mandates and missions, which block effective sharing of knowledge. The knowledge created at the university seeks to know the uniform, the general, and the standardized, while public policy begins with the general – when it is available – but often needs to partition the general into socially and politically relevant categories. At the extreme, it needs point predictions – which science can never supply – but, even when public policy makers are dealing with large numbers, it seeks to understand the differential impact of policy action on subcategories of the population. This picture of the scientist and the policy maker treats the

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scientist as the producer and the policy maker as the consumer, but a consumer who often needs more differentiated and finely grained knowledge than the producer supplies. In this portrait of the university scientist and the policy maker, the frustrations are built in. This picture of the relationship between different types of knowledge misses the subtleties both of what universities do and what public policy makers need. First, the public policy community is much broader than the government, as other sectors of society join in networked relationships with the state to broaden the arena of public policy. It is misleading to look only at the relationship between universities and government. The voluntary sector and the corporate sector, as well as research institutes and think tanks, are now all active nodes in public policy networks. Second, much though not all of the scientific knowledge of “why” is enriched by knowledge of the “how.” The consumer-producer stereotype misses much of the mutual learning that occurs when knowledge is shared.

connecting the “what,” “why,” and “how”: the role of universities in public policy Formal knowledge is, or should be, in constant dialogue with its application. How knowledge is used, who uses it, and who owns it all shape the impact of knowledge on society and test the validity of the knowledge in an unending iterative process. University researchers, who tend to specialize in the creation of formal knowledge of why, miss out on a great deal when they are cut off from knowledge of how. They miss an important opportunity to learn. To take one example: Globalization is usually treated as a generic process through a single overarching model of neo-liberalism. We know, however, that there is no single model of globalization when we look at these processes from the bottom rather than the top. On the contrary, there is wide variation in outcomes of national development, and that variation is understandable only when we look carefully at the “how.” China, India, and Taiwan have all used different tactics to mediate the impact of globalization, enlisting local institutions and upgrading local skills to produce superior products that are now being exported into global markets. Without close attention to the “how,” formal models of globalization miss out on important pieces of knowledge that can challenge and enrich.

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Brazil is often used as a success story of a government that has succeeded in reducing the rate of hiv/aids infection beyond expectation within the last seven years. The strategy it used is radically different from the one proposed by the World Bank when it completed a formal analysis of the epidemic, predicted catastrophe, and recommended the construction of a new public health infrastructure to cope with the exploding rates of infection. The Brazilian government chose a much more conservative strategy. It drew on existing voluntary organizations, local community leaders, community public health workers, and academic experts to create a flexible, decentralized public health network. Knowledge of “why” was integrated with knowledge of “how” through the network, strategies were worked out incrementally at the local level, and knowledge was fed back through the network of local successes and failures. A rich stream of evidence quickly became available, and nodes in the network modified strategies and practices as they received new knowledge. The success in Brazil tells an interesting story. First, it is a story of a knowledge network through which university faculty, experts from global institutions, and leaders from the voluntary sector, government, and local communities shared knowledge of why and how. It was the constant sharing that multiplied the knowledge. Those who developed the formal models were able to refine, adjust, and revise their models as they received information from the field in “real time.” Second, it is a story of the interaction of different kinds of knowledge. The outcomes of public policy are changed in the doing by the impact of local institutions and traditions that produce unforeseen consequences. It is this knowledge of thick popular practice that often eludes expert research and formal knowledge. It is not only thin social engineering that was remade but science itself, as it responded to clinical evidence and field trials, to use the language of science for a moment. And, in turn, the critical voice of science grew through careful analysis of the thick popular practice, which adapted and changed standardized public policy. Universities contributed to and also benefited from the mutually enriching exchange of knowledge. If universities can enrich and be enriched through knowledge sharing on public policy issues, we need to encourage academics to play a more active and engaged role in public policy. Universities

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need to expand the incentive structures they put in place for their scholars and encourage the active engagement of their faculty on public policy issues. If we do not, universities will find themselves increasingly cut off from knowledge exchanges that will define the frontiers of their scholarly work in the next decade. We will find ourselves increasingly at the margin in knowledge networks, rather than being one of the central nodes in a dense web of partnerships. In other words, as university scholars, we will become increasingly lonely in public space. That is not where we should be or where we want to be as scholars.

notes 1 Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society. Vol. 1 of The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 469; Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamp, The Networking Book: People Connecting with People (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986); and Barry Wellman and S.D. Berkowitz, eds., Social Structures: A Network Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 2 Janet Tai Landa, Trust, Ethnicity, and Identity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). 3 Avner Greif, “Cultural Beliefs and the Organization of Society: A Historical and Theoretical Reflection on Collectivist and Individualist Societies,” Journal of Political Economy 102, no. 5 (1994): 912–50. 4 Janice Gross Stein, The Cult of Efficiency (Toronto: Anansi Press, 2001). 5 Ira Katznelson, “Knowing about What? Policy Intellectuals and the New Liberalism,” in Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol, eds., States, Social Knowledge, and the Origins of Modern Social Policies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 6 Knowledge Management: Implications and applications for development organizations. Key terms and definitions, Bellanet, http://www.bellanet.org/km/main/glossary.html 7 Standard methods of evaluating knowledge production – the number of patents, citation indices – fail to capture informal knowledge. 8 Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Epistemology (1958), discusses the tacit knowledge that underlies all formal or explicit knowledge.

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9 Informal knowledge of “how” has been called “practical” knowledge, “technical” knowledge by some development theorists, and “local” knowledge. These terms confuse the kind of knowledge with the source of knowledge. 10 James Scott, Seeing Like a State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 196. 11 Ibid.

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4 Toward a New Understanding of Knowledge Transfer: The Role of Experts in Shaping Public Policy c h a v i v a m . h o ˇs e k As president of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (ciar), I have been extremely fortunate to work closely with some of the world’s pre-eminent thinkers. The institute was founded in 1982 by a group of Canadians from the academic community and the private sector, as a private sector initiative. For the past twenty years, ciar has been a unique catalyst for advanced discovery. It is a place that creates knowledge networks and it enables the country’s top researchers to collaborate with one another and with their international peers on globally significant challenges. They work at the frontiers of knowledge. ciar thinkers and scientists tackle complex issues in ten diverse areas. Many are working in what we usually think of as “hard science,” conducting research in cosmology and gravity, earth system evolution, evolutionary biology, nanoelectronics, quantum materials, and quantum information processing. Within the so-called soft or social sciences, ciar supports programs in human development, economic growth and institutions, population health, and successful societies. Some of this social science research contains a body of very robust learning. It is knowledge that has been percolating out of the world of academic research and into public policy discussions and government initiatives in Canada and around the world. I believe this knowledge, if we use it well, has the potential to transform our society for the better. As James Perkins, the past president of Cornell University, pointed out some time ago, “the acquisition of knowledge

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is the mission of research, the transmission of knowledge is the mission of teaching, and the application of knowledge is the mission of public service.”1 If we could transfer the knowledge that has so far emerged from our Population Health program into public service and action, we could enormously improve our society’s health and well-being. The Population Health program has been underway at ciar since 1987. Its founding director was Dr Robert Evans, of the Centre for Health Services and Policy Research at the University of British Columbia. It is now directed by Dr Clyde Hertzman, of ubc’s Department of Health Care and Epidemiology. This program brought together a multidisciplinary group of researchers around the world, all dedicated to answering a deceptively simple question: “Why are some people – and some populations – healthier than others?” Today, that question is more compelling than ever. There is huge pressure for developed societies to channel more resources – particularly more dollars – into our health care system – or rather, what has become our illness care system. Of course we all want the best care possible when we are ill. But we also want to focus on what keeps us healthy. The accumulated knowledge about what creates and sustains health in people and populations has yielded some startling results – results that challenge long-held ideas about how health is produced. Social science research has found that some societies – and some groups of people within those societies – are significantly healthier than others. Why are some people – and some populations – healthier than others? We’ve known for a long time that the phrase “biology is destiny” is only partially true. Certainly the health of an individual does depend upon that person’s makeup and circumstances. Age and sex, genetic endowment, the interaction between genetic endowment and environment – all of these factors can and do affect health. Men are more at risk for some diseases than women, for example. And old men are at more risk of some ailments than young women. A person with a family history of heart disease has a different risk profile than someone whose family has never had coronary problems. But socioeconomic status trumps all these factors. The fact is: health status within populations throughout the twentieth century has persistently differed according to social and economic status.

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In the movie Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye the milkman sings a song called “If I Were A Rich Man.” He points out, “It’s no shame to be poor. But it’s no great honour either.” He was only partially right. Being poor is neither a shame nor an honour – but it is undoubtedly associated with poor health outcomes. On average, people at higher levels of income, education, and social position live longer – and are healthier – than those at lower levels. Researchers have known about this strong gradient in health status for some 100 years. Studies have repeatedly found a direct correlation between socioeconomic status and health on a wide range of measures – including the amount of terminal illness, mortality figures, symptoms, pain levels, and days spent ill in bed. We have this gradient in Canada, the United States, England, France, the Netherlands, Finland, Belgium, and Britain – all over the developed world. Of course, it’s easy to make a relatively crude distinction between the very rich and the very poor. But there is a more subtle and significant correlation between socioeconomic factors and health. This correlation is sensitive to one’s relative level of wealth or poverty, in a step-wise fashion. The poorest people – those on the ground level, as it were – have the poorest health. And the wealthiest people, on the top floor, are the healthiest. Meanwhile, those in society’s poorest group are less healthy than those in the lower middle class. And those in the upper middle class are less healthy than the very wealthiest. I think there is some resistance in our society to accepting that step-wise relationship between health and wealth. We want to believe that we are in control of our lives and our health. But no matter where we are on the social scale, we are all vulnerable to the inequality of health outcomes, based on our socioeconomic position. Medical advances such as antibiotics and even widespread public health campaigns have had no effect on these findings. A campaign to eliminate smoking might succeed in erasing socioeconomic status differentials in lung cancer, for instance, but poor people are still more likely than rich people to die from some other disease. Whatever people are dying of, poorer people die of it sooner. Could it be that poor people engage in more risky behaviour than rich people? At least one important set of studies says not. The Whitehall studies, which were initially published in 1978, have

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been following mortality rates for 12,000 to 14,000 people over more than twenty years. Led by Dr Michael Marmot, they have correlated the number of British civil servants who died of coronary heart disease with their position in their rather rigid social hierarchy and with their risk factors for heart disease over ten years.2 Dr Marmot has found that those who worked in the lowest job classification were four times more likely to die of heart disease than those in the highest job classification. That finding was somewhat predictable, considering what we already know. What was unexpected was that when the study eliminated statistical differences related to behavioural risk factors, such as smoking and obesity, the people working in the lowliest jobs were still 2.6 times more likely to die of coronary heart disease than those in the highest levels. In other words, factors such as smoking and obesity, which tend to predispose people to coronary heart disease, accounted for only about a third of the differences between classes. Peoples’ position on the socioeconomic ladder was far and away more significant, accounting for some 65 per cent of the chance that one might develop heart disease. That brings us to the next important question that ciar scientists have been addressing: “How much wealth is necessary to ensure good health?” So far, the answer to that question is very provocative. Above a minimum level of reasonable nutrition and good behaviour, it is not absolute wealth that determines health status among all the layers of the population. Income inequality is associated with lower levels of health and well-being for everyone. There is some evidence that the populations of affluent countries with a more egalitarian distribution of income enjoy better health status. In other words, bigger differences between the rich and the poor in affluent countries are associated with poorer health for all the members of those societies. This may be why Costa Rica and Kerala State in India – two jurisdictions that invest heavily in early childhood and literacy initiatives and have less income inequality than societies around them – show healthier health outcomes than the United States. This may be why life expectancy in Sweden and Japan is greater than that of the United States and the United Kingdom. And this may also be why income inequality is correlated with poorer health in U.S. cities, while income inequality has no similar relationship with health in Canada, according to an important study funded by the Canadian Population Health Initiative.3 Social scientists suspect this could be because of the much larger

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differences in socioeconomic status between the rich and the poor in American cities, compared to Canadian cities.4 A variation or elaboration of this explanation is that residents of Canadian cities enjoy access to a much larger basket of freely available or subsidized public goods than their American counterparts. These are essentially redistributive non-cash benefits. This means that the consequences of being in a low income bracket are less severe and the disparity between the experience of the poor and that of more affluent citizens in their communities is diminished. The relative absence of redistributive benefits in U.S. cities means that their low-income residents are not buffered from the full effects of poverty and income disparity. This is a hypothesis, however; the University of Calgary’s Dr James R. Dunn and his associates are conducting more research to prove it conclusively. These findings shed new light on the questions we are now asking about our health care system and its future. Would we be healthier as a society if we invested more in health care – or, more accurately, illness care? The answer to that question, surprisingly, is “No.” More or better health care, even when targeted to those most in need, does not have a major impact on reducing the inequalities in health between the rich and poor in our society. Poorer people do have more conditions for which the healthcare system can offer relief from pain, a supportive environment, and an alleviation of symptoms. But there’s little evidence, even among this population, that high rates of health care consumption are related to improvements in health. There is no evidence that “more care” shows up in better health of the population. We have decades of research documenting how some areas of the country have twice as many physicians per capita as other areas – or hospital beds or hip replacements, for that matter. But the areas with more care are not necessarily the areas with more health. Over a ten-year period in Manitoba, for instance, a 24 per cent cut in hospital beds, combined with a real decrease in hospital spending, had no detectable impact on the health of even the most vulnerable groups – the elderly and the poor. In fact, the results were counter-intuitive. Health status worsened among groups that received the most medical care and improved among those who received the least care.5 And consider what is happening in America. The United States spends 5–6 per cent more of its gnp on health care than other countries, including Canada and many European nations. But on most

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indicators of population health, including longevity and years of life free of disability, Americans score no better than citizens of other developed countries. On almost every health indicator, Americans appear to be less healthy than the citizens of other developed countries.6 It appears that the medical system provides more care than cure. The rich in our society are still healthier than the poor. All these observations provide powerful evidence to support the conclusion that the distribution of health and well-being is a social phenomenon. This brings us to the next important question: “What social measures can we take that would make a difference to health outcomes?” We have solid answers to that question. We know that physical, social, and cognitive development in early childhood is an important determinant of health and well-being. Biological and developmental factors at sensitive periods in one’s early life have a lifelong health impact, regardless of one’s later experiences. Status differences at birth are consistently associated with differences in stability, security, and stimulation in early childhood. And these, in turn, affect readiness for schooling, which affects a host of other factors down the road, many of them linked with health. We also know that the employment conditions of parents affect their health, and their children’s health as well. Going home to take care of a sick child is an unaffordable luxury for many lowincome parents in jobs without paid leave. This connection has been proven in a substantial body of research accumulated over fifteen years, largely led by Dr Jody Heymann of the Harvard School of Public Health. One of Dr Heymann’s studies conducted in 1999 found that only 42 per cent of the working parents in its sample were able to care for their young children when they became ill. That same study found that parents with either paid sick or vacation leave were more than five times more likely to take time off work when their little ones got sick.7 Dozens of studies around the world going back to 1968 have also consistently linked unemployment to poor health – a relationship that cannot be explained primarily by lifestyle or downward mobility. And we know from other studies that those stuck in poor jobs are far more likely to develop high rates of disability and absenteeism. They are also more likely to die prematurely, and from the full range of causes. We’ve even found a powerful correlation between good housing and health outcomes. According to studies led by Dr Dunn since

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1999, people who own their home and are proud of their dwelling or consider their home a good reflection of their identity are healthier. And people with trouble meeting their housing costs, worried about being forced to move, or unhappy with their homes are measurably less healthy.8 These solid social research findings have persuaded ciar to begin its new program on Successful Societies. Its goal is to answer two more questions: “Why and in what ways do social inequality and different organization of social relations affect health status so dramatically?” and “What are the effects of social dominance hierarchies on health?” One theory is that perhaps the neuro-immune system is affected by the stress and feelings of powerlessness created within social dominance hierarchies. I’m looking forward to learning from the experts on this. In the meantime, our Population Health findings so far have vital public policy implications. If we want the biggest bang for the buck in terms of improved health for our population, policy advisors and policy makers – the experts within government at all levels – must understand the importance of a full range of social investment choices. If we really want to improve health outcomes, we need to invest in poverty reduction and alleviation. We need early childhood programs that improve the environments in which children grow up, live, and learn. We need those who develop labour policy to understand that unemployed adults are at higher risk of suffering a decline in their health than their counterparts who have jobs. And we must recognize the importance of work conditions that allow parents to go home and take care of their children during the evenings and on weekends. We need those who develop housing policy to understand the health consequences of affordable housing – and the health consequences of the absence of decent housing. We need those responsible for the fiscal decisions within government to understand these findings – and make decisions based on their public policy implications. And we need also to make sure the public understands and supports the public policy implications of these findings. We are making some progress, I am pleased to say. Most Canadians will be aware of the Romanow Commission on the Future of Health Care in Canada. One of ciar’s researchers, Dr John Lavis, the Canada Research Chair in Knowledge Transfer and Uptake at

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McMaster University in Hamilton, completed a review of 137 stakeholder submissions to that commission. He discovered that a remarkable number of Canadian doctors, nurses, and other concerned citizens are aware of the importance and need for action on the non-medical determinants of health.9 In a separate survey Dr Lavis also found that the vast majority of policy advisors in direct line ministries are aware of this research. Advisors within the Department of Labour, for instance, know that employment and working conditions are important determinants of health. Departments and Ministries of Social Services and Housing are equally enlightened, as are Departments of Health.10 In fact, the degree to which these ideas have successfully penetrated policy circles within government and the research community in Canada is impressive: Federal and provincial health departments have been reorganized to create population health divisions. • The government has created a Federal/Provincial/Territorial Advisory Committee on Population Health. • Each of the federal and provincial ministries responsible for health policy and health services has also adopted a population health perspective. • And new research institutes, such as the Saskatchewan Population Health Evaluation and Research Unit, are now underway. •

And that’s not all. Our ciar program has had, and continues to have, a substantial impact on health policy at the local, provincial, and national levels. ciar people have played an important role in the establishment of a wide range of other program-related research centres and health database systems across the country and internationally: Statistics Canada, working closely with key ciar researchers, has based two major new longitudinal health surveys on these ideas since 1994 – the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth, and the National Population Health Survey. • In direct response to the ciar program’s Population Health learnings, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research established population health as one of its four research “pillars” and created a separate Institute for Population and Public Health. •

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And the Canadian Population Health Initiative was established in 1999 to fund research and knowledge transfer.

