University Affairs

Yes, but how do you measure it?

Canada is perceived to be underperforming in terms of innovation. The Conference Board of Canada, for example, gave the country a D grade for innovation in a 2010 report, How Canada Performs.

However, University of Ottawa law professor Jeremy de Beer questions whether that’s a fair grade, and the reason he does so is because of the metrics used to measure innovation. “Maybe we’re looking at the wrong things,” he said yesterday (Jan. 31) in a talk on Parliament Hill as part of the Big Thinking lecture series put on by the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Professor de Beer noted that many of the key indicators used to measure innovation are related to intellectual property statistics (primarily, the licensing of patents). But he believes IP statistics by themselves may not be an accurate indicator of innovation performance. “We need to rethink the role of intellectual property in the innovation system and how to move from an over-reliance on intellectual property metrics to new ways of thinking about science and progress,” he said.

Much of the current thinking on innovation in Canada, he says, is that we need to have stronger levels of IP protection or we’ll risk losing R&D investment. But high levels of IP protection can create their own problems. He said one need look no further for evidence of this than the mobile communications industry, where “basically everybody is suing everybody else” because of an incredible web of patents held by the various companies involved.

“Intellectual property by itself provides exclusive rights to stop competitors from doing particular things, and that can provide an incentive to invest in research and development,” said Professor de Beer. “The danger is it can also act as a disincentive, it can create barriers to entry, create thickets of rights.”

Professor de Beer cites approvingly a recent report by the Canadian International Council called Rights and Rents: Why Canada Must Harness its Intellectual Property Resources. The report concludes that “Canada is adept at launching innovative ventures, but often fails to recognize the value in their IP.” It argues that our current approach to IP is “short sighted” and that the country is paying a steep price as a consequence. It strongly urges the government to integrate a national IP strategy into an overall innovation framework and to undertake a broad review of its current patent policy.

For his part, Professor de Beer calls for a new way of thinking about IP called “open innovation,” which he calls “a new way to unleash IP resources.” Open innovation does not mean that you do away with IP protection, he said, but rather that you use IP rights to facilitate collaboration rather than as a tool of exclusion. “We need to have people and ideas working together,” he said. “This thinking hasn’t filtered into our intellectual property policy making.”

Returning to the idea of innovation metrics, Professor de Beer said he and his colleagues have been working with the World Intellectual Property Organization to look at new ways of assessing the impact of IP and copyright in economic, social and cultural ways, rather than primarily in economic terms. “What we’ve started to do is build the principles for the types of indicators that we need to be looking at. Indicators of successful innovation policy need to move beyond statistics. We need to take a more holistic view.”

A greater emphasis needs to be placed on qualitative research, he continued, “and that can be an excellent complement to statistics and quantitative research used thus far. This will help us develop a better understanding of what effect the policies are doing in practice, to get a better understanding of how to think about innovation.”

Professor de Beer ended with a fervent pitch in favour of social sciences and humanities research, “because it helps us to understand how these innovations are put into practice by emphasizing the human aspects of science and technology – because that’s what it’s all about, ultimately, at the end of the day. The reason that science and technology is important, the reason we want innovation, is to make people’s lives better. It is about human behaviour. … We need to put more value into social science research.”

The Big Thinking Lecture was co-sponsored this month by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada as part of its “Day on the Hill,” a day-long series of meetings between university presidents and Parliamentarians, senior civil servants and other stakeholders. There were at least 25 university heads in Ottawa for the day. The focus of the meetings was to underline the role of Canada’s universities in building a culture of innovation in Canada, said AUCC spokesperson Helen Murphy, with a special emphasis on the benefits to Canadians of private sector-university partnerships.

Chemistry 101 online, anyone?

Ever since the introduction of the Internet, there have been predictions that online education would transform the university as we know it. As early as 1997, for instance, management guru Peter Drucker observed in Forbes magazine that “already we are beginning to deliver more lectures and classes off campus via satellite or two-way video at a fraction of the cost” and predicted that, “Thirty years from now the big university campuses will be relics. Universities won’t survive. It’s as large a change as when we first got the printed book.”

