Gurston Dacks, professor emeritus of political science, sees the divide between arts and sciences as ultimately self-defeating, as many of our biggest challenges, from obesity to energy consumption, pertain not to science, per se, but to human behaviour, culture, and society. “You can get cleaner tar sands, but that’s not really going to address our energy demand problem,” he says. “All of these solutions lie on the humanities and the arts side of the campus.” Gordon Laxer, director of the university’s Parkland Institute, complains that Alberta’s focus on its energy sector has meant that its economy hasn’t significantly diversified. “What knowledge-based industries in Alberta have to be here? ” he asks. “Alberta is less diverse than ever: we’re about oil and gas, forestry, farming, and tourism.” Public funding of energy research is increasing, he notes, even though private research spending as a percentage of revenue is five times lower in that sector than the Canadian industry average.
Roughly half of the social sciences and humanities professors contacted for this story declined to be interviewed or didn’t respond to requests for information. “It’s not at all about self-protection, but program protection,” explains an English and film studies professor who agreed to be quoted without attribution. “There’s a rising terror, a culture of fear emerging within the university, a general sense of threat hanging over us that small things will need to be pushed aside to free up money for all the big things like the CERCs.” Across the five years prior to 2009, the university’s annual revenues increased by 58.8 percent, but the incremental cost of operating this bigger university is considerable. Deferred maintenance on existing buildings already exceeds an estimated $1 billion, and the size of this infrastructure deficit, according to the university’s financial statements “places programs and initiatives at some risk.”
“Academic reorganization is very much in the air,” says the unnamed professor. “Administrators have been told that the university is thinking about invoking [emergency budget] articles 32 and 33, which entail program closures and academic staff layoffs.” In a few weeks, he will be losing his phone line, and his office has gone paperless, both measures in an attempt to avoid further support staff layoffs. “We are in a boom economy for solutions-driven research,” he says. “We are in a famine economy for arts and humanities and social sciences.” Samarasekera, he says, is “very much admired, and it is impossible to disagree with her vision. But she has lost the enabling vision she came here with. So much hope and promise.”
The Case for Samarasekera
n a few days, Samarasekera leaves for Ottawa to join eleven other university presidents in a meeting with Stephen Harper. Her chief of staff, executive officer, speechwriter, and a few other insiders converge around the large oval table in her office to go over the arrangements. It plays out like an episode of The West Wing, except the people here are more polite, and the foreign land they are visiting is Ottawa, its king a fellow Albertan.When the federal budget was unveiled in March, Samarasekera praised the government for modest increases to research funding. “When I look at the extent of restraint that the government has had to apply to manage a deficit, we are one of the only areas that has come out on top,” she told Nature magazine. “I declare these increases as absolutely a victory.” Student and faculty associations accused her of pandering, but she was partly right: while politicians might not appreciate the dangers of GDP-driven research, they get the basic point — that higher education and research matters more now than ever before. This didn’t happen by accident. “Obviously, the life of a university president is not an easy thing,” says Gurston Dacks, who served on the university’s board of governors when Samarasekera was selected as president. “And one of the reasons it’s not easy is that your biggest successes are invisible. How many of my colleagues know that she’s going to talk to the prime minister tomorrow? My sense is that she has increased the profile of the University of Alberta in Ottawa quite considerably, which can be invisible to rank-and-file faculty members.”
In a report on higher education in May, TD Economics predicted that “estimated additional public financial resources required [are] expected to rise from approximately $400 million in 2010 to $2.7 billion by 2016.” This sevenfold increase will be borne for the most part by the provinces, which are already in the early days of a once-in-a-generation health care crunch. “The biggest challenge for the universities is the inexorable rise of health care costs in this country, which is squeezing out investments in education,” says Samarasekera, who estimates that health care costs in most provinces will rise from 40 percent to 50 percent and beyond. “How do you get the right public policy, [and create] a consensus around the right public policy? How do you manage those very difficult, almost irreconcilable tensions? ” Canadians, she says, need to be “passionate about post-secondary education in the way they get passionate about health when they can’t get into a hospital during an emergency. That is our biggest challenge right now.”
Samarasekera believes the future of education will be about having a university that people can’t imagine themselves without. “We’re losing this notion of uplifting the whole people as a kind of grand idea for education,” she says. The future is experiential learning outside of the classrooms in the community; it’s deepening the process of lifelong learning; it’s interdisciplinary work that breaks open silos that limit innovation and access to knowledge. “We need to not just restructure and tinker at the edges, but massively transform how we are educating people,” she says. But to get this done, “it is actually going to cost us more per student, not less, and that is the paradox. At the very time when you want to invest more per student, governments are trying to educate more students for less money.”
In a way, universities sell themselves. You could wander around the University of Alberta and stay amazed and entertained for days. At the Centre for Mathematical Biology, for example, professors are using mathematical modelling to show that polar bear populations are at risk if ice-free periods in the Arctic continue to increase. Another team of biologists is studying orphan adoption in squirrels. And in business, a minor psychological discovery: people who are touched briefly on the shoulder by a woman are more inclined to take financial risks. Farther away, at the Mazankowski Alberta Heart Institute, doctors control heart catheter procedures with enormous magnets and a joystick, and use ultrasound imaging to remove blockages in arteries. And then there’s the National High Field Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Centre, which can examine the atomic structure of nearly any substance by creating a magnetic field 190,000 times greater than the earth’s, thus enabling research into the creation of personalized medicine based on metabolic signatures, early detection of cancer, quantum mechanics, “plus a lot of other stuff we can’t talk about.”
Think what universities might be capable of, given stable resources. In the meantime, Samarasekera and her peers at universities across the country face a massive set of challenges. With continued neglect, she predicts “a loss of the gains we have made in the past five years and, most important, a significant erosion in the undergraduate and graduate student experience; large classes; not enough teaching assistance; not enough courses.” She also worries about what she calls the worst-case scenario: “Our young people will emigrate to other countries in search of jobs that would be rewarding for them, at a time when we can barely afford to lose one person.” She pauses and makes her final pitch. “Demonstrate the value of education to the individual, therefore to the public, therefore to the government,” she says. “This is the university’s role, in our case, of uplifting the whole people, which is what we’ve done for the last 100 years. [This] is a promise we will realize in the future, and one we are still not doing as vividly and as vibrantly as we can.”