I’m particularly pleased that many important pioneers in this area of research who have worked closely with ciar have now moved on to influential positions in major institutions across Canada: •

•

•

•

•

•

•

Our founding president, Dr Fraser Mustard, is a Canadian leader in sharing knowledge on the socioeconomic determinants of human development and health. Dr Mustard has worked with the World Bank and the Board of the Aga Khan Foundation, as well as with the governments of several Canadian provinces. Dr John W. Frank, the founding director of the Institute for Work & Health in Toronto, contributed tremendously to our Population Health Program and is now scientific director of the new Institute for Population and Public Health within the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. The current president of the Institute for Work and Health, Dr Cam Mustard, is ciar’s Population Health Program associate director. ciar program member Noralou Roos is co-director of the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy and Evaluation at the University of Manitoba, which has a population health information system known as populis. Dr Morris Barer, another important participant in our program, founded the Centre for Health Services and Policy Research at the University of British Columbia and is now the director of the cihr Institute of Health Services and Policy Research. ciar program members John Lavis and Gregory Stoddart are on the faculty at the Centre for Health Economics and Policy Analysis at McMaster University. Two distinguished scientists associated with the ciar program – Drs Marc Renaud and Jonathan Lomas now lead the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation respectively.

It would be fair to say, then, that many health care stakeholders now understand the importance of the body of scientifically robust research we have accumulated about population health. ciar

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researchers get it. Individual line ministries get it. And social scientists and policy elites get it. This is good progress, but it is still not good enough. Dr Lavis’s survey among civil servants, for instance, found that there is virtually no understanding of research into the social underpinnings of health in our society at the level of the central agencies, such as Finance, Treasury, and the Privy Council.11 How can this be? Many of these agencies are run by economists, or by those who subscribe to traditional economic theories. They assume, naturally, that it is economics that drives social conditions and status. But that is the old paradigm. And today we are living with a new paradigm – that economics and social policy interact – constantly. Social policy drives our population’s health. So social policy also drives our economy. There is a further dilemma. Even economists who grasp the concept that the population’s social conditions and social status drive the economy are not applying that concept yet. The general public, too, is almost completely unaware of these new learnings and their implications – or even that the quality of our illness care system is not the determinant of people’s health. Even the best-informed members of the public are mostly unaware of this knowledge. So where do we go from here? How can we act to improve the health of our society? It’s not enough that we have good research. It’s not enough that key people throughout our knowledge system understand the research. It’s not even enough that key people on the policy and delivery side understand the implications of this knowledge. We need progress on an integrated set of policy decisions. And that means government-wide priority-setting and allocation decisions. And it is time for those whose job is to make tradeoffs in government, particularly in central agencies, to think and act in a more integrated way. When I was working in the Prime Minister’s Office, we implemented the extension of parental leave, covered by employment insurance, to one year. I believe that was an excellent policy decision – one that will have long-term positive health impacts for Canadian children and their parents. But it was only possible to make that decision because the government was able to use a single pre-existing delivery mechanism. That mechanism was employment insurance, which came under federal legislation. So the federal government could make

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this decision and take this action without needing to tussle with the provinces about their respective roles in social services. That situation was very unusual, because that single mechanism, in the labour market, achieved a much broader impact. Today, if we really want to measurably improve the health of Canadians, policy makers in areas as diverse as perinatal services, pre-school services and education, crime prevention, family services, and healthcare need to come together to learn from the robust body of knowledge that could now inform social policy development. Experts in policy shops outside the direct health policy “basket” in government will need to work closely together on a wide range of interconnected program, policy, tax and regulatory measures. We will need to find ways to break down the policy silos that currently separate housing, employment, education, and social services policy from one another and from tax transfer policy. The same is true for policy makers in central agencies. They must be attuned to social policy when making dollar-allocation decisions – both through cash transfers and through funding for services. We also need to get this knowledge – and the paradigm shift it represents – embedded in the decision-making apparatus of both the federal government, and provincial governments. That’s a tremendous paradigm shift away from the traditional economic theories that drive much of the current decision-making processes in most governments. But it is essential that all of government think and then act in a new way. It is essential because no one ministry or level of government is able to provide access to all the goods and services that can make a difference in health status, such as housing, transportation, child care, post-secondary education, cultural and recreational amenities, and human services. Shifting society to a new paradigm for understanding the determinants of health – at the individual and the population level – requires more than scientific and policy expertise. In a democracy, it also requires significant public understanding and support. I hope I’ve shown that the experts can only go so far in shaping public policy, even if they share their knowledge with elite policy makers. They must also take an active role in transferring this knowledge to the general public. In this case, knowledge transfer and exchange, not just knowledge, is power. The public needs confidence that a universal health care system is the right policy tool for delivering care to those in need. But

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what will really make a difference to health outcomes in our society as a whole is less inequality. The public also needs to understand that this knowledge affects every one of us, not just the richest and the poorest – because everyone in our society is part of a larger pattern of health outcomes. And although people at the bottom of the socioeconomic spectrum suffer most from health inequalities, it is people among the broad mid-range of the population who will bear the burden of poor health associated with social inequalities – because this group is much larger. To summarize, I think we can argue with confidence that any measures that increase people’s experience of inequality in society will undermine the health of the population, and that investments in health care alone will not increase the overall health of Canadians. If we acted on this knowledge, we could begin to realize significant health gains.

notes 1 Quoted in New York Times, 3 November 1966. Reprinted in J.B. Simpson, Simpson’s Contemporary Quotations, 1988. Available at http://www.bartleby.com/63/96/2596.html; http://www.quoteworld.org/author.php?thetext=James+A.+Perkins. 2 M.G. Marmot, G.A. Rose, M.J. Shipley, and P.J.S. Hamilton, “Employment Grade and Coronary Heart Disease in British Civil Servants,” Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 32 (1978): 244–9; M.G. Marmot, “Social Inequalities in Mortality: The Social Environment,” in R.G. Wilkinson, ed., Class and Health: Research and Longitudinal Data (London: Tavistock, 1986), 21–33; M.G. Marmot, “Multilevel Approaches to Understanding Social Determinants,” in L.F. Berkman and I. Kawachi, eds., Social Epidemiology (New York: Oxford University Press 2000), 340–67. 3 J. Dunn and N. Ross, “Metropolitan Socioeconomic Inequality and Population Health,” manuscript in process, funded by the Canadian Population Health Initiative. See www.metro-inequality-health.ca. 4 R.G. Evans, “Interpreting and Addressing Inequalities in Health: From Black to Acheson to Blair to…?” 7th Annual Office of Health Economics Lecture, 1 June 2000. (London: bsc Print Ltd., 2002), 21–4. 5 M. Brownell, N.P. Roos, and C. Burchill, “Monitoring the Winnipeg Hospital System: 1990/91 through 1996/97” (Winnipeg: Manitoba

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7

8

9

10

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Centre for Health Policy and Evaluation, 1999); M. Brownell, N.P. Roos, and C. Burchill, “Monitoring the Impact of Hospital Downsizing on Access to Care and Quality of Care,” Medical Care 37, no. 6 (1999): 135–50; M.D. Brownell, N.P. Roos, and L.L. Roos, “Monitoring Health Reform: A Report Card Approach,” Social Science and Medicine 52, no. 5 (2001): 657–70. G.F. Anderson and J.P. Poullier, “Health Spending, Access and Outcomes: Trends in Industrialized Countries,” Health Affairs 18, no. 3 (1999): 178–98. S.J. Heymann, S.Tommey, and F. Furstenburg, “Working Parents: What Factors are Involved in Their Ability to Take Time Off From Work When Their Children Are Sick?” Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine,” 153, no. 8 (1999): 870–4. J.R. Dunn and M.V. Hayes, “Social Inequality, Population Health, and Housing: A Study of Two Vancouver Neighborhoods,” Social Science and Medicine 51, no. 4 (Aug. 2000): 563–87. J.N. Lavis, K. Arcus, P.G. Forest, J. Abelson, and M. Mendelsohn, “Commissioning a New Political Bargain for Canada’s Health-care System,” unpublished manuscript, 2001. J.N. Lavis, S.E. Ross, G.L. Stoddart, J.M. Hohenadel, C.B. McLeod, and R.G. Evans, “Do Canadian Civil Servants Care About the Health of Populations?” American Journal of Public Health 93, no. 4 (2003): 658–63. Ibid.

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learning and partnership in knowledge development

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5 Universities and Industry in Canada: An Evolving Relationship arnold naimark Earlier contributions to this festschrift have traced the evolution of the idea of the university and its practical expression in contemporary society. While my comments will focus mainly on the evolving relationship between universities and industry in Canada, many of the features of that relationship may have counterparts in other countries.

the early years The earliest universities in Canada were conceived as civilizing forces for the advancement of a frontier society and as instruments for the education of social elites. They faced the task of assimilating different traditions and reconciling the religious precepts of the denominational colleges from which many universities were derived, with the thrust of rapidly expanding secular knowledge. This duality of potentially conflicting aims and purposes was of little moment when universities were small and selective. However, it became a more salient issue in the post–World War II era as higher education in Canada was transformed into a public enterprise. The need to reconcile conflicting aims and purposes remains a central challenge for universities to this day.

higher education as a public enterprise This transformation had its roots in the revitalization of the postwar domestic economy: the public’s expectation of steadily rising standards of living, a sharp increase in the birth rate, and explosive

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growth in scientific knowledge and technical innovation. An increased demand for highly trained personnel generated by economic expansion, the post-Sputnik enthusiasm for increasing investment in science and technology, and the advent of the baby boom generation prompted the federal and provincial governments, riding the buoyant economy of the 1960s, to sharply increase public investment in universities. This commitment led to a massive increase in student enrolment and in the number, size, and diversity of programs of higher education. Universities joined a growing list of social institutions vying for support from the public treasury and they became more directly and more broadly accountable to the provincial governments who had become their principal financiers. The federal government’s investment in higher education, which for constitutional reasons is largely indirect (that is, through the funding of research, student loans, and fiscal transfers to the provinces), also grew substantially. The boom period of the 1960s and early 1970s came to an end when inflation surged following the opec oil crisis. University funding fell short of rising costs for two reasons: constraints on provincial revenues, and a decrease in the priority of funding universities in relation to funding other social programs, such as health care, which carried a much higher political imperative. Universities became suffused with debate about how to adapt to fiscal constraint. What balance should be struck between supporting accessibility and maintaining quality? Is higher education a right or a privilege? Who should pay for higher education and in what proportion? While these philosophical questions were unresolved – and remain lively topics of debate in university circles – the institutions as a matter of practical necessity sought to address the shortfalls in government funding by adopting strategies to increase support from non-governmental sources, including industry.

the traditional relationship between industry and universities Until about 1980 the relationship between industry and the majority of Canadian universities was largely indirect. Although interactions between industry and individual faculty members, mainly in science, business, engineering, and other professions, have been a feature of comprehensive universities for decades, they were highly

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sporadic, involved a minor fraction of the faculty acting as independent contractors, and took the form of contract research or consultancies. In addition, private corporations have for a long time made significant charitable donations to universities. These traditional expressions of the university-industry relationship rarely involved contractual relationships between the universities as corporate entities with counterparts in the private sector. In fact, the university’s corporate relationship to industry was defensive and designed to regulate (that is, to limit) faculty members’ interaction with industry so that the private sector did not unduly influence the university’s primary commitments and traditional values. The relationship between industry and universities has evolved significantly over the past quarter-century. The points of interaction with industry have proliferated enormously in number and scale, and the level of charitable donations from private corporations has grown twenty-fold or more. While impressive, these developments are a quantitative expansion of the traditional forms of interaction I mentioned a moment ago. What the numbers do not reveal is a remarkable evolution in the qualitative aspects of the relationship between industry and universities. Let me touch on four of them: the economic imperative, the mediation of the industry-university relationship by governments, the tempo of scientific and technological innovation, and changes in how universities do business. The Economic Imperative Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s the most striking feature of the evolving status of universities in the eyes of the body politic was the increasing tendency for their importance to be seen as deriving from an economic imperative. When the country was faced with severe and mounting fiscal deficits, declining competitiveness, and relatively low levels of productivity in comparison with our major trading partners, it became a widely held proposition that, in a competitive knowledge-based international economy, Canada’s future economic well-being lay in pursuing a dual course. We would have to improve the efficiency, productivity, and international competitiveness of our resource-based industries while at the same time reducing our dependence on such industries by expanding secondary and tertiary manufacturing, and service industries through the development and adaptation of new technology.

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Prompted by this vision, industry leaders voiced concern about the relatively low level of research and development activity in Canada and about the effects of underfunding on the ability of universities to undertake, on a sufficiently large scale, the kinds of research and training considered relevant to economic development. The Mediation of the University-Industry Relationship by Government The federal government and certain provincial governments, propelled by their interest in promoting economic development through rapid exploitation of technology and their desire to share the costs of scientific and technological development, initiated new mechanisms for supporting university research. These initiatives were developed in the context of the formulation of a national science policy predicated on the view that public investment in science was justified primarily by its contribution as a strategic input to economic growth. The initiatives were, in the beginning, formulated under the aegis of the federal research granting councils. They included council-specific programs designed to foster universityindustry collaboration. This step was followed by a consortial approach by which the councils jointly managed the establishment of the National Networks of Centres of Excellence. To varying degrees, the programs required financial participation or other kinds of significant and formal involvement by the private sector. This requirement was seen both as a means to share costs and as a validation of the relevance of the proposed undertaking to industrial interests. In due course, as federal budgetary deficits were replaced by surpluses, major new investments were made that include powerful financial incentives for universities to secure shared funding from the private sector or local governments – or from both. The opportunities afforded by these initiatives have been seized to a varying extent by the provinces, with the result that regional disparities in research development have become sharper. The Tempo of Scientific and Technological Innovation For centuries, industrial innovation and the generation of commercially exploitable inventions had their roots in knowledge that was decades and sometimes hundreds of years old. In the current information-intensive society, and in an era of knowledge-intensive

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industries, the lag between discovery and application in fields such as microelectronics, materials science, nanotechnology, and biotechnology is by comparison extremely short. Industrial enterprises are therefore increasingly dependent on a rapid rate of new knowledge generation. Thus the real world of industry is becoming more and more like the world of the university. Both are in the knowledge business. Both have key roles to play in sensing where the growing points of knowledge are, in nurturing them appropriately, and in determining when progress has been solid enough to warrant significant change in training programs, investment in research capacity, or efforts to commercialize inventions. As the pace of innovation accelerates and the rate of new product development increases, the capacity of regulatory processes within institutions and in government agencies designed to protect human and animal health and the environment is being seriously challenged. So too are the mechanisms for protecting intellectual property embodied in existing patenting regimes. Many are concerned, for example, about the implications of patenting higher life forms and genes and their fragments, both from an ethical perspective and out of concern for the constraints that patent proliferation places on future innovation. Industry, universities, and governments are increasingly being called upon to take into account the social, ethical, and developmental implications of the applications of new technology before it is commercialized. I suggest that addressing these issues collectively is likely to be more productive than addressing them from separate sectoral interests. Changes in How Universities Do Business Not long ago, interactions with industry were treated as alien to the fundamental purposes of the academy. They may have been tolerated at the margins but they were not considered strategically important for institutional development. All of this began to change in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as universities became more serious about promoting technology transfer and exploiting intellectual property developed in their laboratories. They established industrial liaison offices, participated in the development of industrial research parks, incorporated subsidiaries to take advantage of tax incentive programs to obtain increased investment in university-based research, formed companies in partnership with

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private corporations, and facilitated the development of “spin-off” companies in which they or their individual faculty members held equity positions. Not all members of the academy or the public have been enthusiastic about these developments. Some are concerned that the university may invest in applied research to the detriment of fundamental research – the wellspring of future innovation. They point out that the increasing involvement of university researchers in the commercialization of their own research enterprises can create serious conflicts of interest and commitment; that an institutional emphasis on industry-related research will tend to unduly constrain opportunities for scholarly work in the social sciences and humanities; that increasing reliance on industry in lieu of government support will mean that important lines of research that happen to be unattractive to industry will not be pursued; and that infringements on academic freedom will increase in frequency. Most universities have introduced policies and mechanisms for managing these areas of concern but few would contest the view that much more needs to be done. To me one of the most interesting changes in the way universities go about the business of science is in the processes they have had to introduce in order to compete for money under the new funding programs established by governments – programs, as I noted earlier, that require direct or indirect involvement of industry and/or clear demonstration of how funding proposals relate to national or regional economic agendas. The agencies administering these programs require that the applications for funding be made on behalf of the institution rather than by the individual researchers involved. Moreover, they require the institutions to demonstrate that the applications selected for submission are coherent with institutional priorities. These requirements have resulted in universities’ having to establish, often for the first time, institutional research priorities or, if they already existed implicitly, to make them explicit. These requirements have necessitated an expansion of the university’s central administrative apparatus in order to manage the process of priority setting and proposal selection – including a reinforcement of the university-industry liaison function. Let me now turn to my final topic; namely, what I see as the rather narrow view that many opinion leaders and policy makers have of the contributions that universities can make to the national

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economy. I recently attended the “Innovation Summit” convened by the federal government to discuss Canada’s innovation strategy. The proposed strategy is predicated on the view that innovation is the key to enhancing productivity, promoting economic growth, and increasing the standard of living. I was particularly interested in seeing whether the trend of the summit discussions would cause me to amend my comments. Alas not.

