UBC Reports | Vol. 49 | No. 9 | Sep.
4, 2003
Two senior UBC academics look for balance
By Cristina Calboreanu
The relationship between teaching and research in modern
Canadian universities is a complicated one.
While some analysts claim that the two successfully reinforce
each other for the benefit of students, others argue that,
in fact, research and teaching compete for prestige and resources.
Over the last decades, Canadian universities have invested
ever-larger amounts of financial and human resources in the
development of a strong research base. Currently, university
research in Canada represents direct investments estimated
at $6.8 billion annually and involves more than 100,000 faculty,
technicians, and students. Through its various funding bodies,
the federal government invests over $1.3 billion annually
in university research.
Meanwhile, funding for teaching and basic infrastructure
has been cut back by provincial governments. Issues such as
class sizes and the tenured faculty / student ratio are constantly
plaguing universities, and full-time enrolment is expected
to increase 20 to 30 per cent by 2011.
UBC Reports invited two senior UBC academics to discuss the
relationship between research and teaching.
Donald Brooks is a professor of pathology and laboratory
medicine and chemistry. An alumnus who joined UBC in 1974,
he was appointed Associate Vice-President, Research in July
2001. He plays a leading role in building UBC’s research
capacity and competitiveness by assisting faculty to take
full advantage of new funding initiatives and by promoting
and co-ordinating interdisciplinary research.
Allan Tupper a is a professor of political science. He was
appointed Associate Vice-President, Government Relations in
February 2002. His research interests are in the areas of
Canadian politics, public management and public policy, as
well as North American higher education, the Supreme Court
of Canada and Canadian provincial politics. He is the author,
with Tom Pocklington, of No Place to Learn: Why Universities
Aren’t Working (published by UBC Press), a poignant critique
of the structure and functioning of modern Canadian universities.
Teaching vs. research: what do you think is a university’s
primary function?
[Don Brooks] I think it depends on what kind of university
you’re talking about: are you talking about UBC, or are
you talking about a university? Universities are of various
sorts, there are some universities that are clearly focused
on undergraduate teaching, that don’t have a significant
graduate program; then you come to a place like UBC, research-intensive
in all of the faculties, across all the disciplines. We choose
to do research, we attract good faculty but we want people
who have a good research background as well as the potential
for strong teaching, so I don’t think UBC has one primary
function. I think we have the functions of teaching and doing
research, and I don’t think they are very different.
[Allan Tupper] I think universities are unique because
they are society’s principal institutions for the analysis
of ideas. No other institution in modern society is exclusively
dedicated to the analysis of ideas, and that, to me, is the
essence of the university — less so its functions. Many other
institutions can undertake functions, but none has that more
general obligation and duty and characteristic of being a
community of people dedicated to the larger ideas that shape
their society, generating them, in the sense of certain forms
of research, analyzing them, in the sense of reflective inquiry,
criticizing them. Everyone essentially argues there are three
principal roles of a university: teaching, research, and public
service, in all their dimensions. Of these, teaching is the
pre-eminent duty of the university — it is not possible or
desirable to try to generate a strong research base either
nationally or within a university without basing that upon
the strongest possible undergraduate teaching, which is foundational
to all forms of research.
How do you see the relationship between research and teaching?
[Don Brooks] I find them inextricably linked in many
ways. I went through Honours Physics myself here at UBC, and
I can remember physicists that taught us enlivening the lecture
by talking about the person they did their PhDs with, or famous
people they worked with, or famous stories in the physics
world. I wouldn’t necessarily describe them all as great
teachers, some of them were really quite boring and we would
have liked to send them to a little teaching school. But they
got me excited about physics, and at the end of the day, I
don’t remember particularly what the lectures were about,
but I certainly took away that kind of excitement, and that
wouldn’t have been there if those folks hadn’t done
research themselves. I know that some of our biggest courses
are taught by some of our best research people, and they get
fantastic reviews, because they can bring that background
to the classroom. Certainly we would like to have the best
research people be the best teachers; that would be an ideal
situation. I do think there are issues — and they are recognized
around the community — around delivering quality undergraduate
education to non-Honours students. You’re going to ask
me how to solve this — I don’t have the answer; however
I don’t think the answer is don’t do research, that’s
not acceptable socially or to the government, or to most of
the faculty.