Fast forward to today, and those predictions continue. Again in Forbes magazine, Tim Worstall of London’s Adam Smith Institute writes, “I would expect to see a crumbling of the extant educational order in the next decade or two. Why spend $30,000 to $50,000 a year to go away to school when you can gain the same or better degree at home for $3,000 a year?” He adds, “If I were starting out now I would be very wary indeed of trying for a teaching career in tertiary education. It’s entirely possible that in 20 years’ time there will be perhaps 10 percent of the number of positions, jobs, doing that as there are now.”

The lure of online education seems undeniable. The annual Sloan Consortium report on online education in the United States, released earlier this month, found that 6.1 million American college students took at least one online course in fall 2010 – a half-million more than in 2009. The report further noted that nearly one-third of all college students are learning online now, up from less than 10 percent in 2002.

Then there’s the recent phenomenon of the 160,000 people who leapt at the chance to enrol free of charge in the online course “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” offered by Stanford University professor Sebastian Thrun. There’s also the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s new MITx e-learning venture, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of college lectures on iTunes U, the thousands of videos available from the Kahn Academy, and so on.

And yet, I remain unconvinced that a revolution in higher ed is at hand. Or, more precisely, I think the predictions of the demise of the traditional university campus are greatly exaggerated. There is a value to the campus experience and the campus culture that is very real and hard to replicate online. As one professor wrote recently, “There is a difference between being on a campus with other students and teachers committed to learning and sitting at home. Learning, like religion, is a social experience. Context matters.”

But I do believe that online education will continue to play an increasingly important role in higher ed. I also think that, for better or worse, the impetus for this will be more economic than pedagogical. University costs continue to increase well above the rate of inflation and are unsustainable in the long run. As Stanford’s Dr. Thrun opined in the New York Times, “I’m not at all against the on-campus experience. … I love it. It’s great. It has a lot of things which cannot be replaced by anything online. But it’s also insanely uneconomical.”

Which leads me to a (non-Swiftian) modest proposal: why couldn’t we try an experiment where a number of Canadian universities banded together to create a series of online foundational courses – Psychology 101 or Introduction to Chemistry, for example – that all of their students enrolled in those programs would take? The universities could be geographically linked, such as the six or seven universities in southwestern Ontario, or institutionally linked such as the institutions that make up the Université du Québec network. There would be a set, agreed-upon curriculum and the best lecturers from each university could prepare one or more of the online lectures while each institution would look after the grading of assignments and the provision of on-campus labs where appropriate. Finished the days of lecture halls filled with hundreds of first-year students.

Lawrence Summers, the former president of Harvard University, recently offered a (somewhat) similar vision: “It makes sense for students to watch video of the clearest calculus teacher or the most lucid analyst of the Revolutionary War rather than having thousands of separate efforts. Professors will have more time for direct discussion with students — not to mention the cost savings — and material will be better presented.”

This is also somewhat along the lines of what Dr. Thrun has in mind, although he takes it much further. Again quoting from the New York Times: “Thrun’s ultimate mission is a virtual university in which the best professors broadcast their lectures to tens of thousands of students. Testing, peer interaction and grading would happen online; a cadre of teaching assistants would provide some human supervision; and the price would be within reach of almost anyone.”

I say let’s take the first step as I outlined above. Any takers?

There have been a couple of incidents recently where university administrators in Canada have felt compelled to react to racy photos of students taken within a campus context – a tricky situation. One was the case of a female engineering student at the University of Waterloo who last spring posed for a photo in a bikini and high heels in front of a racing car she helped build as a member of the engineering students’ Formula SAE team.

The wisdom of posing for such a photo is certainly debatable. But many felt the punishment was severe: the entire team was temporarily suspended and were unable to participate in an international Formula race-car contest that the team members had been eagerly preparing for.

The second incident involves the women’s rugby team at Université Laval. The team members posed nude last fall for a 2012 calendar which was to be sold to raise funds for the team. (Coincidentally, in the Waterloo incident, the female student apparently had her photo taken so that she could enter a contest to be in a calendar to raise money for charity.)

Canada's national women's biathlon team posed in the buff for a calendar.

As with so many of these now ubiquitous “naked” calendars, the photos of the female rugby players were tastefully done (depending on your point of view), with no naughty bits showing. But a couple of professors at Laval felt that the “marketing” of these young women’s bare bodies was a step too far.

