Commentary

The University of the Future

President Harvey Weingarten
Calgary Chamber of Commerce Talk
May 9, 2006

In 1966, after almost 100 years of community advocacy, an autonomous university opened in the northwest quadrant of the city of Calgary. Proudly named the "University of Calgary", it started out with about 4,000 students, 350 faculty and staff, and 12 buildings on a campus that by all accounts was desolate and relatively isolated.

This year we celebrate the 40thanniversary of the U of C. In Canada, the peer institutions with which the U of C is compared have been around for 100, 150 or even 200 years. Calgary's University has grown at a remarkable rate and now has 28,000 students, 5,000 faculty and staff and over 115 buildings on 8 sites including a green, tree-strewn campus just a stone's throw from the centre of Calgary.

Now some might consider it cheeky to give a talk on where the University of Calgary will be 40 years from now. But I do not. It is not in the spirit of Calgary to dwell in the past or to be self-satisfied with the present. Calgary prides itself on thinking that is forward-looking, progressive, and bold. The same is true for the University in Calgary.

I have no doubt that, given the trajectory we are on, we will have more than caught up to the likes of U of T or UBC over our next 40 years. But, if this is all we do it will not be satisfying. To be true to our namesake city, the U of C is obliged to strive to be a leader in higher education. Leadership at a university means thinking about how the world should be, what our students need, and what we must do to serve our students and public better. More of the same, even if we are doing the same better, is not good enough.

I like to think that the U of C should be a model for what a progressive, contemporary public University should look like – if you will, a prototype of the University of the Future. If we get this right – and everything I know about Calgary and the University gives me confidence that we will get it right – we will leapfrog over where other universities are now, and they will strive to emulate what we are doing. I suggest to you that this process has already begun.

Why can I speak with such confidence about the future of the U of C? Simple. I just look around this room – at the friends, supporters, employees and contributors to the U of C – and I look at the university this community has built in just 40 years and it is easy for me to be optimistic about the heights we will reach in the next 40 years – no matter how high we set the bar.

So don't expect the standard presidential stump speech from me today. Today's talk is about what it will take to become an international leader in higher education.

What does this successful University of the Future look like?

Some of the elements you know.

The successful universities of the future:

1. Will continue to be communities of scholars passionately committed to the highest levels of scholarship and discovery.
2. Will continue to nurture engaged students learning with talented professors.
3. Will continue to embrace learning technology and use it effectively.
4. Will continue to compete successfully for the brightest faculty, students and staff.

But, in my opinion, successful universities in the future will also be those that are guided by three core values that will be the basis for their success and that will differentiate them from universities that will be left behind because they are wedded to the past:

What are these values? I suggest three. Successful universities in the future will be those that:

1. Are thoroughly enmeshed with their communities
2. Are student focused, and,
3. Are socially responsive and progressive

Let's talk about these values.

Enmeshed with their communities.

The freshman dormitories at Yale provide a wonderful example of what universities used to strive for. The freshman dorms are beautiful, gothic, ivy covered. They are arranged around a beautiful quadrangle green. The doors of the dorms all open into the green; they present their backs to the community. Surrounding the dorms is a substantial wrought iron fence that physically separates the university from its city.

This is the town-gown relationship that was the ideal for many universities. The university focused inward and valued a cloistered environment distanced from the concerns and issues of society. This is not contemporary. Successful universities in the future will be those that are seen to be at one with their communities.

What are the elements of a university enmeshed with its community?

First, the community uses the university campus as a community resource. Like the over 1 million visitors to the Olympic Oval and other sport facilities on campus, or the other hundreds of thousands who attend our concert halls, museums, and health facilities. A great university campus is the intellectual and cultural heart of a city that aspires to greatness.

Second, a university enmeshed with its community is understood to be a source of solutions to community problems, whether these are issues of economics, urban design, homelessness, health care, environment, governance, social services, business, engineering or arts & culture. Eldridge Cleaver once said: "If you're not part of the solution then you are part of the problem". Successful universities in the future are those that provide solutions to community issues.