the new utilitarianism While no one can deny the desirability of shortening the lag between the discovery of knowledge and its useful application, or of mobilizing the full intellectual potential of Canadians in the pursuit of important national goals, there is a reverberation in the rhetoric of this utilitarian aspect of public policy that is reminiscent of the anti-intellectualism of an earlier era. A former chancellor of the University of Manitoba used to tell the story of the late Adlai Stevenson who, during his first bid for the presidency of the United States, was referred to as an “egg head,” a term which, while it implied the intellectual, had lurking just beneath the surface an implication that the intellectual is an academic who is a theorist unable to cope with the practical problems of life. And so it is said that during his second campaign in 1956 Stevenson had on his staff a speech writer whose main responsibility was to tone down the intellectual quality of the candidate’s utterances – to split an infinitive here, or dangle a participle there – all with the intention of demonstrating that the candidate was no different, or at least not much different, from the ordinary man. I do not mean to suggest that the crude anti-intellectualism of this earlier era is once again in the ascendancy – nor do I wish to imply that seeking to work more closely with industry and other sectors of the world outside of the academy is not a proper function of the university. Indeed, universities are particularly well placed to contribute to an effective harmonization of private and public sector interests in many areas of practical concern. The danger comes when we exalt utilitarianism – when we emphasize it to the point that it blinds us to other values, fidelity to which has always been the hallmark of every university worthy of the name – when we allow utilitarianism to lead to a kind of “presentism” in which the only intellectual pursuits deemed to be

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of value are those that relate to immediate concerns. It is not against the test of usefulness per se that I speak, but against too narrow a conception of utility. Fundamental biological research may not guarantee that cures for cancer, arthritis, or diabetes are just around the corner but it is utility enough that research is our primary source of knowledge for increasing the chances of such beneficial outcomes. The study of the humanities may not be a guarantee of employability, wealth, position, or power; it is justification and utility enough that such study will enrich one’s life and make it more meaningful. But the case for the humanities and social sciences (the “human sciences” as they are sometimes called) goes beyond the contention that they are good for your soul. They are also strategically important in achieving the goals of a policy agenda that promotes innovation in its broadest sense – an agenda that seeks not only to enhance the scope and depth of technical innovation and its practical applications but also has the goal of fostering the social and institutional innovations necessary to realize the full economic and social benefits of technological advances. It is, after all, people who innovate, and who assimilate and exploit innovations. We have made significant strides in Canada toward enhancing the capacity of our universities to play an even more important role, in partnership with industry, in meeting the innovation challenge in the natural and biological sciences and in engineering. We haven’t done nearly as well in building our capacity in the human sciences so that it too can be effectively mobilized in meeting the innovation challenge. This is a critical item of unfinished business on our nation’s policy agenda. There are many more qualified than I to speak about how best to repair this deficiency but I venture to say that it will be essential for us to enlist the vigorous support of industry in making the case for greater public investment in the human sciences, and we need to begin by convincing the leaders of our industrial enterprises that they have a crucial stake in achieving that goal. Other important features of the evolving university-industry relationship deserve to be mentioned: the significant interactions of the two sectors in educational programs (work-study options at the undergraduate level; specially designed continuing education programs; executive-in-residence programs in business schools) and

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programs designed to broaden the experience of university and industry personnel through interchange of executive and professional staff. There are also important collaborations between the sectors in tackling social challenges both domestically (aboriginal youth unemployment, for example) and internationally (through development assistance programs). They are also part of a significant evolution in the relationship between industry and universities in recent decades. Clearly, the membrane that separates the university from other sectors of society is much more permeable than it used to be, and more opportunities for beneficial collaboration and partnership will surely arise in the future. As we move forward to seize these opportunities, let us not lose sight of the importance of the corporate integrity of the university itself. In an era when the tendency is to see universities as a sum of parts – part contract research agency, part consulting firm, part trade school, part junior college, part conservatory, and part studio – we must all guard against losing a holistic vision of the university and of the shared values that constitute the genetic code of the institution as a whole. To be truly valuable partners of industry, universities must remain places for creating, communicating, and preserving knowledge in a climate of freedom and independence; for the synthesis of teaching and best practice; for the fusion of science and humanism; and for the conversion of new knowledge to beneficial application. As more players, be they government officials or captains of industry, are drawn into the process of shaping the future of universities, it is critical that they understand the complex goals of universities (egalitarian in providing opportunity, elitist in intellectual aspiration, generalist in foundation programs, and specialist in advanced studies); in other words that they understand the essence of the university and not merely its superficial attributes. If we are unsuccessful in meeting this challenge, we face a future of working at cross-purposes, sterile debates, and mistrust. But if we succeed, then, as Jim Downey observed, “we can take the future as it comes, with our options open, our wits about us, and a strong sense of who and what we are to see us through.” Our path to future glories will certainly be more certain if our universities are fortunate enough to be led by individuals with the talent and dedication so brilliantly displayed by Bernard Shapiro as principal of McGill.

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6 Research: A Partnership Opportunity for Universities, Business, and Government william r. pulleyblank It is an honour for me to help celebrate the accomplishments of Principal Shapiro at McGill University and to share some of my thoughts regarding present and future partnership possibilities between universities, business, and governments. My opinions are strongly influenced by my experiences in both industry and academia over the past thirty-five years. After working for ibm Canada as a systems engineer in the early 1970s, I took a faculty position at the University of Calgary. From 1982 to 1990 I was a member of the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization of the University of Waterloo and from 1987 to 1990 held the cp/nserc Chair in Optimization and Computer Applications. In 1990 I joined the staff of the T.J. Watson Research Center of the ibm Corporation in Yorktown Heights, New York, where I managed the Optimization Center in the Department of Mathematical Sciences and for five years was director of Mathematical Sciences. In 2001 I moved to my present position as director of Exploratory Server Systems and the Deep Computing Institute. As a faculty member at universities with strong research interests, I carried out programs of pure and applied research in optimization, centring on graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and local and international colleagues. As the holder of an nserc Industrial Research Chair, I had the opportunity to work closely with the Communication and Information Technology department of a major Canadian corporation, cp Rail. We focused on several applied problems; for example, the challenge of optimizing traffic across single- or double-line track in the face of uncertain demand and train performance.

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At ibm Research, in addition to carrying out activities similar to those of a research university, we spent considerable effort on solving customers’ operational problems as well as developing improved procedures for ibm’s internal use. My department also supported selected university research projects financially and participated as an industrial partner in collaborative research projects. During the past ten years I have served on a number of advisory boards of research organizations, all of which have dealt with the issues involved in research within universities as well as the challenges encountered by efforts to work effectively with business and government. There is broad agreement that significant changes are occurring and that we are facing a range of new opportunities for collaboration, provided that certain obstacles can be overcome. I will discuss these from three perspectives.

an industry view Perhaps the most significant political event of the last two decades has been the end of the cold war. During the cold war period, from 1945 to 1980, a great deal of research was carried out that we all sincerely hoped would never be put into practice. With the end of the cold war, there was a shift to the application of a broader set of economic standards to evaluating research and the values provided by universities. Although pure, curiosity-driven research is still supported, it is generally expected that researchers will spend some time trying to develop the practical aspects of their work. Much of the research taking place in corporations is focused on areas that are believed to have business potential. Other, more fundamental, research is often left to the universities. A consequence of this is a broader recognition in industry of the importance of partnerships with academia. Another aspect of this shift is an increased emphasis on interdisciplinary and applied research in many new government-funding initiatives. There has always been stress between the desire to support core research in a discipline and the desire to drive targeted initiatives. We are seeing many new programs emphasizing the latter, a development that is causing some concern. A major driver in the evolution of business today is the emergence of the Internet from being a tool of large universities and

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research laboratories to becoming a pervasive information network. This is leading to an unprecedented degree of globalization, affecting every business. The Internet not only provides universal access to unprecedented quantities of digital information but it also enables the results of processing this information to be delivered globally, to any potential user, almost instantaneously. For example, a researcher anywhere in the world can access new results much faster over the web than the time it would take to mail out a reprint of a paper to a colleague in the same city – provided that these results are posted on the author’s home page. There is at least as much diversity among companies as there is among universities. Some companies, such as the ibm Corporation, maintain central research functions. In the case of ibm, approximately 1 per cent of our 330,000 global employees are in the Research Division. The mission of this division is not to impact the short-term balance sheet of the corporation, but rather to ensure that the right technological foundation will be in place for the next five to ten years. The number of corporations maintaining such a capability seems to be decreasing. This creates a growing dependence on other sources of research and innovation, notably universities. The activity of researchers within a company like ibm is also changing. There is an increasing focus on working with customers and with other divisions within the company to better understand the needs and opportunities. There is also an increasing emphasis on working with development divisions to accelerate the transition of results from research to product, as appropriate. This transition has occurred over the past fifteen years, driven in large part by the economic and business pressures encountered in today’s markets. Significant challenges must be met in order to improve the university-industry partnership. This need originates in part from the somewhat orthogonal views of universities and business regarding the constraints and objectives of a research activity. A university researcher will often feel constrained to obtain a completely correct solution to a problem, and, subject to that, will have an objective of completing it as quickly as possible. An industrial researcher will be constrained to produce a result within a certain time frame and, subject to that, will have an objective of ensuring that the solution is as close to correct as possible.

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There is always an issue of time scales. In my experience, all researchers view their work as “long-term”; however, what this means varies enormously. We expect that a ten-year or longer research program is more likely to occur in a university than in industry. Conversely, an industrial research program may be initiated, defined, and completed in less time than it would take a university researcher even to secure funding for the activity. Industrial research is more susceptible to short-term business pressures than research carried out in a university. Industrial job security lies somewhere between that of an assistant professor on a fixed-term contract and that of a tenured full professor. Whereas a regular employee of a company normally has a job with no predefined end date, it is recognized that jobs will continue to exist only as long as the company and business unit are successful in the marketplace. Although the influence of this on a research division may be somewhat buffered, it is nonetheless real and does affect the focus of activities. Because Canadian universities receive a significant proportion of their funding from governments, there is an inherent stability that both protects them in difficult economic times and constrains them when the economy is in a rapid growth state. This is typically less true in an industrial research organization. Finally, the ownership of intellectual property continues to be a challenge to these relationships. The traditional academic view of freely contributing research output to the “public domain” is changing. This is in part due to financial pressures experienced by university scientists running research programs, as well as to a desire to receive economic benefit from the research. Business enterprises usually understand the difficulty of obtaining any financial gains from the results obtained in research labs and so are reluctant to agree to the sometimes overly optimistic estimates of university commercialization offices. On several occasions, I have seen the inability to reach closure in this area prevent joint research from occurring.

a north american view The United States has developed into the most powerful economic and political force in the world. Not only do Canada and the United Sates share the longest undefended border in the world but

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their economies are highly interdependent. In her address to the Asia Pacific Summit in November of 2002, Professor Wendy Dobson of the University of Toronto cited the following observations: Not only is Canada the United States’s largest trading partner but Canada is the leading export market for thirty-eight of the American States. • Ontario is the fourth-largest U.S. trading partner, after Canada, Japan, and Mexico. • The auto industry alone accounts for one third of the CanadaU.S. trade; this sector has had free trade for nearly forty years.1 •

Nevertheless, the two countries have profoundly different national characters, and the requirement to respect these views, while competing successfully with a neighbour ten times the size, affects many aspects of Canadian activity, including the university-industry partnership. Robertson Davies once asserted that to understand Canada one must realize that it is a northern country. In many ways, Canada is more similar to socialist Scandinavian countries such as Denmark and Sweden than to the United States. The Stanford economist Dr John E. Howell contended that the greatest economic challenge facing Canada is that it is a small country trying to act like a big country when it attempts to compete in all sectors with the United States. There is no question that Canada has a much higher level of social programs than the United States. A comparison of their health care provisions gives an outstanding example. The United States contains many of the most advanced medical facilities in the world, but many citizens are not covered by health care insurance. The scope and level of public services is also significantly higher in Canada. The cost for this is a much higher rate of personal taxation: although the level of personal productivity may be similar in the two countries, there is a fundamental difference in the amount that is government-controlled in the form of social programs compared to the amount left to the individual as disposable income. These differences are reflected by the university systems in the two countries. In the United States there are private universities, funded by endowments, grants, and tuition fees as well as public universities, whose operating costs are subsidized by state resources.

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The tuition fees charged by top tier private universities are rapidly approaching $40,000 US per year. Canadian universities are all heavily dependent on provincial funding, and the fees charged are much lower. In Canada, professors are paid twelve-month salaries; in the U.S. professors typically receive nine-month salaries from their institution and will attempt to obtain two months of “summer salary” from a granting agency to fund their summer research. In the U.S. it is standard for universities to extract a percentage of a grant to a faculty member as “overhead” to cover part of the costs of the basic university facilities provided to researchers to carry out their programs. This is not the general practice in Canada. One consequence of this is that grants in support of research tend to be larger in the U.S. than in Canada, but the percentage of faculty members receiving grants is lower. The amount of real discretionary funds in an American research grant may often be quite small, because much of the funding goes toward summer salaries of the researchers and to university overhead. This means that, in some cases, a Canadian researcher will be in a better position to carry out an innovative research program than an American counterpart. However, some of the expensive research programs being carried out in the U.S. would be prohibitively expensive to carry out in Canada.

a consumer’s view I am the father of two children. My daughter graduated in sociology from Smith College, a small northeastern liberal arts college in May of 2002. Following this, she spent a year sailing on tall ships on both east and west coasts of the United States, in roles ranging from purser to boatswain to engineer. My son is a history major at McGill University and expects to graduate in 2005. There are many differences in their university experiences, some of which are due to differences in the university systems in Canada and the United States and some to the differences between a small college and a major comprehensive university. However, the similarities in their outlooks and their view of the world they are entering are striking. In both cases they have a facility, not a fascination, with technology. They view the interconnected digital world as an unremarkable feature of their environment, much as I viewed the ability to buy gas for my car in any city or town in North America. They communicate

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differently. Text messaging, Instant Messenger, and e-mail are as commonly used tools as the ubiquitous cell phone. This orientation is also reflected in the way they carry out research on a subject. They view the web as a vast resource and often begin a project by searching for volumes of information that will subsequently be distilled and rewritten. The use of Internet search engines helps overcome personal biases as to what they think is important. (Admittedly, these resources also introduce new opportunities for shoddy scholarship. Managing them is an important aspect of carrying out research in the present age.) This generation has grown up in a time of relative economic prosperity and affluence, and consequently seems to focus on core values and nonmaterial issues. It will be interesting to see the values that this generation places on research output as they move into positions of influence and decision making over the next two decades. All parents face concerns about the future of their children. As a parent I welcome university-business initiatives that will better prepare students for a successful and independent adult life. In many cases, this will be a life spent in some aspect of business or industry.

opportunities and challenges These are exciting times for researchers, scientists, and scholars. Powerful computing platforms are becoming commonplace, and the amount of data available continues to increase exponentially. High speed global communication networks make it possible for a person rarely to be out of contact with this information technology infrastructure. These are being used for many applications that go beyond the traditional ones of high performance computing. There are many different types of digital data. Most journals and conference proceedings are now made available in digital form. This accessibility not only speeds up dissemination of results but it permits sophisticated search using methods that go far beyond the traditional set of keywords provided by an author. In fact, text mining is being used as a technique for drug discovery; existing publications are scanned and correlated to identify promising targets for further study. We are seeing the amount of machine-generated data rapidly surpass the amount of authored data. Much of it is scientific data obtained from instruments and sensors. An X-ray can be digitized,

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creating the opportunity to instantaneously transmit the image around the world. The storage of medical imaging data will be one of the fastest-growing data storage segments. Weather satellites continuously stream data to the earth, enabling constant update of predictions. Planned arrays of ocean sensors will produce vast amounts of data regarding ocean temperatures, currents, and biology. The resulting demands on processing power are huge. The capability of computing devices continues to increase, as it has done continually since the beginning of the twentieth century. This was recognized by Gordon Moore, who in 1965 made the observation, now referred to as Moore’s Law, that the density of transistors on semiconductor devices doubles approximately every eighteen months. A well-known consequence has been that the power of computers doubles and the price/performance halves at the same rate. This has enabled much of the rapid expansion of computer applications as well as their pervasive role in our lives. We are seeing major advances that will enable handling these huge data sets as well as running detailed, long-term, multi-scale simulations. For example, when the BlueGene/L supercomputer becomes operational at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories in early 2005, it will be six times more powerful than any machine in existence today. To match BlueGene/L’s prodigious peak compute capability, every man, woman, and child on Earth would need to perform 60,000 calculations per second without transposing digits or forgetting to “carry the one.” The enormous bandwidth of its internal communications networks will support 140 simultaneous telephone conversations for every person in the United States and Canada. To match its tremendous input rate, an individual would need to speed-read the complete works of Shakespeare in a thousandth of a second. In less than ten minutes BlueGene/L can write the entire 20 Terabyte book collection of the Library of Congress. These advances present significant challenges to researchers. The amount of knowledge continues to grow at a steadily increasing pace. Fortunately, part of progress is consolidation, which organizes new knowledge and makes it more manageable. At the same time, existing disciplines continue to evolve and new areas of interdisciplinary activity, such as computational biology, emerge, making continuing demands on researchers to stay at the forefront of current research. Issues of security and privacy are becoming increasingly important. These can range from the establishment of standards that must be

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followed in order to conduct business in a certain geography to intense debate regarding the degree to which privacy should be sacrificed to support improved homeland security. A researcher’s output is now often viewed in a context much broader than originally intended, and scholars are expected to be responsible for possible consequences.

aspects of a successful partnership The research goals of business and academia are complementary. Nevertheless, there is often a high degree of mutual understanding and appreciation. Business leaders respect the goals of a university researcher to conduct curiosity-driven research, and accept the fact that many activities of research are unlikely to have an impact on their activities in the near term. University researchers understand the need of businesses to operate profitably – the market has a low tolerance for businesses that lose money. Business want to hire graduates who are capable of critical thought, tolerant, broadly educated, and able to carry out serious research on a problem. These criteria are very similar to what is desired of a person entering graduate school or starting an academic career. At ibm Research, people ask whether they should work on purely theoretical or applied problems. My answer is that they should work on both, but they should know which it is they are working on, as this information may significantly alter the research objectives and time frame. An industry-university relationship is potentially broad, with four main dimensions: Collaboration: Universities have great intellectual and problemsolving resources, and industry is highly interested in being able to bring these to bear on their problems. Industry has broad access to a huge set of applied problems – and the data it takes to understand them. These are potentially available to interested academic researchers. In many cases, this collaboration will consist of teams of researchers from industry and academia working together. Source of Employees/Market for graduates: Universities produce most of the future employees of the business world. Companies are interested in hiring graduates who will be able to make significant contributions in the short term and, more important, the long term. This is often a source of misunderstanding. To a company such as ours it is more important that a graduate master problem-solving

