Vanier scholars

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.