CERC

Paul Wells explains why Stephen Harper’s science announcement was great optics, lousy policy

As 9,000 scholars descend on Concordia University for Congress, the role of the social sciences and humanities is top of mind

Women aren’t the only ones facing discrimination

From the print edition, my column on the Canada Excellence Research Chairs, in which I acknowledge only in passing the concerns about how all the recipients are men. After three days of blanket coverage of that angle, I’m sure my column will seem hopelessly obtuse to many. But I wanted to use the space Maclean’s gave me this week simply to explain what the program is, and why it will have effects on several campuses that go well beyond the parachuting of some exotic hothouse flower into a cloistered perch. No, in every case that I looked at on Tuesday, the arriving CERC will be joined by colleagues in place and by new hires, new equipment, grad students and post-docs — 19 little colonies of well-funded, very ambitious talent on 19 13 campuses (Laval, Waterloo, UofT got two CERCs each; the University of Alberta got four). There’s room for criticism, but it seems to me that we should start from a basic understanding of this program’s goals and the effect it’s already having.

The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) has been one of the most persistent critics of the Harper government’s science and technology policy. It was CAUT president James Turk who got yelled at and kicked out of Gary Goodyear’s office last year while attempting to critique the then-latest federal budget. Here, the organization takes a stand against the Canada Excellence Research Chairs program, which funds 19 lead investigators from around the world, to the tune of $10 million each for a 7-year research project. Rather famously, the program named 19 men and no women for the CERC chairs.

Today on campuses across Canada, university officials and Conservative politicians will be announcing the first winners of the Canada Excellence Research Chairs competition. Sometimes referred to by academics as the “uber-chairs,” the CERCs seek to add an extra layer of, well, elitism (and believe me, I mean that in a good way) on top of the hundreds of federally-funded Canada Research Chairs who’ve already transformed Canadian research.

We should award our research dollars based on a school’s merit, not its reputation

I return from New Orleans, about which more later, to discover that there has been almost no coverage of the Prime Minister’s recent foray into the realm of the hyper-intellectual. (UPDATE: The Ottawa Citizen’s national editor will be cranky for weeks unless I point to Joanne Laucius’ typically elegant roundup.) I refer, of course, to recent announcements about the Canada Excellence Research Chairs and the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarships. These new initiatives by the Harper government are designed to add another layer of possibility to Canada’s universities — a top echelon, certainly not large in number, of global-class researchers and graduate scholars.