University administrator shakes stick at researchers
In Saturday’s Globe and Mail, University of Calgary President and Vice-Chancellor Harvey Weingarten comes to the defense of the government’s spending priorities. He accosts researchers for neglecting to think about the infrastructure costs associated with research – “they just assume services will be provided” – and defends the decision to pour money into infrastructure instead of basic research since, “it is hard to conduct cutting-edge research in a tent or when one has to spread plastic sheeting over expensive equipment when it rains”.
Ironically, the most useful point of his piece is to point out that there are hidden costs to research that are borne by the institutions that house scientists, and that funding agencies need to balance funding between paying for those costs and providing direct funds to researchers. He acknowledges the tension between individual researchers and university administrators that flows from competition for limited resources (though I know of no researchers who argue that infrastructure shouldn’t be funded), and suggests “the question is not who is right, but whether Canada has achieved the right balance between direct and indirect funding”. Of course, he then immediately argues that university administrators are right and that they should be getting a larger share of the funding.
Not satisfied with poking his researchers with this stick, Weingarten also argues in favour of targeting more research funding in areas of priority chosen by government. His main argument seems to be that since the US spends more on R&D than Canada, the only way to compete is to target research funding to “national priorities that are vital to Canada’s success”. His point isn’t clear here – is he suggesting that we avoid competing with Americans by focusing on specifically Canadian priorities? Our R&D is supposed to focus on oil sands and the lumber industry? Arctic ecology and beaver biology? What about the R&D that led to the Blackberry? Insulin? Weingarten’s vision is a throwback to protectionist nationalism from a pre-globalized age. Canadian researchers are, and should be, full participants in a global science project, and the fact that the US commits more actual dollars to research doesn’t preclude individual researchers here from making major contributions.
Scientists are generally pan-national. When scientists start to see themselves as part of a strictly national science community, we will have ceded our qualification as a world-class research community. As Weingarten himself points out, “researchers, especially the stars, are highly mobile. They will go wherever they see the best opportunities, resources and facilities for their research”. But more than that, researchers value the independence to pursue the prioirities they have identified as vital, and which success and peer-review have judged as meritorious. Witness the influx of stem-cell researchers from the US to Canada during the last administration. It wasn’t the lack of funding per se that drove them here, it was the lack of funding for the work they wanted to do. There is no way that we will be able to, as Weingarten suggests, retain our best and brightest by increasing preferential targeted research in areas specifically in Canada’s national interest. Instead, we will simply create a fleet of technicians who can tinker with the tools to help us hew wood and draw water, and we will no longer have a place at the table of international science. This vision is a step backward for Canadian research.
DontLeaveCanadaBehind has a nice bit on this also.