“They’re selling young women’s naked bodies to make money in a university context. That’s unacceptable,” Professor Hélène Lee-Gosselin is quoted as saying in Le Soleil. The professor, who holds a research chair on women, knowledge and society, added that the negative consequences of the hypersexualization of women are well documented and “based on sound research.”

Dr. Lee-Gosselin and colleague Guylaine Demers contacted the university’s rector, and the administration forbade the team from distributing the calendar. I admire the professors’ courage for speaking out – they must have anticipated that they might be ridiculed for their “prudery,” and they were, mercilessly, in social media and elsewhere.

The students were shocked, saying they were “extremely frustrated” and disappointed by the decision. Said Christelle Paré, the rugby team’s treasurer (a founding member of the team, but no longer a player): “What we wanted to show were different, non-standard bodies, with muscles, bruises and scars. To say, no matter what, we’re beautiful. That’s the message that we wanted to put out there, and the team members wrote a lovely explanation of that for the front of the calendar.”

So, what is it: female empowerment or objectification? These calendars of naked women athletes are ubiquitous, starting with one done by Canada’s national women’s rugby team, Canada’s national women’s biathlon team, Canada’s national women’s cross-country ski team, Australia’s national women’s soccer team, a French rugby team, even a women’s university volleyball team in the U.K.

Finally, just as the Laval controversy was dying down, it got reignited last week when it was revealed that the Quebec-based Simons department store chain had approached the women’s rugby players to model the store’s clothing for an advertising campaign. University officials quickly nixed that idea, but for a different reason: no trademarks or players of the university’s Rouge et Or varsity teams can be used for commercial purposes, said vice-rector Éric Bauce.

Champlain's Dream was shortlisted for the 2009 Cundill Prize.

A historical book on the life and times of French explorer and father of New France, Samuel de Champlain, has been a favourite of some of the presidents of Canada’s universities and has been making the rounds at our offices at the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada.

The book, Champlain’s Dream, by Pulitzer-Prize winning author and Brandeis University history professor David Hackett Fischer, is not particularly recent – it was published in 2008. Nevertheless, I managed to borrow a copy from a colleague before the holidays and was mesmerized, reading it through in just a matter of days. As a person of French-Canadian heritage dating back nearly to the time of Champlain (my ancestors arrived in Quebec in 1640, five years after his death), I was reading a book about my ancestors in this place we’ve called home for almost four centuries.

But, I think this book will resonate with most Canadians who have an interest in the history of Canada and the early colonization of North America. I agree with the National Post reviewer, quoted on the cover of the Canadian edition, that this is “a book that every Canadian should own.” Other reviewers have called it a “masterpiece,” “absorbing” and “the definitive biography” of Champlain.

The book, which was a runner-up for the 2009 Cundill Prize, first came to my attention by AUCC president Paul Davidson, who was told about it by University of Saskatchewan President Peter MacKinnon, a former chair of the board of AUCC. Mr. Davidson loved the book and in turn gave a copy to Michel Belley, rector of Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, when the latter took over as board chair. Mr. Davidson also sent a note to then University of Waterloo President David Johnston recommending he read it. Mr. Johnston evidently found the book inspiring, as he carried a copy of Champlain’s Dream to the podium the day he was named Canada’s 28th Governor General and referenced it in his remarks. He also made reference to it during his official investiture and at numerous other occasions since.

Mr. Davidson later gave a copy of the French translation of the book, Le rêve de Champlain, to Dr. Belley when his term as AUCC chair ended this past fall. The book was signed by the author himself, whom Mr. Davidson had met at the 2011 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences held in Fredericton.

Champlain, born circa 1570, died in Quebec City on Christmas Day, Dec. 25, 1635. He was a prolific writer, a pioneer ethnographer, a famed explorer and expert mariner. Without him, it can be argued that there would be no French Canada. But, as the author makes clear, Champlain was also a dreamer, a man of vision and a humanist:

“If nothing else, his life was a record of stamina with few equals. But always it was more than that. Champlain … dreamed of many things. Several scholars have written about his dream of finding a passage to China. Others have written of his dream for the colonization of New France. But all these visions were part of a larger dream that has not been studied. This war-weary soldier had a dream of humanity and peace in a world of cruelty and violence. He envisioned a new world as a place where people of different cultures could live together in amity and concord. This became his grand design for North America.”