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skills, presentation skills, and the ability to think deeply about a hard problem than it is to have a capability in specific areas. For example, we expect people we hire to be able to quickly develop an understanding of a new programming language as part of the job. However the ability to understand when they have correctly formulated and solved a problem is something we would like them to bring with them from university. Source of Information: The academic enterprise is a huge source of creativity and innovation. In our highly competitive business environment, it is crucial that we maintain access to the results being generated by this body of researchers, and find ways to rapidly incorporate parts of this into our business. This desire to stay connected with universities provides a strong incentive to businesses to support universities, both financially and by donating employees’ time. Customers: Universities not only are large customers for our products, but they are usually very demanding customers. In addition to maintaining pressure on companies to offer their products at a very low price, they also provide important feedback on product qualities and shortcomings as well as suggestions for possible improvements. What creates a successful collaboration? From the point of view of industry, we look for researchers who will expend the effort necessary to really understand the problems we face and apply the creativity necessary to attack and solve them. They must understand that in the business world commitments are important and we expect them to be honoured. We all know of examples of academic authors who delivered manuscripts of books years after the due dates specified in their contracts. This practice is not acceptable in a competitive business environment. A successful collaboration will often have several dimensions. We are delighted to have bright students, graduate and undergraduate, working with us. Postdoctoral fellows often provide the “glue” that makes collaboration successful. If collaboration results in the generation of financial value, we recognize the right of the university and its researchers to receive fair compensation. Businesses are accustomed to paying a fair price for value received. In addition, many corporations do maintain budgets for charitable donations in support of worthy causes. However, successful universitybusiness partnerships should be based on exchange of items of

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value, not charity. Charitable donation budgets are usually much smaller than operating budgets and are often heavily constrained. Frequently, in cases when we have decided not to pursue a collaboration with a university, it has been because the university was unable to identify the value to us of a collaboration, and we have not been able to figure it out either. As the holder of an Industrial Research Chair in a university, I expected businesses to give me the chance to work on problems of importance to them. I expected them to provide necessary data and support so that I could work seriously on these problems. I also expected them to understand the academic time constraints that I had to balance. Students had many commitments, as did professors. It was often not possible to clear a calendar and give the same undivided attention to a problem that one would expect in industry. Several government programs offer support for such joint activities. The nserc Industrial Research Chair program has been effective in bridging these gaps and in developing research activities of value to both parties. The tripartite relationship among business, academia, and the government-funding agency provides considerable financial leverage, enabling a serious effort to be applied to problems of mutual interest. Co-op educational programs have often been the basis of strong partnerships between business and universities. Successful business partners in a co-op program understand their responsibility to provide stimulating, challenging assignments to students on work terms. In many cases, businesses are strongly motivated by these programs because of the advantage their participation may provide in hiring top students. Students in such programs benefit financially from their work terms, but even more from the experiences they gain. Graduate and postdoctoral internships can have similar benefits. On several occasions we have jointly sponsored such an activity for a suitable candidate to tackle a problem of mutual interest. In some cases, this sponsorship has resulted in our hiring the intern. Let me give a final example of a successful partnership. Several years ago, ibm created the Centre for Advanced Studies (cas), associated with our development laboratories in Toronto. This centre gave university researchers access to problems we cared about and allowed us to offer support to researchers at a number of universities.

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The program has proven to be very successful in building a community of researchers working on a range of problems in which we are interested. The model has been replicated, and there are now nine cas locations worldwide. It is generally more effective to establish partnership programs such as these than to arrange individual collaborations. Such programs provide a framework for successful joint activities and they reduce the effort required to work out contractual terms. They also encourage researchers to consider including these sorts of activities in their programs. Governments can be very valuable in helping establish these programs, consistent with their objectives, and in providing some funding. The diversity of the interests, skills, and capabilities can strengthen academic-business collaborations if managed successfully. I discussed earlier the remarkable progress we are making in technology. Biological processes evolve much more slowly, as do changes to existing modes of operation. However, I believe that by continuing to focus on forging more effective collaborations, we will be able to enhance the overall effectiveness of the academic-business partnership.

note 1 (http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/dobson/research/ AP%20Summit%202002.PDF)

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7 Producing Knowledge for Society bruce g. trigger

During his principalship Bernard Shapiro promoted discussion of higher education on a scale never before seen at McGill. Much concern understandably focused on practical issues relating to how a debt-ridden institution might survive in an age of government cutbacks, but these discussions were in turn grounded in more farreaching explorations of the changing role of universities in the modern world. I want to reflect on the role of Arts faculties from the perspective not of an administrator but of a teacher and researcher. I am addressing these issues at a time when political anxieties increasingly blur the distinction between means and ends, and pervasive fear and self-righteousness threaten to dull our analytical abilities, our moral judgment, and ultimately our ability to cope effectively with threats to our collective well-being. The past several decades have witnessed unprecedented social change driven by technological and economic forces and a neoconservative ideology that many academics who are trained to know better regard as unchallengeable. The humanities and social sciences are increasingly portrayed as irrelevant to the new social order and a parasitical luxury that taxpayers should no longer be called on to support. To an astonishing degree university-based social scientists and humanists have acquiesced to this negative evaluation. Some have tried to make themselves useful to the powers-that-be by addressing what the latter identify as urgent social issues. Others have sought escape by engaging in esoteric controversies about whether curricula should stress the values of Western civilization or include those of other cultures and whether human affairs are better studied from a rationalist or a postmodern perspective. These debates only

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reinforce the popular image of the social sciences and humanities as being disconnected from the real world and not addressing the key issues of our age. At the same time movers and shakers and their advocates speak of the end of history and the operation of the invisible hand. These concepts imply that the new world system is a self-regulating one that is able automatically to ensure a stable and successful future for all industrious and deserving individuals. These are self-justifying claims that, as any reputable social scientist ought to be able to demonstrate, are more akin to superstition than to science. Today we see societies and individuals around the world being radically transformed in many ways, both for better and for worse. Key institutions of the early industrial world order, such as nation states, are being eroded by a transnational economy. Individual career trajectories have become increasingly uncertain as rapid technological innovation and cut-throat competition for corporate profits undermine employment security. The ecologists Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson, in their prize-winning study Culture and the Evolutionary Process (1985), provided evidence that millions of years of natural selection have fashioned a human brain that is highly capable of making decisions about the behaviour of people living in small groups and events occurring over relatively short periods of time. Yet they argue that, as technological progress links together ever larger numbers of people and produces ever more rapid social change, the ability of human beings to cope effectively with unfamiliar sorts of problems becomes less adequate, exposing human societies to the dangers of serious sociopolitical malfunction and catastrophic breakdown. Boyd and Richerson’s analysis clearly demonstrates that technological progress and economic change are not the only major variables shaping sociocultural transformations. Other vital factors are human nature and the functional prerequisites of social systems. Human nature is a product of slow natural selection, while social systems are transformed by rapidly acting thermodynamic and ecological constraints. These factors influence human behaviour in ways that are no less significant than are any “laws” imposed by technology and economics. Because the social sciences and humanities are the basic sources of an informed understanding of human behaviour, these disciplines must play a vital role in any effort to shape a sustainable

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future for human beings. Whether those who control the modern world like it or not, the social sciences and humanities are vital components of any society that aspires to remain on the cutting edge of future developments. The sooner physical and biological scientists, politicians, and the general public understand this, the better it will be for our collective future and that of the other creatures with whom we share this planet. We know well, as a result of what happened in the twentieth century, that absolute power cannot be safely concentrated in a few hands in a technologically advanced society. The horrors of mass genocide in Nazi Germany and the massive, irreversible ecological damage done by the Soviet Union bear witness to the dangers of such systems. We also learn from past experience that there is now a need for effective instruments of political control that can balance and contest the power of the transnational economy that emerged in the late twentieth century. What kind of political institutions are required to manage, simultaneously and effectively, a rapidly changing and ever more tightly integrated world on neighbourhood, community, national, hemispheric, and global scales? How would citizens have to perceive themselves and others for such a multi-nested polity to operate? How would they have to be educated and empowered? What sort of common values would they have to evolve? Trying to answer such questions poses a much greater challenge to researchers in the humanities and social sciences than do anodyne culture wars or debating the abstract pros and cons of postmodernism. There is no certainty that the future of humanity or the global ecosystem can be assured by humanists and social scientists addressing major social, political, and economic problems. They may not be able to formulate viable solutions and they do not sufficiently control the levers of power to implement viable solutions if they were to discover them. What is clear, however, is that if these problems are not seriously addressed the future of humanity is increasingly at risk. For the sake of humanity’s collective future, the social sciences and humanities must strive to be taken seriously. But to be taken seriously by others, humanists and social scientists must first take themselves seriously, even if they sometimes don a court jester’s costume to make a point. They must stop envying the physical and biological sciences and the world of business and establish in their

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own minds that what they do is at least as important as what these others do. While the human sciences can never be predictive disciplines, they already have the capacity to explain much about the present and the past. In this respect the human sciences resemble biology, which can explain why change occurs even better than the social sciences do but does not claim it will ever be able to predict the course of biological evolution. To achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the behaviour of individuals and social groups, social scientists and humanists must resist demands by governments and funding agencies to devote all their energies to seeking quick fixes for what are identified as urgent social problems. They must defend their right also to undertake what in the physical and biological sciences would be designated as pure research. One way to move forward in this sphere of the social sciences and humanities that especially interests me is to renew our emphasis on the comparative study of social institutions and human behaviour. Over the years social scientists have collected vast amounts of data and subjected them to careful analysis. One of the major advantages of a comparative approach is that it identifies where varied subjective biases have led scholars to interpret similar situations differently. Some postmodernists will, of course, object that every culture is unique and that comparison is therefore impossible. These objections are easily countered by pointing out that comparative analyses can address differences as well as similarities. It is also obvious that, while every culture may be unique, human groups share numerous traits because of their common humanity. Hence a renewed emphasis on comparative studies seems to offer a promising way to move forward. By adopting a broader and longer perspective, social scientists and humanists can acquire a more powerful and better integrated understanding of their subject matter. Doing this requires the determination to transcend the limitations of political correctness and the courage to risk displeasing those who are influential by not telling them only what we believe they want to hear. Only by encouraging the formulation of as many alternative viewpoints as possible and insisting that all these viewpoints be fully and fairly tested against all available evidence, can social scientists hope to replace dangerous cultural myths and self-serving delusions and half truths with a more objective understanding of human behaviour. Only by

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freeing themselves to a greater degree than at present from being compelled to study what non-academics deem to be useful in order to secure funding can the social sciences and humanities become a source of knowledge that can help the citizens of democratic societies to formulate better long-term solutions for their problems. Achieving that goal further requires a degree of tolerance that has generally been rare among academics themselves and that with respect to many key issues is particularly lacking at the present time. It also involves risking the displeasure of those in authority. Social scientists can only secure a measure of freedom for themselves if they can convince the voting and tax-paying public that in the long run they can contribute significantly to the well-being of society. Viewing human affairs in the long as well as the short term, and looking at them comparatively rather than as single cultures – these are the most important ways by which scholars can differentiate themselves from journalists and politicians. In the educational sphere, academics are under increasing pressure to train technicians to play effective roles in the new transnational economy. Humanists and social scientists take pride in expanding the intellectual horizons of prospective physicians, lawyers, and business people, as well as providing economists, translators, and journalists with the skills they need for their professions. Yet these ways of trying to make ourselves useful, because of their very specificity, fail to define a fundamental or satisfactory pedagogical role for our disciplines; something analogous to the role that Arts disciplines once played, or at least tried to play, in training young people to think and act wisely in all spheres of endeavour. The principal educational challenge currently facing the humanities and social sciences is to prepare students to cope with the intellectual environment that is being created in response to the new communications technologies. To do this effectively, academics have first to learn how to manage this new environment themselves. Through the electronic media we are being assailed by ever more information – some true, some false, and almost all of it disseminated by parties anxious to influence our minds and win our hearts for their causes. Every day we encounter new information that challenges and erodes the certainties of the past and leaves little time for careful reflection and sober second thoughts. How can a person learn to cope critically with this superabundance of data coming from so many often unknown sources? Teaching about

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great literature, Western civilization, or diverse cultures, even when accompanied by occasional courses in logic and a smattering of scientific method, is clearly insufficient. Today the most important pedagogical task facing all the humanities and social sciences is to instruct our students and ourselves in how to manage the new information technologies, how to discriminate among superabundant purveyors of information, how to assess ideas quickly and effectively, and how to distinguish what is valuable to individuals and societies from what is harmful; in short, how to transform information into understanding and even into wisdom, as all humans have tried to do with much less abundant data in the past. Postmodernism, especially its techniques for deconstruction, has much that is important to teach us about doing this, provided we treat such critiquing as a means to an end rather than as an end in itself. These techniques can and should be taught in every discipline as part of a basic Arts education. In this manner, students can be made more aware of the need to investigate sources of information and become wary of the biases inherent in such data. Learning to identify recurrent themes alerts students to material that may have become uncritically embedded in their sources. Nevertheless, I have noticed that in recent years even students who can evaluate specific sources of information effectively are having increasing difficulty finding the time for the reflection that is required to integrate data to produce critical syntheses of their own devising. That leaves them vulnerable to being unduly influenced by a plethora of novel prepackaged systems and ideologies. Boyd and Richerson have demonstrated that untested beliefs can, as a consequence of modern communications systems, spread rapidly and have catastrophic social and political consequences, as the history of the twentieth century has shown all too clearly. On the other hand, they have found that knowledge that is tested by being transmitted from one individual to another over long periods generally comes to serve both individual and collective interests well. There appears at present to be no means and no inclination to slow the rate of technological change so as to control its social impacts more effectively. In order to counter the undesirable effects of such change it is imperative to try to educate people in ways that will help them evaluate and synthesize knowledge more critically and comprehensively.

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Learning how to transcend our own intellectual dogmatism and parochialism and examine our cherished beliefs in a more dispassionate, systematic, and critical manner is essential if we are to be able to train students to think more effectively in the context of our complex and changing world. Incorporating training in such skills into undergraduate programs can help to safeguard lifeenhancing human values – and society itself – at a time when the rapidity of change poses ever greater dangers for both. Finally, we must not overlook the crucial issue of university governance. We live in a world from which command economies have supposedly been banished because of their manifest inadequacies. Neoconservatives teach that services are delivered best when decisions are made by their immediate providers in a competitive context. Yet command economies continue to flourish in Western societies, where both governments and businesses seek to subordinate the research and teaching programs of universities to their complementary cost-cutting and profit-generating agendas. The consequences of this practice have been especially unfortunate for the social sciences and humanities. As government block funds have dried up, the agendas of university programs have been increasingly dictated and distorted by governments selectively supporting what they view as more practical research and teaching options. Arts faculties must ever more assiduously solicit support from individual and corporate donors to maintain programs that tax-cutting governments refuse to support. While such funding promotes many important initiatives, it is usually targeted toward particular interests and hence does not substitute for the general support that was once provided by adequate block grants from governments. As Arts faculties lose control of their financial resources, they are shaped by diverse forces that bear no logical relation to one another or to what academics knowledgeably believe are the real needs of their disciplines. Even when university administrations reallocate funds to sustain Arts programs, as McGill has begun to do recently, the financing of research remains a problem and government responsibility remains unrecognized. The failure of the humanities and social sciences to articulate effective responses to these shifts in funding is in part a baleful legacy of the technocratic tendencies that prevailed in the social sciences in the 1960s, when many academics sought to become expert advisors to government officials and politicians. This trend,

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combined with narrow specialization, discouraged the consideration of a more general role for the social sciences and humanities and encouraged the disengagement of most academics from direct participation in the broader public sphere. If we are to free ourselves from the consequences of this Faustian bargain, we must articulate new and more general roles for our disciplines. We must try to convince not only governments but the general public, whose servants in a democracy both academics and politicians are supposed to be, that Arts faculties in universities can provide a unique setting for the production of general knowledge about human behaviour, society, and culture that is no less important for realizing a sustainable future than what technologists, business people, and micromanagers have to offer. To achieve this goal we need to resist pressures from politicians and powerful interest groups to prescribe specific fixes for particular social problems without at the same time publicly considering the broader issues of which these problems are a part. We also need actively to promote among ourselves and our fellow citizens a new level of tolerance for the disciplined examination of diverse viewpoints in order to facilitate more nuanced and productive discussions of public policy from better informed scientific, philosophical, and moral perspectives. These are goals that, like all important public initiatives in democratic societies, will take considerable time and sustained effort to achieve. Their pursuit must be accompanied by the pragmatic compromises that are necessary to enable our disciplines to survive in the short run. Such pragmatic considerations should not, however, inhibit efforts to reorient what we as social scientists and humanists do and how we do it. We live in difficult times but we are supposed to be experts in communicating ideas. Therefore, to paraphrase the bard, “the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves if no one hears us.”