Third, universities are enmeshed with their communities by the graduates they contribute to society. As of next month, we will have delivered over 120,000 graduates to our communities – to over 120 countries around the world, 70% of them continuing to call Calgary home. They are the caregivers, teachers, business leaders, scientists, health care providers, artists & performers, soccer parents, politicians, leaders of tomorrow and yes, even a Prime Minister, that help make this city, province, country and world better.

Finally, but not least, a university enmeshed with its community has a significant physical presence in the heart of the community. So, as we announced at the Chamber in February 2004, we intend to build a downtown Urban Campus.

An Urban Campus gives us more space and allows us to take more students. But the value of a physical presence in the community goes far beyond these quantitative outcomes.

The Urban Campus allows us to recruit students who, typically, would not be inclined to attend university. These are students who, ironically, get the greatest value from a university education but if we want them, we have to go to them – they cannot be expected to come to us.

The Urban Campus we are building is a progressive partnership with other educational institutions including the Calgary Board of Education, Athabasca University, Bow Valley College, SAIT Polytechnic, and the University of Lethbridge. This is the kind of seamless, collaborative relationship the community expects of universities that are focused on the community and not themselves.

The Urban Campus provides a base that allows us to transform our undergraduate curriculum to make it more experientially based, progressive, beneficial and relevant. Don't believe me – listen to our students. I wish you could have all been with me when I met with the Nursing, Social Work, Dance and Environmental Design students who are studying in a variety of facilities in downtown Calgary. You would have heard them say that the courses they had downtown were some of the best academic experiences they have had. Their work downtown changed their perspectives and, in some cases, changed their views about what they wanted to do with the rest of their lives.

The Urban Campus project has engaged over 200 community partners planning the Campus and thinking about how it can anchor the transformation of the East Village. The foundation partners in the Urban Campus Partnership have signed a Memorandum of Understanding committing themselves to work together to make the Urban Campus a reality. Yesterday, we took another giant step forward when the City of Calgary passed a resolution directing administration to begin discussions with the partners to identify and secure the location of the lands for the downtown campus.

If you want a sense of what how universities in the future will be enmeshed with their communities you will find no better example than the community-based collaborative partnership that has come together around the Urban Campus. There is not much left to do to make this real. Let's make it happen.

Student focused.

OK. Let's move on to the second value of a successful university of the future – student focus.

Here is another image for you. Let's move away from Yale. Let's go to Oxford University – your quintessential stereotype of a university. Beautiful buildings, high tables, quadrangles and greens all over the city, people in academic robes punting down the Thames. One of the colleges at Oxford is called All Souls College. It is an interesting place; All Souls has faculty members but no students. Some have opined that this makes All Souls the ideal college.

I disagree. Students are the raison d'etre of universities. Everything we do at universities has to be understood in the context of the impact it will have on students. As Donald Kennedy, former president of Stanford University wrote in his book Academic Duty:

"The commanding feature of this process of redesigning the university will be the reclamation of its central mission…Its improvement must entail putting students and their needs first. Once that is done, the rest falls into place…Placing students first is a simple design principle, but it has great power."

So, what does it mean to put students first? Here are some examples from the U of C.

It means that when our students tell us that they learn as much outside of the classroom as they do in it, then we reorganize how we deliver student services to serve them better.

It means that when our students tell us that their world is digital, computer and web-based then we make a Digital Library our top capital priority and our campus completely wireless.

It means that when our students tell us that experiencing their learning is a critical aspect of an undergraduate education then we develop scores of new experiential learning opportunities, including the opportunity for hundreds of students to be directly and personally engaged in research with individual faculty members.

It means that when our students tell us that interactions with faculty and peers are a major contributor to the quality of their university experience, then we create 40 new spaces on campus for students to connect, interact, debate and discuss.

It means that when our students tell us that the cost of education is rising too quickly, we allocate millions of additional dollars to assist students who need financial help.

And, perhaps most fundamentally, it means that when our students tell us that they have ideas about how to improve the quality of their education, then we do what no other university in Canada does – we give our students money for them to spend, without any interference from us, on initiatives that in their view will improve the quality of their experience. So far, we have given our students $4M. As you can see, for us, putting students first goes well beyond rhetoric.

