Université du Québec à Montréal Rector Claude Corbo writes to The Hill Times:
Firstly, limiting some universities to undergraduate teaching, without significant faculty involvement in research, would gradually divest them of their very nature as institutes of higher learning. Even undergraduate students need to be trained in the most recent findings, and they should be inspired by teachers who, through their own research activities, are at the frontiers of their fields.
Secondly, as not all disciplines and all fields of study are offered in every university, our university system is already specialized. Incidentally, some of the significant disparities in research funding to universities can be explained by the presence or absence of a faculty of medicine. Thus, with $133-million and $122-million respectively, the University of Guelph and the University of Waterloo ranked 14th and 15th in research funding for Canadian universities in 2008. However, the first 13 institutions all have medical schools.
Thirdly, no university can seriously claim to excel in every field. Academic excellence is not like wall-to-wall carpeting. We must fund the excellence of researchers and research teams wherever they are found (and not according to the established reputation of the institution).
Fourthly, there is a natural tendency to invest heavily in research areas with practical benefits, from medical engineering to pharmacology, aerospace, agriculture, etc. However, societies are faced with economic, social, political, cultural and ethical problems whose solutions will not be facilitated by ignorance resulting from a lack of research in the humanities and the social sciences.
Finally, the "big five" universities benefit not only from significant government support but also from philanthropic assistance disproportionate to that enjoyed by the average institution. This is well and good, because younger or smaller universities have nothing to gain, in the long-term, from the weakening of these major institutions.
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