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8 L’autonomie des universités françaises et les enjeux de la décentralisation jean-michel lacroix En ce début de siècle, voire de millénaire, la tentation est grande de parler de crise de l’Université, quand ce n’est pas pour prédire son déclin. Mais il serait plus juste même si l’on était tenté d’annoncer la venue d’une apocalypse de se rappeler qu’elle ne serait pas fondamentalement incompatible avec la naissance d’un monde nouveau. Le concept de crise n’est sans doute que la manifestation dans les consciences de grandes mutations. Dans le contexte actuel de mondialisation, l’avenir de l’université française est une préoccupation majeure des pouvoirs publics. Le budget de l’Education Nationale en France demeure le premier budget de l’Etat et représente le cinquième des dépenses publiques. Multipliée par deux depuis 1974, la dépense intérieure d’éducation représente 7 pour cent du pib en 2001, soit 100.7 milliards d’euros (6,260 euros par élève ou étudiant et 1,690 euros par habitant).1 Quant aux trente recteurs qui représentent le Ministre de la Jeunesse, de l’Education Nationale et de la Recherche, ils gèrent la moitié de l’administration publique française, soit 1.3 million de personnes et plus de 15 millions d’écoliers, de lycéens, et d’étudiants.

les mutations dans le contexte historique français Parce qu’elle est une nécessité sociale, la fonction de l’enseignant implique des relations avec le pouvoir politique surtout par égard à la tradition centralisatrice, encore très forte en France, qui depuis des siècles confère des attributions étendues et des prérogatives

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primordiales à la puissance publique. Les universités ont connu toutes sortes de vicissitudes dans leurs relations avec l’Etat mais, comme le souligne René Rémond: “Ecclésial ou laïque, le personnel enseignant a toujours été une cléricature: congrégation religieuse, corporation comme le voulait Napoléon ou, si l’on écoute les détracteurs, caste mandarinale.”2 On ne rappellera pas la compétition pour la maîtrise de l’institution éducative notamment entre l’Eglise et l’Etat. Ni la Révolution française ni l’instauration durable de la République n’ont été des commencements absolus. Le développement de l’enseignement est l’œuvre d’une longue histoire; son institutionnalisation et sa généralisation démarrent à partir du dix-neuvième siècle, mais les véritables changements remontent à quelque quarante ou cinquante ans; d’abord, au plan quantitatif, en raison d’une dilatation brusque des effectifs, on peut véritablement parler d’explosion scolaire puisque de 60,000 étudiants en 1938 on est passé à 300,000 en 1968 et à plus d’1,400,000 aujourd’hui. Le changement d’échelle entraîne inévitablement un changement de nature. La massification inverse le rapport entre la demande de formation générale et de formation professionnelle mais surtout on s’interroge sur les finalités de l’institution. Au cours des âges, l’Ecole a entretenu des relations fort étroites avec l’unité nationale, par la diffusion de la langue commune au détriment des langues régionales et par l’enseignement de l’histoire nationale, qui ont permis la naissance d’une conscience unitaire et l’affirmation de l’identité nationale doublées d’une association avec le système administratif et son caractère fortement centralisé. Les années 1880 et l’héritage de Jules Ferry auront bien été de permettre à l’élève de devenir un citoyen à part entière et de s’élever au-dessus de sa condition (selon le principe de la méritocratie républicaine). On comprend mieux comment la crise actuelle de la nation a pu entraîner la crise de l’école. Avec l’émergence d’une culture mondiale ou même tout simplement européenne, on peut constater aussi la résurgence des personnalités régionales. L’inquiétude est forte de constater non seulement que l’on cesse de corriger les inégalités mais qu’on les reproduit; la fracture sociale renforce la fracture scolaire. L’Université fait le choix de la professionnalisation plutôt que de la culture désintéressée. Le souci majeur est de rapprocher l’Université de la société; enfin l’une des particularités du système universitaire français est sa façon de traiter la

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question de la sélection. La réorganisation de l’enseignement supérieur depuis la loi de 1968 est régie par le principe (réaffirmé par la loi Savary de 1984) que tout bachelier a le droit d’entrer dans l’université de son choix (même si le taux d’accès au baccalauréat d’une classe d’âge stagne autour de 61 pour cent depuis quelques années, il demeure le plus fort au monde) alors qu’en pratique la sélection est introduite plus ou moins ouvertement dans un bon nombre de secteurs. Le maintien des grandes écoles à côté des universités en demeure l’illustration la plus éclatante mais il est clair que les difficultés d’un système d’accès ouvert s’accroissent face à une demande de formation à la fois mobile et imprévisible. Dans ces conditions la sélection par l’échec ne peut qu’être injuste, immorale, et dispendieuse et il est essentiel de promouvoir une meilleure orientation des étudiants. “La crise actuelle tient aux difficultés de l’institution universitaire pour trouver dans notre société une place conforme aussi bien à la vocation qu’elle a héritée de son histoire qu’aux exigences de formation et de culture qui émanent de notre société et de ses transformations,”3 comme le rappelle Alain Renaut. L’interrogation porte désormais sur la capacité de modernisation des universités4 non pas au sens superficiel où il s’agirait simplement de s’adapter à quelque mode passagère mais plutôt au sens fondamental où il convient d’envisager de restructurer son mode de fonctionnement ainsi que ses finalités.

autonomie et décentralisation L’enjeu est bien de s’interroger sur la part réelle d’autonomie et de responsabilité qui demeure pour réformer voire pour refonder le service public actuel. Quelle est la capacité d’initiative et d’action au sein de nos universités? L’après ’68 aura été caractérisé par l’évolution des facultés aux universités. Ce qui prévalait jusqu’alors, c’était l’autonomie des facultés, des disciplines, et des universitaires. La loi Edgar Faure du 12 novembre 1968 inscrit formellement les principes d’autonomie, de participation, et de pluridisciplinarité. L’autonomie des universités est décrétée formellement mais elle demeure juridique et théorique. La loi Savary du 26 janvier 1984 renforce ce principe en dotant les universités d’un statut d’établissements publics autonomes à caractère scientifique, culturel, et professionnel (epscp)

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et affirme pour la première fois la notion de service public d’enseignement supérieur et de recherche ainsi que celle de l’égalité d’accès pour tous les étudiants ayant réussi au baccalauréat (quelle que soit leur origine sociale ou quel que soit le point du territoire où est assurée la formation dans le second degré). La Conférence des Présidents d’Université (cpu) créée en 1971 et finalisée en 1984 constitue un lieu privilégié de coordination et de dialogue des universités entre elles tout en favorisant les contacts entre les responsables des universités avec les autorités dites de tutelle. Elle s’affirme de plus en plus comme force de proposition et instrument de réflexion collective. Le travail de ses commissions donne lieu à des rapports susceptibles d’influer sur la décision politique du Ministre; la réunion la plus marquante de la cpu sera sans doute le colloque annuel de Lille organisé en mars 2001 et consacré à la définition même de l’autonomie.5 L’autonomie des universités s’inscrit depuis quelques mois dans le cadre d’un mouvement de décentralisation qui ne peut que se développer. Ce mouvement a été possible grâce à une volonté forte de l’Etat mais aussi à l’insistance des instances régionales, départementales, et locales. Les lois de décentralisation Deferre-Mauroy de 1982 et 1983 (qui ont donné des compétences aux conseils généraux en matière de construction des collèges et aux régions en matière de construction des lycées) sont actuellement prolongées par le vaste débat engagé à l’initiative du premier ministre JeanPierre Raffarin et de son gouvernement. Les thèses s’affrontent entre centralistes ou girondins, entre autoritaires ou libéraux, entre, d’une part, les partisans de l’Etat qui considèrent qu’il doit conserver un rôle moteur et que l’Education nationale doit préserver ses missions régaliennes et, d’autre part, les régionalistes qui revendiquent le partage, voire le transfert, de certaines compétences à condition qu’il soit accompagné d’un transfert financier. Pour l’instant, dans le débat sur la décentralisation, on s’interroge davantage sur l’incidence des éventuels transferts de compétence plus que sur la fonctionnalité des futurs bénéficiaires de ces transferts répartis entre communes, communautés d’agglomérations, départements, et régions. Parmi les démocraties occidentales modernes, la France se distingue non seulement par un fort centralisme mais aussi par un véritable maquis institutionnel6 caractérisé par un empilement compliqué de responsabilités du niveau local au niveau national.

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Les propositions actuelles de révision de la Constitution visent à inscrire que “la France est une République indivisible, laïque, démocratique et sociale et … que son organisation est décentralisée.”7 L’autre nouveauté est que la région devient l’une des collectivités territoriales comme la commune et le département au risque éventuel de la doter de pouvoirs considérables imposant une tutelle sur les autres collectivités. Enfin, l’affirmation du principe de subsidiarité rappelle qu’il convient d’exercer une compétence au niveau le plus approprié. Quel peut être l’impact de ce débat sur l’évolution de l’Université française? Déjà les concertations engagées lors de la mise en route des plans U2000 (Université 2000) et u3m (Université du Troisième Millénaire) ont permis aux collectivités locales d’“entrer” dans les universités. Les financements conjoints entre l’Etat et les collectivités qui caractérisent les contrats de plan Etat-régions ont montré le début d’un partenariat qui a déjà permis de moderniser les installations et les équipements.

quelle autonomie pour les universités? Le principe de l’autonomie est une valeur symbolique très forte et très sensible, qui est d’autant plus affirmée par tous les présidents d’universités que l’on sait par ailleurs quelles sont les limites de cette autonomie. Limites dans les évaluations des personnels dont le recrutement est globalement maîtrisé, mais qui ne sont quasiment jamais susceptibles d’être sanctionnés et a fortiori licenciés. Limites dans la politique financière avec des budgets qui ne traduisent pas toujours assez les véritables priorités politiques de l’établissement (beaucoup de présidents présentent des budgets annuels qui reproduisent à peu de choses près les précédents pour être sûrs d’être approuvés par les conseils d’administration); limites des recettes et des ressources propres autres que la subvention de l’Etat surtout dans les universités à dominante littéraire ou juridique; limites de la marge de manœuvre des présidents qui, même s’ils ont une véritable autorité morale et scientifique, sont constamment soucieux de conserver leur majorité dans des conseils renouvelés car la durée des mandats ne correspond pas; limites enfin dans la gestion du patrimoine immobilier. A cet égard, on peut penser que la décentralisation peut faire évoluer la situation en matière de construction, de réhabilitation, et

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de mise en sécurité des bâtiments universitaires, en impliquant davantage les régions financièrement; mais on comprend aussi par ailleurs que la règle du “qui paye commande” risque de freiner les ardeurs des présidents d’université qui, à tout prendre, préfèrent encore la tutelle protectrice de l’Etat à celle des régions. Il serait sans doute souhaitable, pour renforcer les partenariats, de valider les projets relatifs au développement local et à l’aménagement du territoire au travers de contrats tripartites liant l’Etat, les régions, et les universités, la préparation et la négociation de ces contrats pouvant être organisées en amont au sein de conseils d’orientation stratégique. L’attachement aux diplômes nationaux au nom de l’égalité des chances est fort (tout comme l’aspiration des Français à l’égalité devant les services publics demeure forte); l’idée de transférer la gestion des corps notamment de personnels administratifs, techniques, ou de service aux collectivités est politiquement sensible au nom du sacro-saint principe du maintien du service public. Mais entre le jacobinisme exacerbé et l’“intégrisme décentralisateur,” il devrait y avoir place pour des propositions raisonnables. On peut toutefois souhaiter que la décentralisation ne soit pas “une grande braderie qui laisse la République en morceaux,” pour reprendre la formule de Jean-Louis Debré. L’une des véritables difficultés sera de clarifier le rôle de chaque échelon territorial (notamment entre l’échelon communal et l’échelon intercommunal), voire d’arbitrer les éventuelles rivalités entre les diverses collectivités et d’éviter un creusement des disparités de ressources (même si la Constitution modifiée assortit l’autonomie fiscale d’un renforcement de la péréquation financière). Quant au droit à l’expérimentation, il ne doit pas être livré à la fantaisie des collectivités territoriales. Mais pour l’instant, il ne peut y avoir d’autonomie réelle que si les universités jouent sérieusement le jeu de la négociation contractuelle avec le Ministère de tutelle dans le cadre d’une culture de projet d’établissement. Cette politique contractuelle, même si elle n’est pas toujours respectée (surtout à la fin des quadriennaux en matière d’attribution de moyens), a pour vertu essentielle de donner la possibilité à toute une communauté universitaire de s’approprier un projet commun qui, seul, permet de fonctionner dans une université créative, inventive, et responsable surtout si les dirigeants sont investis, définissent des objectifs clairs et mobilisateurs, et ont le sens du leadership. La pertinence et l’efficacité de la réalisation des missions de service public imposent que les

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universités puissent bénéficier d’une autonomie de pilotage et de gestion renforcées. Il demeure évident que les structures de l’université ne peuvent que continuer à évoluer: elles ont déjà acté la nécessité de l’ouverture sociale à l’international, au monde économique et au monde de la recherche; elles ont progressé en matière de cohérence d’une offre de formation de plus en plus diversifiée en introduisant plus de souplesse et de pragmatisme. Le système de crédits transférables dans le contexte de l’harmonisation européenne, l’introduction de deux langues étrangères, l’harmonisation des calendriers de l’année universitaire deviennent de plus en plus impératifs surtout si l’on veut renforcer la mobilité étudiante. Mais, sans conteste, le développement de l’autonomie des universités implique une réorganisation, voire une profonde réforme, des structures de l’Etat en raison de l’actuelle multiplication des interlocuteurs, des effets pervers de la hiérarchie, des lenteurs des finances publiques, de l’impécuniosité de l’Etat, d’une certaine “viscosité administrative,” d’une réglementation parfois tatillonne, autant d’éléments qui sont préjudiciables à l’efficacité. Pour conclure, je dirai que, d’une part, l’historique de la création des universités dans une France héritière des traditions explique la survivance d’une organisation centralisée et hiérarchisée. D’autre part une large tradition d’autonomie, née au Moyen Age, a soustrait l’Université à tous les pouvoirs locaux et engendré une méfiance tenace à l’égard des pressions politiques. Mais au-delà du poids du passé – fût-il prestigieux – osons croire que l’Université française saura affronter les défis de demain dans le contexte nouveau de compétition internationale et de mondialisation économique. La Sorbonne n’est pas qu’un reste archéologique du treizième siècle8 à côté du musée du Moyen Age de Cluny; elle a gratté ses façades et elle a introduit les fibres optiques tout en maintenant son idéal d’excellence!

notes 1 Dans L’Etat de l’Ecole (Paris: Ministère de l’Education Nationale, no 12, octobre 2002). 2 René Rémond, Préface, dans Louis-Henri Parias (ed.), Histoire générale de l’enseignement et de l’éducation en France du Ve siècle avant

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3 4

5 6

7 8

International Perspectives Jésus-Christ à la fin du XXe siècle, vol. 1 (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie de France, 1981), 24. Alain Renaut, Que faire des universités? (Paris: Bayard, 2001), 13. Par universités, nous entendons ici les 81 établissements, voire les 90 si l’on y ajoute quelques établissements assimilés, qui rassemblent 70% des effectifs de l’enseignement supérieur; le terme n’inclut pas dans notre propos les grandes écoles et les classes préparatoires, ni les sections de techniciens supérieurs (bts), ni les Instituts universitaires de technologie (iut). Voir Autonomie des universités, Actes du Colloque annuel de la CPU (Paris, décembre 2001), 96 p. Aux régions, départements, et communes, la loi Voynet sur l’aménagement du territoire a institué les pays “espaces de projet” dont le développement (300 sont en cours de constitution) inquiète les maires. Cette loi est en contradiction avec la loi Chevènement sur l’intercommunalité. La simplification de la carte administrative de la France s’impose car elle est devenue incompréhensible avec ses financements croisés et ses chevauchements de compétences. Il s’agit de la nouvelle rédaction de l’article 1. Les statuts de l’Université de Paris datent de 1215 et la fondation du collège de Robert de Sorbon remonte à 1257. Pour en savoir plus sur les origines des universités françaises, on pourra consulter avec profit Jacques Verger, Les Universités au Moyen Age (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1973).

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9 The Challenge of Leadership and Governance in the University hanna gray One of America’s great university leaders, Clark Kerr, was shown the exit door some thirty-five years ago in the midst of huge political turmoil. After nine years as president of the University of California, he departed with the memorable observation that he had been “fired with enthusiasm.” It was Mr Kerr who coined the term “multiversity” and identified this phenomenon as the newly dominant form of higher learning in the United States. Now in his nineties, he has published the first volume of his memoirs, still fired with enthusiasm for his project. Among the wonderful anecdotes he has to tell, one concerns his predecessor, Robert Sproul, who retired in 1958 after twenty-eight years in office. President Sproul was a micro-manager who attended to every detail, no matter how small, of his university’s life and administration. He knew everyone, at least on the Berkeley campus, and everyone in turn knew him, at least by sight. But as the institution grew exponentially larger and more diffusely complex, President Sproul began to worry that he no longer had his hands around the place and that his face might no longer even be recognized. And so he decided to try an experiment. Walking across the campus one evening, he fell in step with a student and asked him, “Do you know who I am?” The student replied, “No sir, I do not,” and then kindly added, “But if you have any idea of where you might live, I would be glad to help you find your way home.” What this showed, Kerr remarks, was that “the day of the president knowing all, being known by all, and deciding all was gone forever.” The moment of Sproul’s walk home illuminates the historical dynamic that marked the postwar world of American higher education

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and that of the evolving multiversity. The University of California, as the ultimate example of the size and pace of higher education’s expansion at mid-century, can stand as a proxy for that world. When Sproul was appointed, enrolment at the University of California stood at around 20,000 students; it was 47,000 when he left. Enrolment had doubled again in the brief period between his retirement and Kerr’s dismissal; it had doubled again thirty years later, to some 180,000. These simple numbers alone would confirm the impossibility of any president’s succeeding in Sproul’s chosen role, and explain the deep stresses of governance that threatened from time to time to overwhelm a system struggling to keep up with the altered conditions it had helped produce. The trajectory of higher education that Kerr describes, and within which he played so important a part, continued throughout the later years of the twentieth century: the fluctuating momentum of growth and increasing complexity in its institutions, the accelerating growth and change in the disciplines of knowledge and research, heightening tensions among the different missions and activities that universities took on and were asked to fulfil; a changing demography; and the dependent and often conflicted relation between universities and their public. Above all, universities came to be transformingly driven by the consequences of government funding and by the dilemmas and entangling conditions and regulations that arose from this crucial development. That was as true for private as for public institutions. At the same time, the authority of universities – moral and intellectual – was increasingly questioned, not only in the radical dissent of the sixties but more broadly through the declining faith in the power, quality, and direction of higher education and its prospects that became evident on many different sides in the period that followed. We might well hear the echo of Ogden Nash’s refrain: “Progress might have been all right once, but it’s gone on too long.” In the course of such questioning, we heard mounting skepticism about the competence or willingness of universities to manage themselves effectively and about the capacity of university presidents to lead. There is a widely held view that presidents of the past, and thus the institutions they led, were of a quite different order in earlier and better times: that these leaders were people of principled conviction and educational vision who conceived and used their office as a “bully pulpit” in a way that served and guided

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the larger society as well as their own universities with a clarity of purpose and accomplishment now lacking. There is also a belief that the systems of governance characteristic of academia are not only cumbersome, irrational, and inefficient but that they are designed, if designed is the right word, to obstruct decisive action and necessary change. Noel Annan’s description of conservatism at work, in the person of John Sparrow at Oxford, offers a splendid portrait of a stereotype widely assumed to reflect the general nature of the academic polity: The principles of obstruction … were ingrained in his nature. If a proposal was put to the Governing Board that he disliked, he would argue that to accept it would set “a dangerous precedent.” If that argument failed to convince, he might change his track and plead that the time for such a move was “not yet ripe, or that admirable as it was to pass such a motion now, it would hinder a yet more admirable change in the future.” Nor was he above declaring that the proposal had sounded reasonable enough until he heard the speech supporting it of the Gladstone professor of government.