The New York Times Sunday Book Review had this to say about the book:

“His thesis in Champlain’s Dream, which these days might be considered daring, is that Champlain was an admirable, heroic figure — a stance that runs counter to the recent trend in historiography to debunk and demean most ‘dead white males,’ especially those who were explorers and settlers. Many of them richly deserve this opprobrium for slaughtering and otherwise mistreating the indigenous peoples they encountered. But Champlain was different. He was more interested in learning from and cooperating with Indians than in exploiting them. He treated most of those he met with ‘dignity, forbearance and respect,’ and, Fischer writes, they largely reciprocated: ‘He had a straight-up soldier’s manner, and Indian warriors genuinely liked and respected him.’ ”

This is far different than the relations that most colonizers had with Native Americans. At the same time, Champlain managed to establish three francophone populations and cultures – Québécois, Acadien and Métis –and explored much of North America through what are now six Canadian provinces and five American states. Moreover, he made at least 27 Atlantic crossings and hundreds of other voyages, and never lost a ship under his command. Writes the author: “The most important fact about Champlain is not that he did any one of these things, but that he did all of them together. And it was done through the span of three decades, in the face of many failures and defeats.”

Intrigued? I urge you to read the book.

My last two posts, here and here, have dealt with the concerns over PhD training in Canada and whether Canada is producing too many PhDs. The two posts give a somewhat discouraging outlook for PhD graduates. For the sake of fairness, I will now try to provide a somewhat more encouraging viewpoint, based on some graphs from the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (the research and policy analysts at AUCC love charts and graphs).

I present the first chart (Chart 1, below) as a sort of mea culpa. In my previous post, I quoted from a Statistics Canada report that “the earnings premium between a master level and doctorate level … is marginal” two years after graduation, giving the impression that there is little earnings benefit to a PhD over a master’s degree. However, I should have noted that the main reason for the relatively strong showing for master’s degrees is due to MBA degrees. In most fields other than business, you will note that the earnings advantage for PhDs is indeed significantly higher than for master’s degrees.

Chart 1 (click on image for a larger view)

I should also note that, despite the anecdotal concerns of today’s PhD students and postdocs about finding jobs, the Canadian labour market does seem to be generating a growing demand for graduate degrees (both master’s and PhDs), as seen in Chart 2. Chart 3 suggests labour demands for graduate-degree holders will grow even further given the need to replace the number of graduates expected to retire. I have one final point after the jump.

Chart 2 (click on image for a larger view)

Chart 3 (click on image for a larger view)

The final chart (Chart 4) is somewhat ambiguous in terms of the “too many Phds?” debate, but is interesting nevertheless. It shows that we are importing a lot of PhDs – since 1990, the number of immigrants to Canada with graduate degrees (master’s and PhDs) has increased almost five-fold. More specifically, the number of immigrants coming to Canada with PhDs has grown from roughly 1,500 in 1990 to 4,600 in 2008. To put that in perspective, in 2008 Canada produced 5,500 home-grown doctorates. Are we becoming too reliant on immigration to meet our needs for PhD holders?

Chart 4 (click on image for a larger view)

I think the debate isn’t that PhDs have value, but that they have to be perceived as having value by employers. The challenge, as I see it, is how to get the private sector to utilize and recognize the value of these workers.

As always, your comments are appreciated. This is my last post for 2011. I will be back in early January.

My most recent blog post and accompanying news story on the problem with PhD training in Canada got many views and received many thoughtful comments. It appears to have touched a nerve. Most who commented seemed to agree in principal with the general premise that the content of PhD programs needs to be expanded beyond training these students for jobs in academia, while others argued that we are simply producing too many PhDs.

However, on a somewhat different note, a couple of tweets from Joey Berger questioned the concerns that PhD students and postdocs have about finding jobs. Mr. Berger linked specifically to two charts from the National Graduates Survey of Statistics Canada.

The first chart shows that individuals who graduated with a doctoral degree in 2005 and who were working full-time two years later were doing quite well in terms of earnings, with the median salary ranging between $60,000 and $85,000, depending on the field of study.

