Notes for
Government Caucus Roundtable on Post-Secondary Education
9:00 am -- 11:45 am
Tuesday, August 21st, 2001
Robson Ball Room -- Mayfield Inn and Suites
Edmonton, Alberta
Patricia Clements, President
Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada
21 August, 2001D'abord, M. le Président, je voudrais, come albertaine, vous souhaiter le bienvenue a notre belle province -- à vous et à vos collegues. Et puis, comme présidente de la Fédération canadienne des sciences humaines et sociales, je voudrais vous remercier de nous avoir donné l'occasion de vous addresser ce matin sur ce sujet d'une si grande importance. The Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada would like to thank the Government Caucus both for creating this dialogue on Post-Secondary Education and for giving us the opportunity to present our views today. The Federation promotes teaching, research, and scholarship in the social sciences and humanities. It is the voice of the liberal arts in Canada.
My name is Patricia Clements, and as President of the Federation I am representing more than 24,000 researchers in 67 learned societies and 69 universities and colleges across Canada. I'd like to begin by introducing two colleagues: Dr Sally Rice, a Professor of Linguistics and Director of the Daguida Project, is working with the Cold Lake Nation to prevent the extinction of First Nations languages. Dr Baha Abu-Laban, Director of the Prairie Centre of the Metropolis Project, is working on best practices for the integration into Canadian society of immigrants and refugees. I begin my remarks by introducing these colleagues because their work illustrates some of the ways in which our disciplines contribute to Canadian society and culture.
The Humanities and Social Sciences Federation believes that there are major issues to be addressed in the management of Canada's systems of post-secondary education and research. These have to do with the framing of innovation policy, the funding of research, the education of Canadians.
Canadian innovation policy to date has focused almost exclusively on a small subset of the sciences, to which it has provided outstanding support and in which it has done a great deal of good. But at the same time, narrowly focused research support has divided our campuses and created a class system among the disciplines. Money has poured into targeted areas; it has drained out of others. To the extent that the Vice-President Academic of the University of Alberta told me a few months ago that for him the problem was finding a way to ensure survival of the whole system. One knock-on impact of narrowly focused research support is, as the President of the AUCC [Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada] has said, that it has forced drastic cuts into the teaching budgets.
More than half of Canadian university students work in the many areas of the social sciences and humanities. More than half. But their needs are marginal to current policy, even though that policy is centrally preoccupied with the training of highly qualified personnel.
Can we afford to marginalize these disciplines? Certainly not. For these reasons:
- Because graduates of these programs provide the ideas, the knowledge, and the intellectual labour that runs many sides of our economy and society, and they are more necessary, rather than less, in the new knowledge economy.
- Because innovation, discovery, and creativity are increasingly understood to emerge from the interplay of diverse perspectives. We can't afford to leave whole territories of knowledge and brain power out of the innovation chain or to split technological research away from its economic and social impacts, which is human science research.
- And because the issues social science and humanities research deals with do not go away only because we marginalize them in our policies. On the contrary, the new economy, the new technologies, the globalised culture -- all aspects of major social and cultural transition -- intensify the need for human, social, and cultural research of high quality.
And that is not even to mention the direct link between education and quality of life, between knowing about the world and having a rich life in it - not even to mention, that is, that education is not only for the economy, it is also for the people.
We are approaching a critical moment in Canadian universities. We are, to quote the President of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, about to hit the wall. Fifty-five percent of Canadian university researchers are in the social sciences and humanities, but only about twelve percent of the research budget. The Council is at present unable to meet current needs. But even more serious is the next chapter in the emerging demographic drama, in which a mass exodus from faculty positions coincides both with projected substantial enrolment increases and with the fact that our needs for PhD's in Canada will exceed our production.
The developing situation, Mr Chairman, makes me want to quote Shakespeare: "How will the world be peopled?" Or, to put the matter more bureaucratically, Where will the researchers and professors come from? SSHRC is at present able to fund only 5% of graduate students for its disciplines even though these disciplines represent the greatest looming need in the system.
We need to strike a balance when it comes to innovation policy in Canada. The Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada urgently recommends that the new White Paper on Innovation specifically address these issues of the social sciences and humanities, and that it will treat as matters of priority
- the budget of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council;
- the request of the universities for the funding of indirect costs of research, as a first step towards dealing with the crisis in operating budgets; and
- the looming issue of recruitment and retention of new professors, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, where more than half of Canadian undergraduates choose to study.
We strongly urge the Government of Canada to make a very substantial investment in human capital, to offset the decades of decline in post-secondary education in Canada. We believe that the current lack of balance in innovation and funding policy is creating serious problems for the present and laying landmines for the future of Canadian universities. Like the Vice-Presidents Academic of our universities, we are all now facing the problem of how to ensure the survival of the whole system.
