In the company of federal ministers and the media, Samarasekera speaks of the “transformative, life-changing research” that is possible when the right mix of money, people, and institutions come together. Yet reflecting on her own life, she acknowledges two transformative forces: public universities, and the social mobility that accessible, quality learning confers. “My kids went to the best universities in this country, and the costs were affordable,” she says. “We have a society where people have been able to succeed in spite of their beginnings. People underestimate the power of education in transforming the lives of an individual and, just as important, transforming society.”
The President at Work
he road to the future is littered with agendas and events and details. Samarasekera is meeting today with Phyllis Clark, U of A’s vice-president of finance and administration, and for half an hour they discuss everything from the university’s tattered investment portfolio (now recovering and, they hope, recouping last year’s losses) to trimming the costs of international business trips. An accidental fire burned out a research lab in the chemistry department a few months ago. It was fierce enough to restart itself; firefighters couldn’t fight it because of the hazards of unknown chemicals. “That looked bad,” she says, so they’re studying measures like fume hoods, safety training for students, and the impact on insurance. “Much of what I do is risk management,” she explains, “and travelling, and talking. It is a complex job. If you don’t have the skills, which I didn’t, you have to develop a lot of different areas very quickly: financial, risk management, understanding where the world is going. More important, have a sense of a vision of where education is going to go twenty years from now.”In the course of a day, Samarasekera might ponder lab safety design, meet with a federal minister, grapple with the possibility of a double-dip recession, and study up on the future of nanotechnology. She must manage several different levels of government, as well as myriad granting agencies, professional organizations, and corporate partnerships, plus donors large and small. And she stays in constant contact with her executive team: six people, including herself, who earned a total of $3.6 million in salary and benefits in 2009. (Maclean’s has called Samarasekera, whose 2009 compensation including non-cash benefits was $830,000, one of Canada’s highest-paid university administrators.) Her provost, Carl Amrhein, with whom she discusses hiring, firing, research, and academic performance, actually runs most of the day-to-day aspects of university life.
Lately, Samarasekera has been spending time on the university’s international strategy. Like many private sector corporations, U of A believes part of its future lies in emerging markets, especially China, Mexico, India, and Africa. Canadian universities depend primarily on provincial funding for undergraduate programs, but money for research and capital projects must be accessed elsewhere — which explains, in part, why Samarasekera spends about 110 days a year on the road, apparently to good effect. In April, the university announced an $80.5-million gift for virology research, sponsored by the Hong Kong billionaire and philanthropist Li Ka-shing and the government of Alberta. (It was one of the largest such gifts in Canadian history.) “She has an incredible profile in Canada,” says Suzanne Fortier, president of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, one of the country’s largest agencies for research grants. “But she also has a really good profile internationally. I’m often meeting people outside of Canada, and there’s one name that comes up often, and it’s Indira.” In 2009, Samarasekera was invited to the annual Bilderberg conference, joining David Rockefeller, Queen Sofia of Spain, and 120 or so others representing the likes of the World Trade Organization, Goldman Sachs, and Royal Dutch Shell — confirmation, if any were needed, that she had made the global A-list.
What makes her so popular with politicians and CEOs is her belief in the knowledge economy — the idea that the strength of a society and its economy are largely informed by the quality of its education systems. It doesn’t matter that it’s already a bit of a cliché. Politicians have come to associate economic growth — or at least gains in health, productivity, efficiency, and sustainability — with education, and creating what Fortier calls knowledge “assets.” The private sector, too, views the talent and research created by top-level universities as critical. Canada’s steadily declining productivity, now well below that of the United States, suggests that we can no longer create significant prosperity, as we did in decades past, through debt-fuelled consumer spending and natural resource exports. Everyone now agrees: the answer is education.
This is precisely the reason Samarasekera helped invent the CERC. After declining in the 1990s, research funding in Canada still hadn’t regained enough traction, so she and the other “big five” presidents — from U of T, UBC, U of A, the Université de Montréal, and McGill University — began talking about how to fund clusters of excellence. Then Samarasekera floated the idea at a Meech Lake round table on finance with the finance minister, Jim Flaherty. Later, at a meeting in her office with Jim Prentice, then minister of industry, she told him, “‘You know, Minister, we’re already attracting some of the best people from other parts of the world, using Canada Research Chairs, but this is our chance to go to the best of the best.’ He just loved the idea, and of course it turned up in the next budget.”