The critique of leadership in the contemporary university takes many different forms. There are those who assume that only philistines would take on administrative positions, that these are onetime scholars who have forfeited all title to academic pretension or conviction. Others see university leaders as pusillanimous panderers to political correctness and political pressure, or as trimmers afraid to offend donors, alumni, policy makers, or any of the many interest groups that want to exercise influence. Still others regard them essentially as bureaucrats and money raisers ready to sacrifice all academic values to the expedience of the marketplace. And there are those who define the problem by pointing out the highly diverse constituencies that presidents are asked to satisfy and the demanding consumer mentality to which they are expected to accede, and who ask whether central educational leadership can ever again be renewed, given the state and given the infinite pressures of the university today. On the issue of university governance more generally, there arises the question of whether traditional roles, collegial customs, and rights to consultation inhibit the capacity to come to conclusive action in a timely way; whether the dispersion of authority among

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boards, administrators, faculty, and public entities makes it sufficiently possible to locate ultimate points of accountability or to effect genuine change. These are certainly not new questions, but the contexts in which they present themselves shift with historical circumstance, and they appear in our current situation both acutely urgent and insistently perplexing. The university, as has been pointed out, is in some sense an organized anarchy. Its purposes of pursuing to the greatest possible extent the tasks of the discovery, preservation, and communication of knowledge create this paradox, which calls for securing an environment hospitable to the greatest flourishing of individual thought and expression while maintaining responsible commitment to the goals – and hence the processes – of a community of learning. As an institution, the university requires the autonomy that will guarantee these central purposes; yet as the repository of a public trust, it most surely does not and cannot live in isolation from the society that supports those ends. University governance presumably exists to serve these all-important purposes and to enable the conditions of intellectual freedom, academic quality, educational vigour, and institutional health. These are some of the broad and constant imperatives of university governance. At the same time, as the university’s specific environment and priorities shift with time, it becomes necessary to identify what these may be and to examine how structures and processes of university governance may be adapted to the current state of higher education and our sense of future needs. From the centre of the academic enterprise, we have seen the frontiers of knowledge and the nature of the disciplines move in wholly new directions. We have seen new information technologies come to have a shaping impact on the methods and objects of research and scholarship, on the infrastructure of investigation and learning, and on the way the future of higher education itself is thought about. We have come through a period of economic expansion that has made possible large strides in intellectual and physical capital, yet we feel that there can never be enough resources to support all that is worth doing, and find it difficult to absorb the lesson that new discovery and the benefits of such discovery lead to an escalation of cost in an unceasing spiral. So, too, we are aware that competition among our institutions breeds similar results, while simultaneously creating greater homogeneity

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among them and stimulating the expensive race to acquire more of everything and the same of everything, as well as meeting the ever-rising expectations for facilities, programs, and services of all kinds. Even in times of constraint and contraction, the acknowledged desirability of greater selectivity and, with it, comparative differentiation on the part of individual universities, finds itself on a collision course with the facts of competition for the resources a university can command. With the growth of universities and the proliferation of degrees has come intensified decentralization and a diminished sense of common institutional citizenship. Dual citizenship is, of course, a fact of life for the professional scholar or scientist; each is a member of at least two significant communities (that of the collegiate institution and that of the profession or discipline) and any individual may also be attracted to those forms of consulting, advising, and participating in the public or corporate worlds that rely on professional expertise. The boundary between research and its application, too, has become far more permeable than it once appeared, above all, but not only, in the sciences. The pull toward translating discovery into development and practical benefit has deepened, and the pressures for contributing to the social welfare and the economy through the resources of universities have gathered force. The problem of sustaining university support for the relentless costs of the extraordinary new science – and of doing so without decreasing commitment to other and equally significant fields of learning – looms ever larger. New issues of intellectual property and heightened concern related to conflicts of interest are at the centre of attention. Where once the critical tension was seen to lie in the effects of the university-government nexus, it now often has its locus in relations with the corporate world that, it is feared, may carry the seeds and the dangers of “commercialization” into the academic universe. There exists also a pervasive unease as to whether collegiate education receives the emphasis it deserves in comparison to the status accorded research and scholarship and graduate teaching, and whether the incentives embedded in university culture allow for some correction. And there is unanimity in the recognition that universities, while long since members of an international community, have yet more fully to address the phenomenon of globalization, in both intellectual and institutional terms.

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Such, then, are some of the major questions now challenging our universities: How to confront the impact of the ceaseless growth and with it, the cost, of knowledge and technology, especially in a time when sustained economic growth in the academy appears much slowed or unlikely to survive while higher costs are resisted by the payors both public and private? How to cope with, or even think responsibly about, the impact of the revolution in technology and its profound effects for education (whether in the classroom or in the form of distance learning) and research? How to achieve an appropriate balance between teaching and research and give rightful attention to the quality of undergraduate education and its curricula? How to locate a sense of common mission within an increasingly diverse community of free agents and quasiindependent entities? How, given the primary mission of a university, to seek the proper response to the demands for significant external service? How to maintain the autonomy of the academic order while basing its financial support to such a significant degree on public and corporate largesse? How to sustain core academic principles and practices and institutional integrity in the circumstances of the competition for resources and prestige that mark the world of higher education? How, in short, can our lumbering battleships, caught up in their multiple and consuming tasks of day-to-day management and crisis management, be nimble enough and wise enough to deal with the pace and weight of developments and conditions in their own environment, let alone in the world out there? Having put all these queries, I am reminded of someone’s observation that he had “yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become more complicated.” That is surely true of the problem of governance in the university. Nonetheless, it seems to me that the basic components of effective governance are indeed present in our universities; the larger issue is how to exercise the will and the leadership to make them serve as they should. However valuable the regular review and rethinking of the different structures of governance may be – and the process of doing so is in itself of great benefit in renewing attention to fundamental issues and commitment to fundamental purpose – the structures themselves will never suffice. Boards can become agents of special agendas and of clumsy intrusiveness; faculty councils forums of politicized self-interest;

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departments or schools parochial circlers of turf; presidents reluctant to take an unpopular stance or to disturb the peace by insisting on hard choices for the common good. In the inevitably fragmented and decentralized terrain of the university, there is a critical need for some capacity to see the institution as a whole, to care for the balance between its different parts, to identify a common framework for setting goals, to assess comparative strengths and opportunities, to stimulate and integrate strategic planning, and to embrace the work of advocacy for the university’s cause. Equally important is the need to sustain and protect the processes by which crucial academic policies and decisions are discussed, approved, and carried out and to ensure the vital intellectual rights of all members of the academic community. The role of presidential leadership remains at the centre of these responsibilities. It is a role that requires both courage and modesty: courage to raise questions and insist that they be pursued, to stand by principle in the face of dissent and unpleasantness, and to speak clearly to the need for hard choices and the long-term view; modesty in trusting and listening with patience to the iterative processes of deliberation that academic governance demands, in understanding the importance of collegial consultation and delegation, in acknowledging that the work of the university is the work of its many members whose crucial vocation of teaching and discovery one enables rather than directs, and in endeavouring to fulfill the trust of caring for the long-term future. Such leadership requires the president to be both student and teacher: a student of higher education and its world, of the trends and needs and opportunities that have greatest consequence and promise, of the broad spectrum of interrelated developments that affect the university and will help shape its future; a teacher who communicates those findings and goals to a wider audience within and without the institution and who conducts also an ongoing series on the purposes and aspirations of higher education. For such presidents, their ultimate satisfaction, as with all teaching, will come from having made some contribution to the learning and potential of their students and colleagues and to the productive lives of their institutions. Their leadership will be expressed in the clarity and steadiness of guiding purpose brought to the performance of daily tasks in the context of a principled commitment to the institution of the university itself.

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A century ago William Rainey Harper, founding president of the University of Chicago, offered two maxims that, he said, “must regulate the work of the chief officer of a university if that work is to be successful.” The first: “One should never do himself what he can in any way find someone else to do.” The second: “The president should never do today what by any possible means he can postpone until tomorrow.” For, he went on, “premature action is the source of many more mistakes than procrastination.” To my mind, the single greatest challenge – perhaps not new but certainly pressing – among the many complicated and immediate matters confronting universities at present is that of making the choices that will allow them sharpened focus and greater selectivity in what they do, despite the lessening of comprehensive reach that such choices may entail. We need to affirm more confidently and stringently the special missions of the university and chart our paths more decisively by that standard. This is of course a tall order, easy to applaud in the abstract and very difficult to carry out in practice. But if our self-governing institutions fail to take on this challenge, to take seriously the complex outlook that dominates our universe today, and to do so with discipline and imaginative determination; if our leaders bury their heads in the sand or decide they can do it all themselves – and today – then our universities will be led by strangers to homes quite unrecognizaable and quite remote from the ideal of the academic polity that, however imperfectly realized, has inspired the strength and animated the architecture of those houses of learning whose ever evolving blueprint is the work of so many, not least the leader whose accomplishment we celebrate in this volume.

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an individual perspective

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10 The Educational Journey of Bernard J. Shapiro paul axelrod It is a mere twelve-minute drive from the Montreal home where Bernard Shapiro spent his childhood in the 1930s and ’40s to McGill University where he became principal in 1994. But his journey between these points was neither direct nor predictable. It was marked, and made possible, by a series of educational choices, emerging professional pathways, and shifting currents in the social and cultural life of Montreal. Bernard’s mother, Mary Tafler, was born in Montreal and lived her first few years on a farm north of the city. His father, Maxwell Shapiro, spent his formative years in Russia. A Menshevik socialist in his youth, he “got into difficulty” with the police because of his political activites, and he emigrated to the United States in 1913, leaving his wife and two children behind.1 He did not find his family again until 1921, by which time his wife and son had died. He moved to Montreal with his daughter, Molly, in 1923 and married Mary Tafler in 1933. Bernard and his twin brother, Harold, were born in 1935. Maxwell’s attempts to bring his sister, Fanny, from Poland to Canada were unsuccessful, owing, in all probability, to the federal government’s refusal in the 1930s and ’40s to allow European Jews to immigrate to Canada.2 Ultimately, Fanny perished in the Holocaust. Had the Shapiro brothers been Protestant they would have attended Hampstead Public School. As Jews, they were unwelcome in the school. From grades 3 to 11, they were sent, instead, to Lower Canada College, an elite private institution in which they were the only Jews. Their social interactions with their classmates were limited: “In most of their houses we were not acceptable.”

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This experience reflected the cultural reality of Montreal, which, as Bernard recalled, consisted primarily of three ethnic solitudes that barely interacted: French Catholic, English Protestant, and Jewish. Bernard perceived this situation less as one of exclusion or discrimination than of “separateness.” He felt motivated to succeed rather than disadvantaged by the community’s religious barriers, an outlook reinforced by his family. While his parents were not orthodox Jews, they kept kosher in the home and Bernard attended synagogue “every single Saturday” for Sabbath services. If his Jewish identity was important, so too was the need to excel in school. “That was my job,” he recalled. “Learning was everything.” Lower Canada College cultivated Bernard’s passion for study. Its headmaster, Stephen Penton, taught history in a way that opened his students’ intellectual universe. Penton provided Bernard with advanced readings and the two met regularly, outside normal class hours, to discuss these works. Through these encounters Bernard was steeped in “the sheer excitement of learning for its own sake,” an experience that smoothed his transition to university. From his family’s perspective, there was little question that Bernard would attend university, and McGill was the only real choice. “If you do well enough,” his father declared, “you will go to McGill. If not, you will go to work.” However, for reasons unclear, even to himself, Bernard had developed a fascination for Princeton University; he applied for admission, unbeknownst to his parents, and was awarded an entrance scholarship. His father was unmoved. Bernard’s persistence yielded this compromise: if he could demonstrate that Princeton offered academic opportunities not available at McGill, then he could head south. Unable to do so, Bernard enrolled at McGill in 1952. Why did his father feel so strongly about the need for Bernard and his brother to remain in Montreal? Wasn’t it appropriate and desirable for young men to assert their independence by obtaining higher education away from home? Not, evidently, in Bernard’s father’s world. “The notion that you would live separately from your parents as a student or even as an unmarried adult was very radical … even shameful.” The Shapiro family ties were powerful, and, without rebellion or rancour, Bernard followed his father’s educational directive. It is possible, too, that Maxwell Shapiro cherished the opportunity to showcase the successes of his academically accomplished sons within their own community, something that

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would have been more difficult had they studied abroad. And the father had much to crow about. In 1956 Bernard received the Allan Oliver Gold Medal for graduating as McGill’s top student in the Faculty of Arts, and Harold was awarded the Lieutenant Governor’s Silver Medal in Commerce. In recognition of his sons’ successes, Maxwell held a celebratory luncheon for 400 people. As an undergraduate student, Bernard majored in Economics and Political Science, though the subjects of politics and history, not economics, engaged his intellectual interests. Several professors made a lasting impression on Bernard. Noel Fieldhouse, a historian, and Bernard Crick, a visiting political scientist from England, were “extraordinary” teachers. “I came out of Crick’s classes a different person than when I went in,” recalled Bernard. J.R. Mallory, professor of Canadian government, explained the complexities of the Canadian political system, and Saul Frankel introduced Bernard to the work of Hannah Arendt, whose book The Origins of Totalitarianism he found engrossing and affecting. It opened his eyes to worlds beyond his own, as did the writings of the English philosopher T.H. Green, who grappled, persuasively from Bernard’s point of view, with the challenge of how one can live meaningfully both as an individual and as a member of the broader community. Two other political philosophers were especially important in helping shape, or at least giving voice to, Bernard’s emerging ideas and values. Immanuel Kant demonstrated to Bernard the “power of thinking … how rationality can be a guide to the future,” and Isaiah Berlin asserted the precept that in the world of action one’s convictions matter. One should act in the hope that one’s principles and beliefs can make a difference, even if one realizes that they probably will not. Bernard’s evolving political sensibilities were liberal – he had faith that the conditions of life could be remedied or improved, and that the actions of individuals are consequential. Their McGill academic successes notwithstanding, Bernard and Harold did not immediately pursue graduate or professional study. Bernard had won a fellowship to study political science in France, but family interests and responsibilities beckoned. Since their graduations in 1956, he and his brother worked at Ruby Foo’s, their father’s well-known Montreal restaurant, which Maxwell opened in 1945 following twenty years as a “professional gambler.” Bernard was about to marry Phyllis Schwartz, whom he had known since his childhood, and for the time being “the more known route” of securing

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work after completing the BA held sway. After Maxwell Shapiro’s sudden death in 1958 at the age of 65, Bernard and Harold assumed the full ownership and management of Ruby Foo’s. Bernard thoroughly enjoyed the five years he spent at the restaurant. The exposure he had to countless people “was really an education all in itself.” Indeed, but for “chance,” he might never have left the restaurant business. Unexpectedly, he and his brother were offered “four times” what they thought Ruby Foo’s was worth and they accepted the proposition. Harold was already inclined to pursue graduate work, and Bernard, too, determined that an academic occupation – possibly that of a high school history teacher – offered greater long-term challenges and rewards than the food service industry. Bernard’s educational journey continued as a Master’s student in Social Science at Harvard University in 1961. His advisor, John B. Carroll, a psycho-linguist, stirred his interest in educational psychology. Carroll suggested that Bernard apply to work in a summer program as a research fellow for Educational Testing Services (ets), a company that specialized in the psychometric testing of students throughout the United States. Bernard’s task was to assess the argument made by Banesh Hoffman in his controversial book The Tyranny of Testing that standardized testing disadvantaged especially bright students who could think of legitimate answers to questions that the test-setters hadn’t anticipated. Bernard administered the Advanced Chemistry Placement Test to members of the Board of Directors of the American Chemical Society and found, indeed, that there were examples of this kind of problem, but that they were too rare to undermine the validity of the test. Bernard enrolled in Harvard’s doctoral program in Measurement and Statistics, still uncertain that he would become a university professor. He thought he might continue the type of research work that he had undertaken with ets. Indeed, while completing his doctorate, he worked on measurement-related projects as a research associate at the Educational Research Council of America in Cleveland. His EdD thesis (1967), “The Subjective Estimation of Relative Word Frequency,” written under the supervision of John Carroll, explored how accurately individuals estimate word frequency in the English language. He tested the attitudes of six subject populations: sixth-graders, ninth-graders, college sophomores, industrial chemists, elementary school teachers, and newspaper