I tweeted him back, saying that’s fine if you’re working full time. To that, Mr. Berger responded with a link to a second chart from the same survey showing rates of full-time employment by level of study. “Why does the conversation about PhD outcomes almost never include this data?” he asked.

I can’t say that I find the second chart makes a compelling case. At a glance, the rate of full-time employment for those with a doctoral degree in certain fields does not appear to be any better than those with an undergraduate or master’s degree.

Furthermore, there is another chart from that same survey which is even more interesting. This chart shows earnings distribution of 2005 graduates working full-time in 2007 by gender and level of study. Leaving the gender aspect aside, the chart clearly shows that the greatest earnings premium is between the bachelor’s and master’s level, and that the premium from the master’s to doctoral level is low to non-existent. Here is how StatsCan characterizes it:

The largest earnings premium existed between the bachelor and master levels suggesting that investing in further post-graduate work is financially beneficial. On the other hand, the earnings premium between a master level and doctorate level suggests that the monetary gain from employment two years after graduation for doctorate students is marginal.

These are not new data and have been hashed out before. But, they do appear to back up concerns about the value of a PhD as it currently exists. Of course, there are lots of caveats. The earnings premiums and employment levels may look very different 10 years out compared to just two years after graduation. What’s more, the economic situation now is quite a bit more precarious than it was in 2007, which could affect the relative standing of PhD grads.

As always, your thoughts, rebuttals or other comments are greatly appreciated.

For years now, successive federal governments have promoted the “knowledge economy” as the key to our future prosperity. Just recently, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty stated: “Our greatest renewable resource is our grey matter.”

A linchpin of the knowledge economy is the production of PhDs, an area where Canada is seen to be lagging. At a recent symposium on the training of scientists held as part of the Canadian Science Policy Conference in Ottawa, MITACS chief operating officer Olga Stachova noted that despite an increased production of PhDs in the past 20 years or so in Canada, we still fell from 20th to 23th spot among OECD countries in the number of PhD graduates per capita during that time.

But, even more worrisome was the sense articulated by the speakers and attendees at the symposium that something is wrong with PhD and postdoctoral training in Canada. The comments were in the context of the biomedical and natural sciences, but I think they could equally apply to PhD training in the humanities and social sciences.

The issue – and it’s not a new one – is that most PhD students have their eye on a career in academia. Yet, as several panelists at the symposium noted, as it now stands less than one in five PhD graduates will end up with an academic position and their training does not generally prepare them for a career outside academia. I have written a news story on the symposium, “Is Canada producing too many PhDs? Yes, no and maybe,” which you can read here.

Similar sentiments were voiced at the World Innovation Summit for Education held in early November in Qatar. “We still need to give students disciplinary expertise, but they also need the much broader skills of entrepreneurship, flexibility and understanding of the economy. Students need the perspective to think about the links between their creative output and industry,” said Deborah Buszard, a professor at Dalhousie University’s college of sustainability, as quoted in University World News.

(Not incidentally, many reports – including most recently the Jenkins report – have lamented Canada’s poor record in business innovation. I think these two things are related.)

University Affairs treated the subject in depth back in 2010 with this report (“Give us the dirt on jobs: Why universities need to prepare doctoral students for careers outside academe”) and this follow-up, (“Professional development for grad students: Skills training gives PhD students a boost, whether they find work inside or outside academia”). We also have a podcast series called “Escape the Ivory Tower.”

The blame for the inadequate training is being laid on academics themselves. Commented panelist Alan Bernstein, founding president of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research: “People who are going through their PhDs and postdocs should not simply be looking at themselves as clones of their PhD or postdoc mentors. That paradigm is out of date. The academy – your mentors – are to blame for this.”

Dr. Bernstein also chided academics for perpetuating the notion that a career outside of academia is somehow a failure. “We need to get away from a pecking order that says the good students go on to academia and the poor ones go elsewhere,” he said.

Ian Chubb, chief scientist for the Australian government, made a similar comment the night before at the science policy conference: “We need to tell the universities they’ve got to change the way they produce PhD graduates to develop overtly some of the more generic skills they would need to be able to work outside of academe, and at the same time to psychologically prepare them not to see that as second best.”

Things do appear to be changing, but it would seem not quickly enough. Ms. Stachova mentioned the excellent MITACS Accelerate program, which offers opportunities for graduate students to conduct collaborative research with an industrial partner.  We wrote about the program, here.

