“Top five” universities spark anger with call for bigger share of funding
[2009 08 28]The presidents of Canada’s so-called “top five” universities have sparked anger across the country with their call for a bigger piece of the already small post-secondary education funding pie.
The leaders of the universities of Toronto, British Columbia, Alberta and Montreal, and of McGill University say a new national strategy for post-secondary education should direct more of the available money for research to their institutions.
Their universities should get the resources to focus more on research and graduate student education, they say, and the others should focus on undergraduate teaching.
The proposal has been widely criticized as an elitist “not so subtle cash-grab,” and an attempt to create an “intellectual caste system” that would stifle competition and innovation and diminish the ability of smaller institutions to attract and retain talent.
CAUT executive director James Turk points out that another disturbing implication of their proposal is that undergraduate teaching is somehow a lesser activity, to be carried out in institutions without a serious focus on scholarly work and research.
But the biggest issue with their proposal, he says, is what it does not call for.
“Most institutions, and students and their families, understand that the fundamental crisis facing all of Canada’s universities and colleges today is chronic under-funding,” says Turk.
“This seems to have been lost on these presidents, who, instead of demanding the federal government create a bigger pie by significantly increasing investment in post-secondary education and academic research as a whole, say they want a bigger slice of the existing pie for themselves, at everyone else’s expense,” he added.
Given the real crisis, Turk says, the presidents of all universities should be banding together to demand more federal funding for post-secondary education as a whole.
“It’s unfortunate that the “top five” have instead chosen such an insular, short-sighted and potentially destructive approach,” he said.
On a related note, CAUT is calling on the federal government’s 2010 budget to increase funding for the three granting councils and for better accessibility to post-secondary education.
In its submission ahead of the Finance Committee’s pre-budget consultations, CAUT has called for an investment of $1 billion over the next two years for the three granting councils to support untargeted, peer-reviewed basic research.
“The government’s mandated ‘strategic review’ of the granting councils led to nearly $148 million in funding cuts for basic research, and we can’t overstate the devastating impact this is having,” said CAUT president Penni Stewart. “The contrast between what’s happened here and what’s happened in the U.S. is stark, and, as a result we have lost and will continue to lose top researchers unless the federal government gets it right in the next budget.”
Also included in CAUT’s brief is a call for the government to increase the cash transfers for post-secondary education by $400 million in the next budget, and over the next three years to raise and maintain the transfer at 0.5 per cent of GDP.
In light of the current economic situation, CAUT also stresses the need for an expansion of the Canada Student Grant Program to provide additional assistance for students from low-income families and the provision of full financial assistance for all qualified Aboriginal students.
CAUT continues to call for a Post-Secondary Education Act that outlines clear responsibilities and expectations for the federal and provincial/territorial governments, establishes pan-Canadian guidelines and principles, enacts enforcement mechanisms and determines long-term and stable funding formulae.
CAUT’s brief to the committee is available on line here.
[taken from the CAUT newswire]