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reporters. He found that people’s subjective notions of word frequency were “incredibly accurate.”3 This finding had implications for the selection of appropriate reading materials for school children. Bernard pursued his work in measurement studies at Boston University, where he was appointed an assistant professor in Education in 1967. Bernard was intrigued, and frequently critical, of the way researchers employed statistical analyses on educational subjects. In the course of his methodological assessments of such work, he would then become interested in the educational issues themselves and conduct new research on some of these topics. Two major themes emerge in more than two dozen published (mostly collaborative) articles through the late 1960s and ’70s. One explored the impact of methodology on the educational psychologist’s analysis and conclusions. More broadly, this spoke to the author’s view of the limitations of the scientific method in determining reliable results. He believed that there was nothing purely objective in the use of any scientific technique. Hypotheses, presumptions, values, and beliefs all shape one’s choice of methods, analysis, and conclusions.4 But he also maintained that practitioners must thoroughly understand methodology before they could reliably employ it or critique it. With Norman Reali he argued that graduate schools of education failed to require students to take methodology courses until the virtual completion of their degrees, or they allowed students to substitute alternative, so-called “equivalent” courses for courses in methodology. In the course of their research, students came to believe that they could “hire someone to do the statistics,” while they concentrated on the substantive part of their study. Shapiro and Reali argued that this approach was short-sighted. It was important for students in the behavioural sciences to “know about reliability, validity, item sampling, etc. … What of statistics? … How many sets of data sit on shelves waiting for the announcement of a new test which can, perhaps, make sense of the numbers on those sheets? … To whom do the results apply, and more importantly, to whom don’t they apply? Our plea for more graduate work in these methodological areas is not a plea for less interest in the students’ substantive fields: technique is never a substitute for ideas. However, all levels of education are under attack to show that they are doing what they say they are doing … At least at our graduate schools, we should start to insist that research is both done and read by people equipped to do so.”5

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An illustration of Bernard’s critical appreciation of measurement studies was his appraisal of the work of Arthur Jensen, the controversial hereditarian psychologist who explored the supposed connections between race and intelligence. Jensen believed intelligence and scholastic achievement to be primarily genetically determined, and that whites were significantly superior to blacks with respect to “their possession of the determining genes.”6 Shapiro and his coauthor, David J. Marion, challenged Jensen’s narrow definition of intelligence, which he confined to those competencies demonstrated in iq and other intelligence tests. Shapiro and Marion claimed that “iq tests are valid but very limited measurements of individual and social potentialities … It is precisely because intelligence is a matter of particular contextual judgement that Jensen’s gross, evaluative conclusion that whites are more intelligent than blacks cannot be justified by iq measurement differences, no matter how great.” Bernard’s second major research interest addressed how children learn. It included studies on the emergence of logical thinking, the value of poetry in developing students’ intellectual acuity, and effective methods for instructing children with learning disabilities. Two articles on the development of logical thinking in children, written with Thomas C. O’Brien, explored the age at which children develop a capacity for “hypothetical-deductive thinking.” The authors’ investigation of the ability of young children to “discriminate between a logically necessary conclusion and its negation and their ability to test the logical necessity of a conclusion” led them to conclude that “hypothetical-deductive ability cannot at all be taken for granted in children” between the ages of 6 and 8,7 an inference confirmed in a subsequent study of children aged 6 to 13.8 A follow-up investigation of how students in grades 4 through 10 learn mathematics induced them to question the applicability of Piaget’s theory of how children master the “formal operations” stage of thinking.9 A new series of articles, co-authored with Phyllis Shapiro, examined the ways in which the study and writing of poetry fostered learning in elementary school students. This collaboration arose from Phyllis’s doctoral thesis and the numerous discussions she and Bernard had on this subject. The authors wrote that both “free” and “semi-structured” methods of teaching poetry had positive results. “Thus children of the fourth grade can be taught to express

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themselves in poetry, and … this possibility exists not only for the bright, the creative, or the high language achieving, but for a very wide range of children along each of these dimensions.”10 Students from disadvantaged backgrounds proved as capable as those from higher socioeconomic groups of benefiting from poetry instruction.11 The Shapiros followed this work with studies comparing the effectiveness of ita (initial teaching alphabet) and to (traditional orthography), techniques for teaching children to read and write.12 Phyllis and Bernard Shapiro again joined forces to explore the teaching of students with learning disabilities. One study identified sixty-two “high risk” kindergarten children who were grouped and afforded one of several “remediation techniques” designed to improve their cognitive development in language arts and arithmetic, the results of which were compared by the investigators.13 In a subsequent article, the authors and their collaborators argued that on “psychological, philosophical and societal/cultural grounds,” educators should set similar “early childhood educational objectives for normal and retarded children.”14 Such an approach would diminish the segregation and marginalization of retarded youth and would incorporate the principle that “all children have an equal right as human beings and as citizens to perform at their highest level.” As this sampling of Bernard’s work indicates, by the mid 1970s he had established himself as a productive researcher who combined his interests in statistical methodology and his expertise in measurement with a probing curiosity about the cognitive development of children. Reflecting the disciplinary discourse, the studies were focused and highly specialized, though they frequently touched on broader conceptual, philosophical, and societal implications of the research. Indeed, in his teaching Bernard stressed the need for students to think outside the sometimes confining parameters of their discipline in which technique occupied such an important place. In the final examinations of his statistics courses, said Bernard, “[I] never allowed a single number to appear either in my questions or in the students’ responses. If you couldn’t talk or write, then you didn’t know what you were saying. I felt people were mistaking a tool for an idea.” Bernard’s continuing concern with methodological approaches within his academic field led to the publication, in 1976, of Contemporary Perspectives in Educational Psychology, edited with Robert A. Dentler.15

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By this time Bernard’s professional direction had taken another pivotal turn – to university administration. Bernard became chair of the Department of Humanistic and Behavioral Studies at Boston University in 1971, and served as associate dean of the School of Education from 1974 to 1976. It was not that he was losing interest in research, but he wondered if the challenge would adequately sustain him in the long term. “Publishing,” he recalled, “turned out to be easier than I thought.” He considered his scholarship original and valuable but not necessarily “cutting edge … I knew that I wasn’t going to win a Nobel Prize.” He was eager to remain in the university, and the problem-solving skills required for administrative work seemed to fit his abilities and experience. The former restaurant manager and business executive was confident that he could put his “experience to work … I knew how to run things.” He revelled in the creative aspects of university administration. “I was very good at imagining policy … I had ideas! … I could always think of six times as many alternatives as anyone else as to how you might do the next thing. It’s not a very modest thing to say but that’s how I felt about myself.” Bernard’s administrative tenure at Boston was relatively brief. Two developments led to his return to Canada. Although he admired the intelligence and academic goals of John Silber, the dynamic president of Boston University, Bernard found him personally difficult to abide, and their administrative styles clashed. Coincidentally, Dan Birch, a fellow Canadian with whom Bernard had studied at Harvard, urged him to consider returning to Canada. Unbeknownst to Bernard, Birch recommended him for education deanships at two institutions, the University of Calgary and the University of Western Ontario. Both offered Bernard the decanal positions. He and his wife, Phyllis, especially liked the city of London, and in 1976 he embarked on yet a new university venture as dean of Western’s Faculty of Education. He assumed the deanship with a mandate from the academic vice-president to “help the Faculty move into the university environment in a more serious way.” This, in Bernard’s view, required teacher educators to engage more fully in academic research, something that had not been part of the culture of traditional teachers’ colleges. As universities increasingly assumed responsibility for the preparatory education of teachers in Canada, this issue – the prevailing intellectual standards of education faculties –

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commonly confronted education professors and administrators. Enhancing their standing within their universities required a persuasive demonstration by faculties of education of their scholarly breadth and depth, which, in Bernard’s opinion, was also a critical element in the improvement of teaching itself. Scholarship and research should inform teaching practice, and faculties of education were the appropriate venues for forging this link. Bernard subsequently wrote several articles on this theme in which he attempted both to clarify the research responsibilities of faculties of education and to identify educational subjects that required investigation. In “Teaching and Learning: Facing the Unknown,” he reviewed literature on several models of classroom teaching, including behaviour control, discovery learning, and rational teaching. Such research tended to focus on the performance and actions of teachers.16 He called for further attention to the characteristics and needs of the student learner. Ideally, the research should more effectively integrate the study of teaching and learning, and be attuned to what was yet to be discovered about the teaching process. Two later publications reiterated Bernard’s faith in the value of educational research and challenged teacher educators to meet their responsibilities more effectively in this area: “I believe that it remains true that faculties of education have not succeeded in making themselves congenial homes for teacher/scholars if only in the sense that far too many of my colleagues in education have not defined their own work in terms of this double obligation of university faculty members.” In an era when sustained government support for higher education could no longer be assumed, when the public had grown disenchanted with schooling, and when faculties of education continued to occupy “sometimes unfair[ly] … low status on our various university totem poles,” the faculties needed to demonstrate their intellectual value and professional pertinence by making education research “a field of study and primary focus of interest.”17 The author, then, had little patience for teacher educators who were not engaged in research. But was there a place for the education scholar whose work, as a historian or philosopher, for example, might not contribute, in any obvious or direct way, to the improvement of classroom teaching and learning? Bernard was ambivalent on this point. He had a deep commitment to “liberal education”

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in the university, a reflection of his own intellectual grounding at McGill, and he wrote positively about the overall value of university research for the role it played in adding to society’s “common stock of cultural capital.”18 But his published assessment of worthwhile education research seemed highly instrumentalist: he appeared to favour the explicitly relevant and applied over the more exploratory and abstract. Bernard wrote a number of other short pieces on educational issues in the late 1970s and ’80s, indicative of the kinds of concerns that engaged him as an education dean and senior university administrator. He was particularly concerned about the future of Canadian education. Current controversies over educational policy had emerged, he argued, from a combination of uncertainty in economic and social life and the exaggerated faith placed by the public in the solution-generating capacity of schooling. Steeped in unprecedented public funding, and now governed by enormous bureaucracies, “education came to be seen as a sort of universal solvent for the problems of society.”19 The current back-to-basics movement among some educators and the public had arisen “not because we know it to be sure but because we feel it to be safe.” He contended that education should “focus neither on the traditional knowledge of the past, nor on the detailed predictions of the future … education must devote itself to the cultivation in each of us of both the expectation of change and the ability to adapt to it.”20 Specifically, he recommended that educators consider the importance to policy development of the following trends: the growth of adult education, the increasing presence of private business investments in the educational sector, and the adaptation of “modern communications technologies to the needs of education.”21 In 1980 Bernard assumed the directorship of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, one of Canada’s leading facilities for graduate studies in education. Begun in 1965 as a provincial educational research institute, oise had a continuously contentious relationship with the University of Toronto, with whom it was affiliated and whose degrees it offered. According to one historian, the senior administration of u of t believed that oise had too much autonomy, and too little high-quality scholarship to show for it.22 With the blessing of the University of Toronto administration, Bernard was determined to raise the Institute’s academic standards,

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and to forge a new working arrangement among u of t, the faculty of education (which prepared school teachers), and oise. He approached this challenge by “redirecting resources to people who were doing good work.” He was especially impressed with the research being conducted in the fields of Modern Languages, and Measurement. By contrast, he was critical of the departments of Curriculum, Sociology, and Educational Psychology, which he believed “overestimated” their contributions to the scholarly study of education. He also vetoed several faculty recommendations for tenure, decisions that sparked considerable controversy and formal grievance exercises. Unexpectedly, in 1985, the premier of Ontario, David Peterson, announced a plan for the merger of the u of t and oise, but in the face of vigorous lobbying by oise and other faculty associations, it foundered. Full integration among oise, the Faculty of Education, and the University of Toronto finally occurred in 1996. Asked, in retrospect, to assess changes at oise in the wake of his deanship, which ended in 1986, Bernard pointed to the following accomplishments: the appointment of high quality professors, the balancing of the institute’s budget, and the preparation of the groundwork for the new oise/ut relationship. Bernard’s growing prominence as an authoritative educational voice in Ontario coincided with the announcement of a controversial government initiative. In June of 1984, Premier William Davis reversed a long-standing Progressive Conservative Party position by promising to provide full public funding to the province’s Roman Catholic schools, which were then supported only up to the end of grage 10. (The Ontario high school system included the additional years of grades 11 to 13.) The existing policy fulfilled Ontario’s constitutional obligations to support the educational rights of the Catholic minority, but the Catholic educational community continuously exhorted the provincial government to fund non-denominational public and “separate” schools at equivalent levels. Supported by the opposition parties, the Liberals and New Democrats, the premier was now agreeing to do so. The reasons for Davis’s “turnabout” on this policy are not entirely known, though one historian suggests that the premier came to believe that the quality of separate secondary schools, whose student numbers were increasing, would be chronically impaired without

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full public support.23 The Conservatives lost power in 1985 before seeing the proposed legislation through, but the Liberal/ndp coalition government implemented the first phase of the full-funding policy in time for the September 1985 school year. Premier Davis knew that his separate school initiative would raise the hopes of private and independent school educators for provincial funding of their schools. In particular, religious minorities would press the claim that they were victims of discrimination in light of the “special treatment” received by the province’s Catholic schools, a problem now compounded by the new policy. Reflecting his sensitivity to this view, and probably hoping to mute criticism in light of an impending election, Davis invited Bernard Shapiro to head a one-person commission on the issue of public support for private schools. Specifically, Bernard was asked to “comment upon whether … public funding of private schools that provide elementary or secondary education, or both, would be desirable and compatible with the independent nature of such schools.”24 The commission’s assignment led to the publication of Bernard’s most substantive scholarly work since his days as a research psychologist. It was also the most widely publicized project of his career. As well as contributing significantly to public discussion, if not, alas, to Ontario’s policy on the funding of independent schools, the report revealed much about Bernard’s own educational values and conceptions of public policy making. Backed by specialized commissioned studies, public hearings, and more than 500 written briefs, the report thoroughly explored its subject’s terrain. It reviewed the history of private schooling in Ontario and the status of these schools in every Canadian province and several Western countries, observing that “the general, but not universal trend, is for increased government control to be associated with increased levels of public funding for private schools.”25 This was followed by a painstaking review of arguments for and against government support of independent schools. The report concluded with a detailed articulation of the commissioner’s recommendations and of the principles that informed them. The author was favourably disposed to the claim by independent school educators that in a multicultural society, parents should have the right to select, “free from financial considerations, the kind of education they believe to be appropriate to their children.” He also sympathized with the concern that public funding of Catholic

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schools harmed the rights of religious minorities denied such support. He noted that although the constitutional arguments for government financing of Catholic schools have deep roots in Canadian history, “they do nothing to inform us about what we ought to do” with respect to other religious schools. However, he rejected the “double taxation” argument, that is, that parents who sent their children to independent schools had to pay for education twice – once for public schools through their taxes and once through private school tuition fees. Citizens, he contended, did not have the right to opt out of paying for public services that supported the common good on the grounds that they chose not to use those services. He noted, too, that private schools currently received indirect public support through various tax exemptions owing to their status as non-profit educational institutions and/or religious organizations. He subjected arguments against public funding of private schools to similar scrutiny. He disputed the claim that the province could not afford to fund independent schools. Such costs would be a relatively small proportion of the overall provincial budget. He agreed with the contention that public schools were a critical instrument of integration and social cohesion in a culturally diverse society, though he noted that not every public school performed this role effectively and that social divisions within these schools were not unknown. Above all, government policy should avoid weakening public education and exacerbating community tensions. Through this type of internal dialogue, the report signalled the principles that shaped the author’s recommendations. “In reviewing the various arguments and my own response to them … the emerging difficulty was how to envision the schooling arrangements for Ontario that would increase parental choice and address discrimination while not only maintaining but also enhancing – in the name of social cohesion, tolerance, and the quality of educational opportunity – the integrity of Ontario’s public schools.”26 He concluded that a strong, flexible public system in a tolerant, diverse community could accommodate government support for independent schools. The level of that support, however, need not be equivalent to that of the public system since the latter has broader social purposes. Furthermore, independent schools receiving government funds should be subjected to a reasonable degree of administrative oversight. They should employ only certified teachers, charge no tuition, be accountable to local school boards, and have

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non-discriminatory admission policies, though students would follow the prescribed program of the school. In the interests of promoting tolerance, the commission called for each secondary school to offer a course in world religions as part of its curriculum. (Significantly, the report also recommended that the content of the Catholic secondary school religious studies course be “non-confessional in nature” and include both a comparative perspective and an ethics component “as is the case for all other credit courses, from a new Ministry of Education guideline.”27) Private schools prepared to follow such prescriptions would be deemed “associated independent schools” and would receive operating but not capital funding from the province. The report predicted that this program would cost the province $51,000,000 annually. There were strong elements in this report of the philosophical and academic approaches that informed Bernard’s earlier work, including his “measurement” studies. Values, beliefs, and the political process, not statistics, would ultimately determine educational policy. He noted that “the ‘facts’ yielded by research studies cannot in themselves respond to the public policy question of whether to provide more funds to private schools. The response to such a question is not so much a matter of facts as it is a matter of values. Social viability is always based on a shared system of values, for it’s only on the basis of common values that truly shared existence (as opposed to mere coexistence) is possible.”28 The report was also an outlet for Bernard to explore the ways in which individual rights and social responsibilities could be negotiated and reconciled in a democratic society. The “associated independent schools” proposal was his answer to the question of how these tenets could be balanced. As he explained in a recent interview, “I felt my obligation was to recommend something that made intellectual sense and that was politically feasible.” Whatever its virtues, the report was shelved by the provincial government and may well have been discounted even before it was completed. Following the assumption of power by the new government in 1985, the Liberal Minister of Education, Sean Conway, announced that “while he looked forward to the Shapiro report with interest, the government does not contemplate at the present time funding anything other than the last few grades of the Roman Catholic School system.” He reiterated this position in September, 1985. The Shapiro report was released in October.29

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Though the government failed to adopt the commissioner’s report, it did embrace the commissioner himself. In 1986 Bernard was offered, and accepted, the post of Deputy Minister of Education in Ontario. Given his interest in educational policy and his belief in the need for change, he took on the position enthusiastically. As historian, R.D. Gidney, notes, “He was the first senior ministry appointment who had not risen through the ranks of the education bureaucracy, and thus had not been socialized into its values and shibboleths.”30 Bernard immediately took the unprecedented step, for a deputy minister, of spending one day a week in different schools throughout the province. He was determined to demonstrate, though this action and others, a visible interest in the work of teachers. Among his discoveries was a palpable attitude of cynicism toward the government. Missives to the schools from the Ministry of Education were habitually “thrown in the garbage.” Concerned about the ministry’s overall communications strategy, Bernard instituted a policy of replying to all correspondence to his office within five days instead of the customary one to two months’ response time. In an era of continuing controversy about the quality of schooling and the legacy of “child-centred” educational reforms, the government set an agenda that included the improvement of student performance, curriculum review, and new systems of assessment and accountability. As a deputy minister with a background in the field of educational testing and an opponent of an educational philosophy that promoted what he called the “pedagogy of joy,” Bernard oversaw the implementation of new processes for measuring student achievement, beginning with the areas of math and science. In addition, the province introduced grade 3 and grade 6 literacy and numeracy benchmarks. It also instituted a test project for grades 9 and 10 geography “that would become the model for the revived system of ’provincial program reviews.’”31 Supported by the recommendations of a report on the state of Ontario schooling by journalist and consultant George Radwanski, the ministry stressed the importance of early childhood education and expanded senior and junior kindergarten classes, and it introduced full-day kindergarten programs in some areas of the province. The subject of high school “dropouts” generated much research and discussion within the ministry, but in the end, little action. While some education officials and educators saw the academic “streaming” of secondary

