Zombies, Higher Education and Research: Increasing University Relevance and Making Research Count

I really enjoyed reading Naylor’s address to the Empire Club of Canada and thought that I would share some of the highlights of this address that are relevant to us as participants in this course, as members of the university and as future graduates of the iSchool:

•  On Page 11, Naylor distinguishes between unfettered research funding and fettered research funding which is funding tied to specific partnership and programs.  While the following data was gathered only for NSERC funding for UofT from 1983 to present, I think it can also be applied to the SSHRC funding:  about $230 million of federal funding has been reassigned from unfettered funding to fettered funding over the past 5 years.  According to Naylor, this has happened nationally as well, but, and to me this is a huge but, the innovation and competitiveness indicators didn’t improve.  Naylor states, “In fact, the real problem was never the type of research that universities were doing. Wrong diagnosis; wrong prescription. It was business related R&D spending that lagged” (11).

•  Applied research is always great, but Naylor also addresses “why great basic, disruptive, fundamental research matters” (13), and I like his third argument the best.  Naylor states, “The third and final reason why serious fundamental research matters is that the distinction between fundamental and applied research is somewhat misleading.   As Nobel laureate Sir George Porter famously pointed out, there is applied research and yet-to-be applied research” (12)  He provides examples of researchers who began researching one thing but ended up finding awesome things that weren’t within the scope of their study, and their research led to advances across many disciplines. At least once per class, it is mentioned that  good research crosses disciplines and boundaries, and the same is said about successful blogs.  Naylor makes the same argument:  “One needs excellence in research and scholarship across disciplines because no one can predict how disciplines will collide.  So much of the best innovation is convergent” (13)

• There are a few more points that I would have liked to address, but I am already way over the word limit.  But quickly, last week we discussed interpreting data and how quantitative approaches to interpretation can be used as a blunt instrument, and how this misuse should propel readers to question who is speaking, who conducted the research, who was interviewed as part of the research process; anyhoo, the information provided on page 15, 16 and 17 of Naylor’s address deals with a lot of the themes and issues we have dealt with in this course.  Naylor discusses the different kinds of data that are collected for university rankings, how the different factors are measured and who was interviewed to gather the stats. 

http://www.president.utoronto.ca/speeches/zombie-vs-zombies