And, the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, in its recent prebudget submission (PDF), is calling for the federal government  to “invest in talent” by committing up to $15 million to develop a program of 500, 12-month paid internships, valued at $30,000 and matched by the host employer, that “integrate master’s and PhD students and graduates into the labour market, especially in small- and medium-sized enterprises.”

Finally, I realize this isn’t their primary role as science bureaucrats, but I couldn’t help but notice that Dr. Bernstein and his colleague, Suzanne Fortier, president of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, seemed to have little advice to offer the anxious PhD grads and postdocs in attendance at the CSPC session. Dr. Bernstein suggested PhD grads may wish to consider becoming high school teachers or seek a career in the vaguely defined field of “science diplomacy.” Dr. Fortier said it will be up to the graduates themselves to create “the jobs of tomorrow,” adding, “we’re rooting for you.”

I attended the Canadian Science Policy Conference last week in Ottawa. It was a very informative and worthwhile event, and I’ll try to report more on it when I have a chance to go through all of my notes. For the moment, though, I’ve assembled a few quotes from a panel session with three interesting individuals who were asked to present the “big picture” perspective on science and innovation policy. The three were Ian Chubb, chief scientist of the Australian Government; Peter MacKinnon, president of the University of Saskatchewan and member of the STIC (Science, Technology and Innovation Council) State of the Nation Working Group; and Rémi Quirion, the recently appointed chief scientist of Quebec and chairman of the board of the Fonds de recherche du Québec. Here’s a bit of what they had to say:

The challenges ahead

Dr. Chubb: “The reality is that we presently have seven billion people on the planet and we can only feed six billion. Two hundred million of those underfed people are children. The population is projected to grow to nine billion by 2050. If we think that humanity will be able to survive by doing more of what we do now, we’re crazy. We have to do things differently. We have to do things better. … We simply cannot go on thinking that all we have to do is make incremental changes in what we presently do.”

Collaboration

Dr. Quirion: “I was meeting earlier this week with colleagues at the NIH (National Institutes of Health in the U.S.) – I trained at the NIH and still know a lot of people there and developed partnerships with them. The fact that the economy is not too, too strong in the U.S. means that they are more open to collaboration and partnerships. They are very open to collaboration and partnerships. We have just hired someone, Julie Payette the former astronaut, who will be the Quebec rep in Washington D.C. to discuss with the National Science Foundation and with NIH, to see how we can partner more. So during tough economic times there is more opportunity for partnerships.

Politicians and policy

Dr. Quirion: There are some politicians that understand better than others the importance of science. But of course they are all concerned about elections in three or four years’ time. They want to have something to show.

Prof. MacKinnon: “A quality that’s necessary here is patience. We all are familiar with one of the rallying cries of impatience: what are we getting for all of these investments in R&D? The reality is that the contemporary, the modern investments in R&D, are of relatively recent origin. I worry that in our rush to achieve results we may not have the necessary patience to build the long-term capacity we require for us to achieve.”

Scientific literacy

Prof. MacKinnon: “Politicians will attribute importance to what their electors attribute importance. And given the troubling state of scientific literacy in the general population, we can’t be terribly confident that the politicians think their electorates think science is important. So what do we do about that? I think a much broader public education on all of these issues is terribly important.”

Teaching science in K-12

Dr. Chubb: “The troubling thing for me is the school education system. I don’t think we support our teachers well enough so that they are comfortable enough with contemporary science to enable them to excite and enthuse their students in primary and secondary school. There was a survey done a couple of years ago of schools in Australia and what was being taught on a particular day. A very significant proportion, around about 70 percent, of teachers were teaching out of their field on that day. I think it must be very hard for these teachers to confront a class, to try to teach them something with which they themselves feel uncomfortable.”

Training of scientists

Dr. Chubb: “We have 8.5 people with a doctorate per thousand of our workforce [in Australia]. But most of these PhD holders classify themselves as researchers. So we have very few people – there are some, but very few – with that high level of training in the general workforce. When I ask employers why not, they say, ‘Because they want too much money, they think they know everything, they don’t work in teams, and anyway it takes too long to train them to work in our industry.’ … We need to tell the universities they’ve got to change the way they produce PhD graduates to develop overtly some of the more generic skills they would need to be able to work outside of academe, and at the same time to psychologically prepare them not to see that as second best.”