[Allan Tupper] It all depends on what you mean by
research: if you define research in the classical sense of
what we call reflective inquiry – deep, disciplined thinking
about your subject and about how your subject relates to other
subjects and about the major questions in those fields, what
we know and don’t know – that form of research fundamentally
strengthens the teaching activities of the university, because
the earlier years of university must establish the foundations
and the major dimensions. If you mean teaching the particular
specialized research activities of modern university professors
as part of your curriculum, that’s where we part company
with a lot of people, because it might be interesting in the
short term, but it doesn’t establish the broader foundations
of learning. So in other words, the teaching and research
relationship is very multifaceted: it can be very powerfully
reinforcing, if you have a very expansive view of research.
It can be quite narrow and stale if you have a narrow definition
of research. Under certain circumstances it just becomes an
assertion in a big university that teaching and research reinforce
each other beneficially, when, in fact, there’s substantial
evidence by the very practices of the university that they
don’t reinforce each other, that they actually conflict.
While Ottawa’s investment in university research
has grown by 54 per cent since 1998, funding for teaching
and basic infrastructure has been cut back by provincial governments.
Canadian universities face a projected 20 to 30 per cent increase
in enrolment over the next 10 years. How will these growing
pressures affect the overall quality of teaching in Canadian
universities?
[Don Brooks] Provincial governments want us to train
more students, and they’re not telling us how to do that;
they are willing to let us be creative. But they’re not
giving us a lot more resources, so we’re not increasing
the numbers very much. I think there’s a fairly well
understood balance there. But I think there’s room for
us, as we get more resources, to increase the number of students
and increase the quality of the education they’re given.
We just have to pay more attention to it, and get more people
to pay more attention to it. If we are to increase enrolment,
we’re going to have to have more teachers and more facilities;
in that sense, it shouldn’t make a difference. But if
we have to increase enrolment without receiving the necessary
resources, then that’s going to pose a bigger challenge.
[Allan Tupper] My sense is that the federal government
is increasingly cognisant of the fact that universities are
very unique institutions with a highly developed set of interdependent
functions, and that the tremendous strengthening of the research
capacity, which now exceeds that of most other countries,
will be followed, over the next decade, by a much larger federal
presence in most of the other activities of the universities.
The provincial governments have pursued quite vigorous cost-containment
strategies in their educational, health, and social assistance
systems for more than a decade. I think that will begin to
change — the question is only how far have different institutions,
jurisdictions, fallen behind. Higher education is central
to an advanced society, and the provincial governments have
great roles in that — I think in the next 10 to 15 years
either they will aspire to a much larger role in rebuilding
the institutions in partnership with the federal government,
or else the federal government will, as I said earlier, do
it themselves. And there will be some very substantial pressures
on provincial governments that will lead them to act. So I’m
not particularly pessimistic on that front, actually. That
said, we will have to do things on our own — it’s not
exclusively a public policy question, there are certain things
that universities will have to do to deal with greater numbers
of students in more creative ways. You want to use these pressures
to be creative, not to simply rely on what you’ve done
before and say, we’ll just keep doing what we’ve
done before with more people. We’ll have to make some
structural adjustments. Universities are very creative, they’re
very adaptable, and I think the next decade and beyond will
really put that adaptability and creativity to the test.
[for Don Brooks] Canadian universities perform a third
of the country’s research and development. What makes
a university, as opposed to a specialized institute, an appropriate
environment for research activities?
One reason that we do research in universities is to train
researchers: almost all the places where research is done
that aren’t universities train no graduate students.
Besides, in a corporate environment, and even in government
institutes, it’s quite different, they just don’t
have the same mix and the kind of excitement; 5 o’clock,
most people go home. You come to UBC on the weekends, and
you find all kinds of labs full of faculty and students, so
I think there’s a very strong argument on the research
training side for universities doing research, as well as
other centres.
[for Allan Tupper] In your recent book [No Place to Learn],
you argue that “Teaching and research are generally in
conflict with each other. The mutual enrichment thesis is
an impediment to necessary university reform. ” How and
why do university teaching and research come into conflict?
I make no presumptions that university professors wilfully
place research in front of teaching. But research is very
time consuming and leads to an orientation towards one’s
professional colleagues, and not directly towards one’s
students — not in every instance, but in a general sense.
One other issue is the transformation of the professor from
a thinker to an expert, and it’s a big difference. An
expert knows a lot about something small, a thinker knows
or tries to know a lot about a lot of things, and how they
interconnect. We have to re-establish that everybody’s
duty around a university is to be a thinker, not simply an
expert, and that’s really where the teaching and research
come into conflict again, the question of the breadth and
depth of all of us in a modern university. Are we increasingly
experts at the expense of what people generally used to aspire
to be, a thinker? That balance needs to be re-struck.
