David Naylor
Dr. Catherine Hankins and Dr. David Naylor in conversation with Paul Wells: Maclean’s Live Replay
Two scientists on Canada’s COVID-19 Immunity Task Force joined Wells to discuss the progress in the fight against the coronavirus—and the dangers that lie ahead. Watch the full replay!
[UPDATED] Black History Month, and the Canadian at Lincoln’s deathbed
A few years back I came upon one of those historical footnotes that gets you thinking: after Abraham Lincoln was shot on April 14, 1865, as he lay dying in a boarding house across the street from the Ford Theater, one of the small group that watched over him was Dr. Anderson Abbott, Canada’s first black physician.
Lawyering up impedes progress
There are better ways to deal with an unresponsive administration than sit-ins, violence and lawsuits
Where you need to go in this town for a good idea
Science and technology minister Gary Goodyear was at the MaRS Discovery District in Toronto to fulfill a commitment the feds made in their most recent budget: he launched a review of Canada’s policies regarding business R&D. As David Akin points out in his Sun Media column today, the problem is simple enough: Canadian researchers are far better at producing new ideas than Canadian businesses are at implementing them. (Here’s a column I wrote in which John Manley expounds on similar themes.) Far too much effort has gone in recent years into fine-tuning (read “fiddling clumsily with”) the research that goes on in university laboratories. This review attempts to get things right: it looks at the very substantial federal aid on offer to businesses that want to engage in R&D, and asks why so little of that assistance is taken up and why it hasn’t produced a culture of constant innovation.
Where you need to go in Ottawa for a good idea
How to attract human capital and find a place for science students in industry
Metablog: Adding to Wells on Ivison on Naylor
Colleague Wells points us to what I agree is a very good piece by Ivison on David Naylor’s visit to Ottawa. Toward the end of his column, Ivison references a piece on the recession and higher education, written by Alex Usher and Ryan Dunn of the Educational Policy Institute.
A columnist writes about education and the knowledge economy
And it isn’t me! Or Jeff Simpson! No, it’s colleague John Ivison, who does a bang-up job of summarizing the conversation that ensued when UofT president David Naylor came to Ottawa last week, where he ran into freelance provocateur Alex Himelfarb. The topic was brains and money. Ivison’s column is worth your attention.
Naylor on the knowledge economy
David Naylor, the University of Toronto’s president, delivers a speech on research, innovation, and Canada’s business culture that’s eerily similar to a column I published last week. Drawing from some of the same sources I used, Naylor makes a few points that should simply become common currency among people who want to discuss how Canada can use ideas to improve its economic performance:
College presidents: gaining on their more highly paid university peers
The pay of college executives still trails that of universities, but they’re catching up
U of T wants fewer students
President says education will be improved by reducing undergrad enrolment on downtown campus
Update: Maybe David Naylor is a (relative) bargain
U of T says president’s house is included in compensation. That means the head of the largest university in Canada is paid less than several of his colleagues
Who is Canada’s most highly paid academic?
Surprise: Ontario’s salary leader isn’t a university president.