The Canada Research Chairs Program raises disturbing questions about the future of post-secondary education in Canada. It promises $900 million over five years to cash-starved universities — but it exacts a price in return.

Before discussing that price, we need to put the Canada Research Chairs Program in context. That context is one of the gradual restructuring of Canada's post-secondary institutions driven by government funding cuts and corporate desire to shape university research and teaching. The funding cuts have been dramatic. The federal government's cash contribution to post-secondary education has fallen this year by 34 per cent since 1992 — from $2.9 billion to $1.9 billion. As a share of the economy, this is the lowest level of cash investment in post-secondary education by Ottawa in more than 30 years.

Provincial spending on post-secondary education has dropped 14 per cent during the same period when measured on a constant dollar, per capita basis. Worse yet for universities, provincial operating grants to universities in 1999/ 2000, on a constant dollar and per capita basis, has fallen more than 25 per cent from what they were in 1992/93.

As well as less funding, provincial and federal cash have had more strings — targeting it to certain faculties or certain government priorities. Granting councils have increasingly introduced strategic programs and partnership arrangements that steer university research priorities to outside, often commercial, interests. The Canada Foundation for Innovation, with $1.8 billion in federal cash, requires researchers to find 60 cents from a "partner" for every 40 cents of public money — effectively giving "partners" veto power over what research gets done with public money.

There is also growing pressure for universities to narrow their focus — to emulate the corporate restructuring of the 1990s with an emphasis on "selective excellence." Cornell University President Emeritus Frank Rhodes glowingly describes this as "de-Harvardization" — seemingly oblivious to the interdisciplinary cross-fertilization that is vital to a healthy and intellectually stimulating university environment.

Finally, the academic profession itself is being pressed to restructure. Government funding preferences and administrative directives are breaking that link between teacher and researcher that defines the uniqueness of university academic practice.

Increasingly university administrators are turning over instructional responsibilities to faculty members who are hired to only teach — an underclass that is poorly paid and denied prerequisites necessary for normal academic life, such as academic freedom and a role in collegial governance.

Powerful forces are undermining university pay structures — pressing for academics' salaries to be based on market demand for each specialty. This is creating rifts in the profession and a pay structure that bears no relation to the importance of each specialty in the intellectual life of the university.

In this context, the $900 million Canada Research Chairs Program looks less benign. It is a powerful tool being used by the Canadian government to accelerate the restructuring of post-secondary education along the lines described above. Four effects of the program will be particularly pernicious:

The Matthew Effect — To Those Who Have, More Shall be Given

The federal government has decided to allocate the 2,000 chairs based on each university's share of money from Canada's three granting councils. This allocation formula means 12 universities get two-thirds of all chairs — leaving the remaining 60 or so universities to divide up the rest. Such gross inequality propels Canada in the direction of the American model of university education — with a handful of excellent giants at one end and a huge number of less than adequate institutions at the other.

A distinguishing characteristic of Canada's university system is the consistence of its quality, made possible in large part because it is a public system. While there are some exceptional universities, all Canadian universities afford students the opportunity of getting a good quality education.

The grossly inequitable distribution of the Canada Research Chairs helps undermine Canada's consistent quality and moves us toward the pear-shaped reality of our American counterparts.

Realigning Disciplinary Priorities

About 54 per cent of full-time Canadian academics are in the social sciences and humanities, just under 29 per cent are in the natural sciences and engineering, and 18 per cent are in health sciences. For some years, the federal government, at the behest of industry, has been bemoaning this reality. The Canada Research Chairs Program has been designed to change this disciplinary balance. Only 20 per cent of the chairs will be allocated to the social sciences and humanities, whereas 35 per cent will be given to health sciences, and 45 per cent will be allocated for natural sciences and engineering. This will begin to change the face of Canada's universities — despite the interests of students (the majority of whom have opted to study social sciences and humanities) and despite the interests of the faculty (the majority of whom have dedicated their teaching and research lives to social sciences and humanities).

The Stars & Drones

The Canada Research Chairs Program is also accelerating the trend to dividing faculty members into a small camp of "stars" to whom enormous resources will be dedicated and the remainder with whom the university will have to make due.

This is a major problem. All academics are committed to a meritocratic system — all having shown their intellectual prowess through a gruelling process of graduate study, followed by rigorous assessment required to receive an academic appointment, then further assessment for tenure after a probationary period unparalleled in any other profession. But a university achieves excellence only if the academic staff can be part of a scholarly community — a community fatally divided by consigning the majority to the category of necessary but under-resourced and underappreciated drones.

The federal government has made a conscious choice not to put $900 million into desperately needed core funding for universities that would help all faculty and students. Instead, they gave it all to a program that rewards a few and gives nothing to the rest.

As Nobel Laureate Torsten Wiesel, President Emeritus of the Center of Mind, Brain and Behavior at Rockefeller University recently noted: "No one seemed to understand that you can't create good scientists by gutting the universities and only funding the top end of research. You have to start from a solid base or the entire system will be flawed."

Undermining Governance & Autonomy

Academic governance and university autonomy are among the most jealously guarded attributes of the university. They are at the heart of what protects the quality and integrity of our institutions. Yet both are fundamentally compromised by the design of the Canada Research Chairs Program which gives an external government panel veto power over who is given a chair. This, then, is an external veto over all external chair appointments.

Under the program, the university is to use its normal internal hiring and appointment process to select nominees for chair positions. In almost all cases, the university's ability to hire any of its external nominees will be dependent on those individuals being awarded a chair. But that final decision does not rest within the university community: it rests with the Canada research chair steering committee. The program secretariat has set up a college of reviewers who will recommend to the steering committee whether or not a university's nominee should be granted a chair's position. The decision of the steering committee is final.

The federal government is not prepared to trust internal university decision-making processes. In its Canada Research Chairs: Questions and Answers, the government makes clear that not only will final decisions be made externally, they will not be a rubber stamp: "the program steering committee is fully prepared to have a high rejection rate if necessary, in order to ensure that the program supports only the highest calibre of award winners." So much for academic governance and university autonomy.

There Are Alternatives

The federal government could have designed the program in ways that avoided many of these problems. The inequitable distributional aspects of the program could have been lessened if chairs had been awarded based on the number of full-time faculty members in each of the three disciplinary areas and based on each university's share of faculty members in each area.

Regular university decision-making processes could have been trusted, rather than distrusted, for making final decisions about who should be given chairs. The federal government accepted the universities' strategic plans as decided by each university. They could have done the same for chairs.

Better yet, the federal government could have allocated the $900 million to help restore core funding for universities so that universities could decide priorities and initiatives for themselves.

But the federal government has made crystal clear to CAUT that they intended to have the very outcomes about which we complain.

They want to shift priorities away from social sciences and humanities toward the natural and health sciences and engineering. They want to increase the tiering of universities, with only a handful of full-fledged research universities.

They want to increase the differential among faculty members — with a small core of research stars and a larger group of workers who will increasingly bear a heavier teaching load.

And, they want to intrude on university autonomy to make universities more responsive to government and commercial directives.

When the program comes up for review at the end of three years, CAUT will document the impact the program has had on our universities. In the meantime, the best we can do is try to assure the greatest awareness possible about the nature of the program and its effects, and persistently assert faculty prerogatives in decision-making about the program at each university.

James L. Turk is the executive director of CAUT.