[for Don Brooks] In the October 2002 issue of the University
Report Card, UBC was rated 19 (among 29 universities) in quality
of education. One UBC student was quoted as saying “Many
of the faculty fail to put any effort into teaching, which
I feel is what university is all about. Learning ahead of
research, teach the students well and we will come.”
How does the strong focus on research affect the amount of
time and effort university professors put into teaching?
I think it’s terrible to hear a quote like that, I really
don’t like to hear it at all. What do we do about it?
I don’t have the answer, but I think we do have to undergo
a process to look at the problem in a balanced manner, particularly
with respect to undergraduate students. I think the graduate
training is much different, people like to do it because graduate
students are close to them, being in the labs and that kind
of thing. If you ask most graduate students to comment on
the quality of their graduate education, they’re really
positive. And I think they are because we do have a good research
community, we do have good facilities and it’s an exciting
place in the research world. I think we do a good job there
and I think there are lots of examples where that excitement
gets rubbed off on the undergraduates, but it’s got to
be the undergraduate himself who is excited, or excitable.
[for Allan Tupper] A 1998 report commissioned by the Association
of Universities and Colleges of Canada concluded that “university
research is society’s most fertile environment for training
people and generating new ideas”: universities produce
knowledge and also equip individuals with the skills necessary
to put this knowledge to work. Why do you consider this model
flawed?
We fully understand that research is essential to a health
society, and not only to a healthy society, to a very strong
and vigorous economy. Again, the question is what we mean
by research, where it should be done and in what capacity.
Universities are distinguished from other research institutions
by the fact that they also must teach. Eighty to 90 per cent
of our students are undergraduate students; we do not doubt
for a second the fundamental importance of research, but we
should not forget the fundamental importance of our instructional
roles in the deepest sense as institutions. Universities are
evolutionary, and developmental in a classic sense: they change
all the time, they move into new areas, and so on; we have
to be constantly looking at the balance and the way they’re
adjusting. I think it’s time to re-examine where the
institutions are going.
UBC’s Strategic Research Plan states that “UBC’s
goal is to excel internationally in research and teaching,
and to be a leader in discovery and scholarship that is the
wellspring of scientific, technological, social, cultural,
and organizational innovation in the nation and the world.
” What measures should the university take to achieve
excellence in both research and teaching?
[Don Brooks] I have only been associated with executive
activities here for three years, but even over that period,
I now hear a lot more about the quality of teaching and the
concerns about the diluted classes and senior people not teaching
enough. There are some creative activities ongoing and we
could do more to enhance that side without it costing us more.
We are making a tremendous push to enhance our research success,
to hire strong research people. It’s getting a lot of
attention and we’re having a lot of success — we’re
ranked number two nationally in NSERC and SSHRC funding, number
three in CIHR in the last competition, and we’re number
one in CFI in terms of dollars raised, it really is working.
We are hiring people from all over the world. We don’t
yet have the international reputation we deserve, but we’ll
get it, slowly. The research side is actually going pretty
well. I don’t think we have yet brought the same energy
to bear on the teaching side — I think that’s something
we need to discuss more as a community. We can go out competitively
and hire more people if we are more successful at research
because research activities can fund your salary for five
years or more if you get a personal award. By this means we
can build up our total faculty numbers somewhat, and those
people are still supposed to teach, so that would help.
[Allan Tupper] There’s two or three that I think
really are required to move this forward. First of all, the
very great pressures for physical space in universities that
allows people to interact. We’ve all witnessed, in all
of our institutions over time, a steady whittling away of
common space where people actually interact together and can
do so in a reasonable way. You really know you’ve got
a good course if students are doing a lot of work on it outside
of the classroom. To do that, though, you have to have some
capacity — and I’m not talking about luxurious surroundings,
but you have to have good physical space. It’s a very
important thing, and one that has come back onto the agenda,
if you just look at a number of things we’re doing here.
The Barber Learning Centre for example, is a tremendous kind
of thing. And I think another thing we have to do is to talk
a lot more openly and freely about these sorts of questions
— there’s been a tendency to regard some of the questions
about how we conduct our activity as non-debatable, contentious,
or wrong, and so on. And I think we need to have throughout
our institutions a very wide range of debate about our internal
priorities — it’s not just what governments do, and
what society expects, it’s our capacity to respond. We
are autonomous, we have our own capacity to shape our destinies,
and we can’t forget that.