Into the Knowledge Economy
he federal government believes in economic payoffs. It’s no accident that two of U of A’s four CERC chairs are focused on non-renewable resources — tar sands oil and Arctic diamonds. The government’s press kit described the projects in bottom line terms: “Uncovering Canada’s Riches” and “Developing Sustainable Techniques for Oil Sands Recovery.” And while the chairs were chosen by international peer review, they were guided by the “four priority research areas” outlined in the government’s 2007 science and technology strategy: environmental science and technologies, natural resources and energy, health and related life sciences and technologies, and information and communications technologies. As Prime Minister Stephen Harper said at the time, “[Canada] is charting a new direction, one that links the competitive energy of Canada’s entrepreneurs to the creative genius of our scientists. Our new strategy will strengthen Canada’s economy by tapping our deep well of entrepreneurial energy to fuel our technological progress.”What worries some observers is this: how do we know where the politics ends and the research begins? With the modest increases in federal research funding in 2010–11, we are no longer killing innovation by neglect, but we are entering into a more complex and potentially difficult period where research and higher education are subject to worldly demands. The problem isn’t that universities are entering into partnerships and funding relationships with industry and government; it’s that increasingly universities are being rewarded for finding answers to utilitarian questions, such as how to separate sand from oil more efficiently, or how to locate Arctic diamonds more easily. “Universities have, for a very long time, played an important role in relation to industry and markets,” says James Turk of the CAUT. “For the past fifty years in the United States, a significant portion of the military research was done at American universities like Caltech and MIT. Professors of medicine have done research for decades related to the pharmaceutical industry. So that is not what is new. What is new is this whole reframing of the importance of post-secondary education in terms of its economic benefits. [And] the Harper government in the past four years has been the most extreme in trying to target academic research in ways that meet short-term industrial needs.”
When there is a major “innovation gap” — to borrow a phrase favoured by education and research professionals — governments often step in and contribute tax relief or grants. Canada’s industrial history is full of these interventions. The concern is that university-based research funding is capable of creating economic winners and favoured industries. For example: only two of the nineteen CERC chairs had an association with renewable energy (quantum non-linear optics and hybrid power trains). Instead, CERC emphasized quantum signal processing for information technology, the oil sands, diamonds, and fish farming. And several chairs in medicine and environmental studies were funded (U of A’s other two were in diabetes and hepatitis research), but none dealt with environmental impacts on human health, or with preventive medicine. (On the flip side, the University of Manitoba is increasing the staff of its Centre for Earth Observation Science from seventeen to 100 people so its CERC chair can study Arctic microbial activity and chemical transformations within sea ice and ocean sediments, which might help further an understanding of climate change.)
Moreover, the very act of setting goals for research can sabotage the process of discovery itself. Historically, most crucial innovations have come about through the serendipitous pursuit of “discovery” science (a fancy term for curiosity-driven inquiry) as opposed to “innovation” partnerships with government and industry. “What has changed,” says Turk, “is the focus on commercializable research at the expense of basic research. I can understand why politicians might do that, but I am surprised that university administrators would, because almost everything that has turned out to be of importance in a commercial sense — whether it is lasers or computers or MRIs or global positioning systems or most advances in medicine — has come out of basic research. University presidents are not defending that broader vision of the university’s role in a society. They are falling into the trap of saying, ‘Well, if we say what government wants to hear, we will more likely get funded.’ I think we are undermining our public purpose.”
Samarasekera concedes there are imbalances, possibly serious ones. There is an opportunity, she believes, “for universities to do research that currently doesn’t look even remotely commercially viable,” she says. “I’m going to ask the prime minister to invest in knowledge that may or may not have a commercial breakthrough tomorrow, even in ten years or ever, because you just don’t know where it could lead.” The irony, of course, is that the Harper government, which often reminds us that politicians are bad at engineering social and economic change, should need to be persuaded that they are no better at predicting what knowledge will ultimately prove useful. As an engineer, Samarasekera knows there are problems to be fixed and that universities should play a role, but as a researcher she also knows that Canada’s history in choosing economic favourites — from coal mining to shipbuilding — is rife with failure.
This is the double bind in which all Canadian university presidents now find themselves. Everyone agrees that higher education could and should help us solve problems. But when resources are scarce and funders designate “priority areas,” whose problems get solved first?