Let me state the obvious. We cannot predict what technology will be available over the next 40 years – 15 years ago, no one predicted the impact of the internet. We cannot predict where society will be in 40 years or what challenges the university and its students will face. But, whatever lies ahead, I predict that the universities that are seen to be successful and cutting edge in the future will be those that live by the value of putting their students and their needs uppermost in their minds.

Fashion a better world and quality of life/Compass for society.

Let's move onto the third value – being socially responsive and progressive.

The image I want you to have now is to go back to a conversation that happened in the White House right after World War II between someone named Vannevar Bush, who was Franklin Roosevelt's Scientific Advisor, and the American president.

Vannevar Bush reminded Roosevelt that the contribution of American scientists during the war was a major reason the USA and its Allies had come out on the winning side. Bush proposed the following social contract between universities, government, and the public: Universities – not industry or government labs – would become the major place for research, the federal government would support that research but would keep its hands off direction of that research, and the public would derive good simply from the indirect but inevitable consequences of all this research activity.

This model, especially the idea that universities should be funded, but not directed, by government or the public, was accepted by the Americans and led to the creation of the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

This social contract also influenced the relationship that many other countries, including Canada, developed between universities, government and the public.

I suggest to you that the public, governments and, yes, even our students, are looking increasingly for a much more direct and immediate benefit from their investments in universities than society was willing to tolerate in the past.

Calls for universities to be more accountable and relevant will not go away. Calls for a more obvious, direct and rapid link between what we do at our universities and public and private good will not dissipate. These calls, though, represent an interesting challenge for universities. One of the other values many people cherish in their universities is for them to be autonomous and to promote broad, deep, long-term thinking and scholarship that is not beholding to societal norms or current practices. So, I predict that the most successful universities in the future will be those that successfully balance the requirement for direct societal benefit and relevance with the more traditional indirect role of societal critics and mirrors.

People will debate where this balance point lies. But this I know for sure. Re-balancing is necessary and it will require changes in the way universities think and work.

Let me give you two examples of where the U of C is changing how it does things to make sure that we are socially responsible and progressive.

The Institute for Sustainable Energy, Environment and Economy is a pan-university Institute that breaks down the silos between disciplines and engages scientists, engineers, policy makers, economists, environmental designers, lawyers, business people – from academia, industry, government, NGO's – in mission-oriented, high level research, education and analysis that will allow us to unlock significant energy reserves in an environmentally responsible manner. You will not find many Institutes of this scope and character on a university campus and this Institute is already being touted as a model for the way universities should organize themselves to fashion solutions to complex societally-relevant problems.

Second, a university is socially progressive when it acts as a social compass and does things in ways that model how the rest of society should act. You may have read in the most recent Avenue Magazine about several buildings in Alberta that are bring constructed to meet a gold standard for environmental responsibility and sustainability. What you didn't read in that article is that the Child Development Centre we are building on our campus is expected to be the first building in Canada to meet the higher platinum environmental standard and one of the first such buildings on any university campus in North America.

Bring it all home.

Most of you, in one way or another, are connected to the University of Calgary. So, you will pardon me if I make one request before we head back to work. If you believe that we are on the right track, that what we are doing is right for Calgary and right for students, then I invite you to share these thoughts about the University of the Future with your colleagues and friends. It is, after all, your University. As community leaders, you have a critical role to play in positioning the U of C for the next 40 years and I want you to know that I do not take that for granted.

On significant birthdays, the U of C does what we would all do – we reflect on where we have come from, what we have accomplished and where we are going. Significant birthdays are a curious blend of reminiscing and nostalgia about the past and excitement and enthusiasm about the future.

In Alberta it has always been thus – fondly remembering the past but optimistically embracing the future. I am reminded that when the Province of Alberta was established in 1905, Prime Minister Laurier said the following about this province:

"I see everywhere hope. I see everywhere calm resolution, courage, enthusiasm to face all difficulties, to settle all problems. We…do not want, that any individual should forget the land of their origin or their ancestors. Let them look to the past; let them also look to the future; let them look to the land of their ancestors, but let them look to the land of their children."

The U of C is a living and growing institution that remembers and celebrates its past but that looks forward to serve the "land of our children". We expect to be leaders. We have a high tolerance for risk. We embrace change.

To those who doggedly defend tradition, we reply:

That was then. This is NOW.

Thank you for listening.