There are some very strong opinions as to how closely corporations should be working with Universities. Some, like Nobel Laureate John Palanyi, argue that research at universities should be discovery driven and that corporations are too short sighted with their research goals.
Others, like Ginny Dybenko, argue that universities should have more specific goals in sight and that there are many economic benefits to both students and the community when universities and corporations work together.
UOIT was created with the intention of being the MIT of Canada. A university designed to work closely with the private sector to achieve specific goals. According to this insider, things aren't going according to plan. Here's an insider account on UOIT and his opinion on what the role of universities are:
The Role of the Universities
Since the 1980s and 1990s it has been recognized that universities, by directing their research into assisting the economic and social development of the regions which “feed" them can play a massive role in developing the fortunes of their surrounding regions (e.g. Berkley, Stanford and other California universities’ roles in the creation of Silicon Valley).
But, where do the Canadian universities stand? In general: “We’re not interested. Thanks for the money, but don’t expect anything in return – we know best about how to use it and want our professors to be able to focus on what they are personally interested in or curious about."
Because they do not share the same criteria for evaluating the value of research that Canadians and their governments might have, they avoid connecting their research to what the province or country needs and argue that funding should go to “what the professors are interested in.”
To show this difference, consider the case of an Ontario university which has the chance to hire a Nobel Prize winner in the field of etymology. Every University would jump at such a chance. Such a hiring gives universities an international profile and the other university professors bask in the reflected sun at the next international academic conference they attend. That is the universities’ criteria and their culture.
Now, suppose the government asks our Nobel Prize winner to look at bed bugs because they are infesting the GTA. The highly regarded researcher says: “No. I’m simply not interested in bed bugs, it is ant colonies which interest me.”
The new University of Ontario Institute of Technology, for example, was recently established in Oshawa, Ontario, to provide readily available expertise, personnel and research support to meet the coming challenges facing the automobile industry and to help ensure the long-term sustainability of the Durham Region Economy.
However, when the newly–recruited faculty of engineers first met with the GM executives, they responded by saying that none of their professors were interested in the fields of research that might assist the auto manufacturers – e.g. increasing fuel efficiency. The answer was simply: “Sorry, we can’t help you.”
These responses reflect some important underlying principles maintained by the universities which prevent them from being real contributors to Ontario’s future well being:
1. Their determination to base research proposals on things which interest them.
2. Their disconnection from, and lack of social responsibility towards, the regions and countries which fund them.
3. Their fixation on becoming research universities to gain international reputations which will give all the university's professors prestige.
4. Their fears of dirtying their hands by working with industry. The fears are that this relationship will erode their “academic integrity” (How?) and their “academic freedoms” (i.e. industry come to control their research to address the problems they face).Last but not least is the decreasing attention given to teaching university students given the obsession with research work.
This obsession may be reflected in how they use tuition and other student fees and associated government grants per student. Universities report their spending by functional area, one of which is defined as: “Teaching and Research”.
The research spending under this category is described as “non-sponsored research”. The suspicion one reaches is that the universities are using money from student fees and associated government teaching grants to pursue their own private, curiosity–based research priorities. Do the students and or their parents know that tuition fees (including the accompanying government grants) are being so extracted? Doe the minister know? How much could tuition fees drop if this suspicion proves to have some basis? Will the universities tell us?
As the quality of teaching decays in 500 member classes, where is the university's sense of social responsibility?
- written by a public servant and professor (the writer of this blog asked to remain anonymous).
Here is another university professor’s first-hand account on working together with private enterprise to achieve a goal.
In just more than six short years, the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT) has moved from a start-up university to one of the most research-intensive universities in Canada. This remarkable success was achieved by fostering a collaborative internal structure and focusing on a small number of research areas where UOIT has carved a niche. Most notably, UOIT has attracted six Canada Research Chairs and another five industrial research chairs.
During the 2008-2009 fiscal year, UOIT was awarded more than $8.1 million in research funding. Over 14 per cent of this was industry funding, whether they were contracts, collaborative research or student research projects. These industry contributions often lead to matching funding from federal and provincial programs. Taken together, approximately 30 per cent of research at UOIT can be said to be industry-related and the remaining 70 per cent is for ‘pure’ or curiosity-driven research.
As the Canada Research Chair in Health Informatics at UOIT, I lead Project Artemis, which grew from a research idea that originated in Australia and took root in Canada. Project Artemis is helping to make sense of the constant stream of data collected from critically ill premature babies so that doctors will be able to recognize the subtle changes that can reliably predict deterioration in condition.
While I was able to demonstrate some prototypes of the concepts, I had reached a point within my research where I needed a robust low-level, event-processing engine to do some of the work of analyzing the physiological data streams. I then started to talk with researchers from the IBM TJ Watson Research Center and they thought we could extend an event-stream processor they had been working on.
To date, Artemis has been highly successful. Our industry collaborative partner, IBM, has commercialized the Streams software (Infosphere Streams) in part due to our collaboration. Our health-care collaborators at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto have started leading-edge clinical research around condition onset predictors for nosocomial infection. Our students are engaged in real-world collaborations and are gaining hands-on skills and experience. We have the potential to reduce mortality rates with the technologies we are researching and to use these approaches to reduce health-care costs. And IBM recently recognized the success of Project Artemis by awarding the work with its international IBM 2009 Infosphere Innovation award.
Research completed within the context of academic freedom should aspire to be translatable beyond the walls of academia to do any or all of:
- Lead innovation within industry.
- Lead domain-specific innovation, such as health care.
- Grow the knowledge-based economy by training future generations and redeploying current generations in work involving innovation.
- Generate outcomes for the betterment of society, via education and the deployment of innovations.
- Create research opportunities for undergrads that have the potential to impact the local, provincial, national and international economies.
Canada Research Chair in Health Informatics
Associate professor, Faculty of Business and Information Technology/Faculty of Health Sciences
UOIT (University of Ontario Institute of Technology)
What do you think? Do corporations belong in the classroom?