Policy goals for Canada

Prof. MacKinnon: “We’ve had a lot of reports on science and technology and innovation and productivity. We’ve had the Conference Board report, the competition review panel, the Council of Canadian Academies report, two STIC reports, we’ve now have the Jenkins report. And the themes are fairly common and constant across the board. … The trick now is to recognize that we’ve reported enough and we’ve got to move into the realm of policy – focussed, serious policies and goals – and see if we can achieve it. Can we come to some kind of sense of what we’re trying to do here? We need to decide, are we content with the fair to middling performance or are we interested in being a leader?”

Like many (if not most) magazines, University Affairs relies heavily on freelance writers. We simply cannot afford enough full-time staff to fill our pages (and our website) and so we depend on the very good work of our regular freelance contributors.

We pay our freelancers fairly well by industry standards. The problem is that the industry standards are appallingly low. We pay from about 50 cents to one dollar per word, so a 1,500-word feature might fetch a freelance writer … well, you can do the math. Full-time freelance writers are lucky if they make $40,000 a year and many make considerably less than that. There can be periods when work is scarce and there are no employee benefits. What’s more, the pay rates have remained stagnant for at least two decades.

We’d of course prefer to pay our freelancers more, but our budget is limited. If we did pay more, we’d likely have to cut in other areas, like photography or design or paper quality.

Does all this sound familiar? As you’ve likely guessed from the headline, I see a parallel here with the use of sessional instructors at universities. Universities rely heavily on these low-paid, part-time workers, but gosh darn it, they just can’t afford to pay them more – or, heavens, offer them full-time tenure-track positions.

I do sympathize with Canada’s universities. It’s not like they haven’t been hiring. According to the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, about half of all university faculty in Canada have been hired in the last decade. In addition to replacing retiring faculty, universities have hired about 8,000 additional professors during that time.

But university enrolment continues to grow – the number of full-time university students has more than doubled since 1980 – outpacing the growth in faculty. The result: higher teacher-faculty ratios and an increasing reliance on the academic underclass of low-paid contract teachers.

I often wonder how contract teachers are viewed by tenured faculty. Do professors feel a bit uncomfortable seeing these highly trained individuals being treated as second-tier professionals? Is there a sense of solidarity, or is it easier to just not think about it?

It’s a muddle that I’m well acquainted with. Perhaps we could pay our freelance writers more and generally improve their working conditions. In recent years, some of our writers have joined syndicates which demand higher and more uniform pay rates, and we have complied.

Of course, the parallel between contract teachers and freelance writers is not exact. For one, many freelance writers choose this line of work because of the freedom it gives them, even though it is low-paid. I don’t doubt that contract teachers (or contingent faculty, or adjuncts, or whatever you choose to call them) also like their work, but I’m sure most would gladly give up the itinerant lifestyle for a full-time position with all the added benefits.

It’s fairly common for universities to try to distinguish themselves from one another. Part of that is branding, although I must say I don’t hear universities talk too much about their particular “brand” nowadays – not compared to five or 10 years ago, when it seems to me this was more common.

During that period, quite a number of universities devised taglines as part of their identity. I see some universities have dropped them in the intervening years, but they’re still fairly common. A quick count of the 95 member institutions of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada found roughly a third (31 members) use a tagline. For the purposes of this little survey, the tagline had to be right up there with the logo of the university on that university’s homepage for it to count.

Looking at these taglines is always interesting – a sort of Rorschach test for institutions’ identities and aspirations. In at least one case, it can also lead to a bit of controversy. I remember when Carleton University came up with “Canada’s Capital University” – a nice double-entendre, since it’s in the nation’s capital and the adjective “capital” means important or leading. But, around the same time, crosstown rival University of Ottawa came up with “Canada’s University,” which to some was a bit too similar.

It’s fun to look at these taglines for what they say about their institutions, so with that in mind I’ve devised a little quiz. Below on the left you’ll find 10 taglines, which you need to match with the correct university on the right. The answers are below.

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Answers: 1-C, 2-A, 3-I, 4-J, 5-F, 6-H, 7-D, 8-E, 9-G, 10-B