Recent worries over Canada’s international role in education have started discussion over post-secondary reform among the presidents of Canadian universities.

Some fear Canada is perceived as a second-rate place in the world for professors, research faculty and students.

In a recent Maclean’s article, Canada’s major five schools — the universities of Montreal, Toronto, Alberta, British Columbia and McGill — suggested every university should focus on unique and differentiated missions and research and graduate education should be the primary focus of their larger institutions while undergraduate education should be the focus of smaller and medium size schools.

In response, smaller universities assented that while each university should have a unique focus, research shouldn’t solely be designated to the big five.

“Occasionally we’ll be able to achieve excellence in select areas through sheer luck or through generous philanthropic contributions, but we’ll not have a systemic capacity to support excellence,” said Amit Chakma, Western’s president and vice-chancellor.

“We have a number of very good programs … but we also have major gaps,” he added
Gerald Kidder, Western’s associate vice-president research, does not believe Canada is seen as a second-rate destination. “We’re doing better in the past decade because of programs like the Canada Foundation for Innovation,” he said.

However, he explained funding is often the most important factor.

“In research, it’s often about money. To be really competitive you have to establish the infrastructure that will attract the top researchers in the world … [and] we also need to increase funding to the granting councils in Canada,” he said.

“We’re not as competitive as the States. The government recently cut the budget for the granting councils, which was absolutely the wrong thing to do. You can’t have funding for research infrastructure alone and not for operating the research,” he added.

Chakma agreed the largest gap Canada has is in the funding of its universities.

“It is manifested in our very high student to faculty ratios. Such ratios for U.S. private and publicly funded schools would be around 4:1 and 14:1, respectively. In Canada this ratio is about 22:1,” he said.

As for the “big five”, Kidder said those universities already receive the biggest share of research funding, even though they aren’t necessarily the best.

“There are other universities outside the five that have excellent research programs that the big five don’t cover,” he said.

“The debate should be whether Canada needs to do more to support excellence in its universities, not whether certain universities should be designated as research universities,” Chakma said.

“[Western] has become the number one destination for undergraduate students in this country and at the same time is a research intensive institution that is placing a very high priority on graduate programming,” said Alan Weedon, vice-provost academic planning, policy and faculty.

There is also concern that designating research to specific schools will create a perception of a two-tiered education system, where the research institutions may be viewed as superior to others. Furthermore, this may attract fewer professors to the institution.

“Research and teaching go hand in hand,” Kidder added. “You can’t separate them. Professors who are active in research are the best to teach those subjects because they have the most up-to-date knowledge in those courses.”

Weedon explained Western’s own efforts to enhance its quality of education. In the last eight years, Western has hired over 500 probationary and tenured professors who are at the forefront of their fields both as teacher and researchers, he said

“We need to have active researchers teaching undergraduates and involving them in their research, so as an undergraduate you don’t just learn about topics but you learn about how to create new knowledge in the field,” Kidder said.