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school students as the cause of early school-leaving, others, including the deputy minister, did not, and consensus as to how to proceed on the matter proved elusive.32 Within the ministry, policy development around these and other issues involved the minister, the deputy, and various officials. Bernard, as always, was filled with ideas, and “I didn’t care who got credit for them.” He saw his role, on the one hand, as encouraging “people at the bottom” to convey their views, and on the other hand, cautioning the minister against taking precipitous action. He recalled telling senior politicians: “Being elected doesn’t give you the power you think it does. It just means you have a more important place in the system than you did before. But there are a trillion constraints on the system.” Gidney concludes that Bernard’s propensity to consult was so extensive that “whatever their value as foundations of policy … the plethora of reports commissioned by Shapiro … delayed decision-making.”33 Bernard continued his work for the provincial government, moving to a succession of high level positions: Deputy Minister for Skills Development (1988–89), Secretary of Cabinet (1989–90), Deputy Minister and Secretary of the Management Board (1990– 91), and Deputy Minister for Colleges and Universities (1991–93). The Skills Development posting proved to be his least fulfilling appointment: “Neither the government nor anyone else seemed to have a coherent idea of what they wanted to do … I didn’t contribute much to it … and it didn’t get better as far as I could tell.” As Secretary of Cabinet, he served essentially as the premier’s deputy. He coordinated cabinet meetings and helped prepare legislative proposals. He enjoyed this work, though he found it removed him from the kind of “action” that engaged him as Deputy Minister of Education. As Deputy Minister for Colleges and Universities, now under the government of the New Democratic Party, elected in 1990, he deepened his involvement in higher educational administration, a field that would occupy him until his retirement. He oversaw the largest post-secondary educational system in Canada, which was grappling, continuously, with the problem of the availability and allocation of financial resources. Bernard recalled that during his tenure the development of a new “corridor system” for the establishment of enrolment levels and the distribution of funds to universities consumed considerable time and energy. Ideally, he would

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have preferred a more discretionary funding system that acknowledged the differential academic roles of Ontario universities, including differences in program quality. But the system that emerged, in which the bulk of operating funds was allocated to institutions largely in the same way, “was not an unreasonable response to the political realities of life. This was not the platonic idea of funding. It was a reasonable compromise.” Undoubtedly impressed by his academic, administrative, and government experience, the Nova Scotia Council on Higher Education induced Bernard (in 1993) to head a commission on the future of teacher education in the province.34 Determined not to work in vain, Bernard sought, and received, assurance from the premier of the province, John Savage, that the committee’s report would yield results.35 The report was a devastating critique of the quality and administration of teacher education practices in Nova Scotia, where all previous attempts to reform the system had foundered. The commission found too many institutions (nine) offering teacher education and inadequate capacity in the province to absorb the annual crop of graduates. The programs engaged in too little “outreach” with the educational community and produced faculty who were insufficiently “active in research and scholarship.”36 The report recommended that all teacher education students have a bachelor’s degree, and that they be exposed to the kind of university-based instruction that would equip them to “engage in thoughtful, reflective, inquiry-based teaching.”37 It urged that Nova Scotia Teachers’ College, a non-university facility, be closed down along with the programs at four other post-secondary institutions, and that teacher education facilities be confined to three universities in the province. Notwithstanding the report’s co-authorship, it bore some trademark Shapiro traits. It was blunt, analytically comprehensive, and focused on the issue of educational quality. It was also influential. Most of its major recommendations were quickly adopted by the government, and after generations of inaction, teacher education in the province was dramatically transformed. Bernard later undertook a similar review, though on a much smaller scale, of teacher education in the province of Manitoba. Bernard’s work in Nova Scotia was followed closely by his appointment to the principalship of McGill University in July 1994,

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a position that returned him to a community now prepared, at long last, to accept a Jew as head of one of its leading cultural institutions. He confronted a university facing severe challenges, including a climate of political uncertainty in Quebec, internal questioning about the institution’s academic direction, and an accumulated debt of some $60 million. Bernard, not surprisingly, had a vision and the willingness to express it. In 1995 he articulated his view of the future in a document called “Towards a New McGill.”38 He did not believe that any university, including McGill, could meet all legitimate academic needs and maintain a consistently high level of quality, particularly in the face of accelerating institutional competition and limited public funding. He envisaged a smaller campus, focused on a defined number of excellent programs that would reflect McGill’s great strengths in academic research. The university should both cultivate its relationship with its alumni and project itself more fully onto the international stage by forging academic partnerships with other organizations and by attracting more students from abroad. It should seek alternative revenue sources, including higher tuition fees, a portion of which would be used for those who required financial assistance. Finally, the institution should be administratively accountable, innovative, and more attentive to the needs of students. Not all of these proposals met with universal acclaim, particularly his recommendation for a smaller university, and over the years Bernard – the veteran of government service – modified his views about what was not only desirable but achievable. Asked to comment on the major changes McGill experienced during his principalship, he identified these developments: an extensive plan for faculty hiring and renewal, the building of a successful collaborative research culture which led to an influx of major funding from such agencies as the Canada Foundation on Innovation, the construction and refurbishing of campus facilities, the adoption of a process of academic program reviews (the first in forty years in the Faculty of Arts), notable successes in fund raising, the forging of improved relations with the provincial government, and the retirement of the university’s debt. He believed, however, that the institution remained insufficiently responsive to students once they were admitted, and too comfortable with its place in Canada as the favoured destination of huge numbers of applicants. He felt that

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McGill’s administrative infrastructure still needed to do more to earn students’ continuing support and respect.39 Over the course of his principalship, Bernard frequently expressed his views on higher education to external audiences in Canada and abroad. His perspective reflected both core values that had their roots in his formative university years and evolving conceptions – and concerns – about the future of the university. Owing to the perceived economic importance of universities, especially in an era of globalization, Bernard was persuaded that they had become central instruments of public policy, a role that proffered both opportunities and risks. As a “public trust,” the university “now had an obligation to engage with the wider community … 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 explanation and its application.”40 Yet “hyper-specialisation,” both in research and teaching, was a perilous path through which academics could come to know too much about too little. Students and professors ought to be conscious of and engaged with the interconnections among academic disciplines “where so many of the interesting questions arise.” Interdisciplinarity would lead researchers to explore innovatively, from a variety of perspectives, such subjects as “the brain, the city, the environment, the climate, health, [and] e-commerce.”41 The establishment of the multidisciplinary School of Environment at McGill, was, in Bernard’s view, a creative expression of this philosophy. Bernard consistently contended that contemporary universities ought to have distinctive academic orientations. They should neither be comprehensive nor imitative. Given the demand for greater accountability, differentiation would “offer societies a much more finely tuned range of options.”42 He found the proposition that McGill was, or should be, “the Harvard of the North” a “noxious idea.” Canadian universities ought to understand their own communities, and cultivate excellence in focused academic areas that suited their contexts and resources. They should not, for opportunistic reasons, merely attempt to emulate famous institutions with some assumed degree of status.43 Notwithstanding his belief in public accountability, Bernard came increasingly to worry about the loss of university autonomy

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and the tilting of the university’s moral compass. Too great a focus on the “knowledge economy,” or the “cult of relevance” reinforced by “strategic” funding programs established by government and the private sector, would impede the university’s fundamental mission of facilitating the broad search for truth and the cultivation of good citizenship. “The point of a university is creating a changed human being, intellectually and morally autonomous.”44 These commitments, in part, explained his attempt to embolden the Faculty of Arts at McGill, a university that had long been focused on medicine, science, and engineering. Even within the humanities and social sciences, he was troubled by certain academic tendencies, particularly the influence of postmodernism, which, through some renderings, was pervaded by cynicism. Bernard believed that the understanding gained in universities could “inform life … The loss of that faith in the academy by radical reconstructionism is a recipe for disaster both for the academy and everybody else.” Reflecting his liberal values, and, in no small way, a career-long faith, he asserted: “I really believe in the power of education to make people better, to improve the conditions of people’s lives. That’s what I’m always thinking when I take up a new position in education. That’s why I left the restaurant business.” Though far from a complete picture of Bernard Shapiro’s life and work, this portrait has attempted to provide a glimpse of the man’s background, intellectual interests, and career pathways, informed primarily by his own writings and recollections. At the very least, I hope that this sketch will serve as a starting point for other, more thorough, investigations, particularly of his years as McGill’s principal.45 Bernard Shapiro emerges, thus far, as an individual with a deep commitment to his family and community, secure in his identity, and determined, from an early age, to excel in every endeavour. He took on a variety of challenges, first outside and then within the world of education, partly because he found whatever he did fascinating and potentially fulfilling. His eclecticism was less a product of indecision than of unrestrained curiosity. “I was the ultimate dilettante,” he claimed, and “I don’t mean that in a self-critical way.” Education was the appropriate venue for him because he was so stimulated by the exploration of ideas. Within the university, he moved from the domain of research to administration because he believed that it would allow him to have

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the greatest impact on his environment. He did not, evidently, lack confidence. One senses that he thrived on entering a situation about which he knew little only to emerge as an expert armed with sharp recommendations. To this reviewer, the following intellectual threads link the various components of his career, from the specialist in measurement and behaviour, to the deputy minister of education, to the university principal. He was fascinated by how people attain knowledge and how they might do so more successfully. The researcher explained how elementary students learn through poetry; the deputy minister promoted early childhood education; and the university principal stressed the value of mulitidisciplinarity and the liberal arts. He believed passionately that it was the job of schooling to cultivate moral citizens who could think independently while contributing to the community, and he intended to exemplify this in his own professional life. His style of leadership was distinctive. While he understood the need for altering one’s course of action in the face of political realities, he was disarmingly bold in his public statements – and even bolder in private. There was scarcely a subject (or person) on which he did not appear to have a strong opinion. He was quick to judge, imaginative, persistent, confident but self-deprecating, and filled with good humour. As noted earlier, two of Bernard’s intellectual mentors were Immanuel Kant and Hannah Arendt. Near the end of her life, Arendt delivered a number of lectures on Kant’s political philosophy, in which she cited the three questions that Kant believed “constituted the proper business of philosophy: What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope?”46 For Bernard J. Shapiro, these questions, consciously or not, appeared to motivate and guide him through a rich and illustrious academic career.

notes 1 Author’s interviews with Bernard J. Shapiro, 2 July 2003, 15 July 2003, and 7 August 2003. Subsequent Shapiro quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from these interviews. 2 For a comprehensive account of the federal government’s antisemitic immigration policy, see Irving Abella and Harold Troper,

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6

7

8

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10

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None Is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933–1945 (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1986). Bernard J. Shapiro, “The Subjective Estimation of Relative Word Frequency,” Journal of Learning and Verbal Behavior 8 (1969): 248–51. Bernard J. Shapiro, “The Science of Education,” Journal of Education 151, no. 3 (February 1969): 27–31. See also George A. Simmons and Bernard J. Shapiro, “Reading Expectancy Formulae – A Warning,” Journal of Reading 11, no. 8 (May 1968): 625–9. Norman C. Reali and Bernard J. Shapiro, “More Research Courses! More Measurement Courses! More Statistics Courses!” Educational Forum 36, no. 3 (March 1972): 406–7. Bernard J. Shapiro and David J. Marion, “Uses and Abuses of Intelligence,” Educational Forum 34, no. 10 (November 1970): 99–102. Thomas C. O’Brien and Bernard J. Shapiro, “The Development of Logical Thinking in Children,” American Educational Research Journal 5, no. 4 (November 1968): 531–42. Bernard J. Shapiro and Thomas C. O’Brien, “Logical Thinking in Children, Six Through Thirteen,” Child Development 41, no. 3 (September 1970): 823–9. Bernard J. Shapiro, Thomas C. O’Brien, and Norman C. Reali, “Logical Thinking: Language and Context,” Educational Studies in Mathematics 4 (1971): 201–19. Phyllis P. Shapiro and Bernard J. Shapiro, “Two Methods of Teaching the Writing of Poetry,” Elementary English 47, no. 4 (April 1971): 225–8. Phyllis P. Shapiro and Bernard J. Shapiro, “An Evaluation of Poetry Lessons with Children from Less Advantaged Backgrounds,” Educational Leadership, Research Supplement 30, no. 1 (October 1972): 55–9. On a related theme, see Phyllis P. Shapiro and Bernard J. Shapiro, “Poetry Instruction: Its Effects on Attitudes Towards Literature and the Ability to Write Prose,” New England Reading Association Journal 8, no. 2 (1972–73): 35–42. Robert E. Willford, Phyllis P. Shapiro, Bernard J. Shapiro, “The i.t.a. Transition Problem – A Comparative Study,” Journal of Educational Research 65, no. 2 (Spring 1971): 57–60; Bernard J. Shapiro and Phyllis P. Shapiro, “The Effect of Reading Method on Composition,” Journal of Reading Behavior 5, no. 2 (Spring 1973): 82–7. Blanche L. Sewer, Bernard J. Shapiro, and Phyllis P. Shapiro, “The Comparative Effectiveness of Four Methods of Instruction on the

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15 16

17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26

27 28 29 30 31

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Achievement of Children with Specific Learning Disabilities,” Journal of Special Education 7 no. 3 (Fall 1973): 241–8. Ellen Winkelstein, Bernard J. Shapiro, and Dorothy G. Tucker, “Model for Conceptualizing Early Childhood Educational Objectives for Normal and Mentally Retarded Children,” Mental Retardation 12, no. 5 (October 1974): 41–5. (New York: Harper Rowe). Bernard J. Shapiro, “Teaching and Learning: Facing the Unknown,” in H. Stevenson and J. Wilson (eds.), Precepts, Policy and Process: Perspectives on Canadian Education (London, Ontario: Alexander Blake Associates, 1977), 161–76. Bernard J. Shapiro, “Scholarly Concerns of a Faculty of Education,” Journal of Educational Thought 19, no. 1 (April 1985), 43. “Emerging Needs in Educational Research,” in Baha Abu-Laban and Brendan Gail Rule (eds.), The Human Sciences: Their Contributions to Society and Future Research Needs (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1988), 184. Bernard J. Shapiro, “The Challenge of Public Education, “ Orbit 13, no. 1 (February 1982), 13. Bernard J. Shapiro, “The Teacher as Futurist,” Comment on Education 12, (April 1978), 24. “The Challenge of Public Education,” 14. Martin Friedland, The University of Toronto: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 471–4. R.D. Gidney, From Hope to Harris: The Reshaping of Ontario’s Schools (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 127–8. Bernard J. Shapiro, Commissioner, “The Report of the Commission on Private Schools in Ontario” (Toronto: Government of Ontario, 1985), 2. Ibid., 18. This quotation is from an article published the year after the report was released. Bernard J. Shapiro, “The Public Funding of Private Schools in Ontario: The Setting, Some Arguments, and Some Matters of Belief,” Canadian Journal of Education 11, no. 3 (1986), 272–3. “Report of the Commission,” 64. Ibid., 38. Gidney, From Hope to Harris, 135. Ibid., 199. Ibid., 201.

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32 Ibid., 209–12. 33 Ibid., 214. 34 “Teacher Education in Nova Scotia: An Honourable Past: An Alternative Future. A Report to the Nova Scotia Council of Higher Education” (Halifax, 1994). The other members of the commission were Jean Clandinin, Robert Crocker, Emmet Currie, Michael Fullan, and Jane Gaskell. 35 Personal Interview, 15 July 2003. 36 “Teacher Education in Nova Scotia,” 25. 37 Ibid., 29. 38 Bernard J. Shapiro, “Towards a New McGill: Some Preliminary Thoughts,” (McGill University, Office of the Principal, 1 October 1995). 39 Bernard Shapiro, and others, discuss some of these issues in Andrew Mullins and Diana Grier Atton, “A Farewell to Shapiro,” McGill News (Winter 2002–03): 13–19. 40 Bernard J. Shapiro, “Acting on Conviction: Universities at Centre Stage,” speech to the Empire Club, 22 May 1997, in Gareth S. Seltzer and Edward P. Badovinac, editors, The Empire Club of Canada Speeches 1997–1998 (Toronto: The Empire Club Foundation, 1998), 43–55. 41 Bernard J. Shapiro, “The Research University: An Undergraduate Challenge,” Sir Robert Menzies Oration on Higher Education, University of Melbourne, October 2002. 42 “Acting on Conviction.” 43 This theme was also developed in Bernard J. Shapiro and Harold T. Shapiro, “Higher Education: Some Problems and Challenges in a Changing World” (Toronto: Council of Ontario Universities, 1994). 44 “A Farewell to Shapiro,” 17; “The Research University: An Undergraduate Challenge,” 12, 16, 25. 45 Since he “retired” as principal, Bernard Shapiro has undertaken a number of major projects and offices. In 2004 he served as co-chair of the board of Société du Havre, charged with the task of designing a development plan for the Montreal waterfront. He headed the search committee for the new music director of the Montreal Symphony. He chaired the International Review Committee for the British Columbia Leading Edge Endowment Fund, which allocates twenty endowed chairs to that province’s universities. He was chair of the board of governors of Royal Military College, vice president of the Combined Jewish Appeal Federation in Montreal, and a

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keynote speaker on school governance for The Learning Partnership, whose advisory board he joined. In April 2004 he was appointed Ethics Commissioner of Canada with responsibility for addressing conflict of interest issues for members of Parliament, deputy ministers, and heads of crown agencies. 46 Ronald Beiner, editor, Hannah Arendt Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago: The Harvest Press Limited, 1982), 12.