Toronto, Thursday, November 7, 2013
CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY
Thank you, Harvey, for your kind introduction.
I’m pleased to be here bright and early this morning among so many colleagues.
I consider you colleagues having been a university professor, dean and president for nearly a half century myself. Like you, I have spent many wonderful, rewarding days consumed by thoughts of how people of all ages gain, expand and wield knowledge. So while I may have had a different kind of job for the past few years, I’ll always remain a university man at heart.
Several months ago, I had a long talk with Harvey, during which I indicated how much I wanted to be here with you at this conference. I’m a big fan of the council for two big reasons: first, it sponsors research that has consistently uncovered helpful findings to make Ontario’s institutions of higher education more accessible, of better quality and of greater accountability; and second, it hosts some of the most thought-provoking meetings and events found anywhere.
True to form, the council has hit on an appealing theme for this year’s conference. Going beyond the buzzwords sets an ideal tone for your discussions over the next two days. Buzzwords aren’t merely unimaginative; they cloud meaning, act as barriers to understanding, and delay or even prevent us from taking constructive action.
So in keeping with our theme, I promise I won’t be talking about game-changing paradigm shifts that we can use to move the goalposts and take higher education to the next level. Instead, the council encouraged me to kick off the conference by sharing with you what I think higher education will look like in the future.
Let me start by humbly declaring my absolute lack of absolute prescience. I don’t know exactly how higher education will evolve over the coming generation.
The mechanical world that Newton revealed to us centuries ago, and that inspired the ways of learning that we experienced when we were in school, is being replaced by our current digital world—which is changing the way everyone now lives and works, and therefore the way everyone learns.
As a result, the roles of teachers and students are losing their traditional meaning; learning activities are becoming more flexible, fluid, unpredictable and interactive; and emerging technologies and related applications are creating countless possible connections among all learners while giving vast numbers of new learners access to the best teachers from the best schools.
But these are just general directions, not clearly marked pathways. I can’t highlight for you every specific problem you’ll face, nor recommend to you with certainty all the precise answers you’ll need.
A character from the TV series The West Wing nicely expressed the mystery of it all. He said: “Education is the silver bullet. It’s everything. We don’t need little changes. We need gigantic revolutionary changes.
Competition for the best teachers should be fierce and schools should be palaces—incredibly expensive for governments yet absolutely free of charge for citizens. I just haven’t figured out how to do it all yet.”
A core truth emerges from this quip. We shouldn’t be looking to any single person to provide us with the answers. No one individual truly can. I’m not a soothsayer.
And I have an inherent distrust of anyone who thinks he or she has all the answers. Higher education is simply too complex for the best approaches to emerge from one person or even one group from within one country or even one region of the world.
And yet smart answers that make higher education a more enriching, rewarding and fulfilling experience for students are out there to be found.
The best way to discover them—I would suggest the only way—is by working across academic and professional disciplines and across regional and international borders to find, share, test and refine knowledge about higher education—what I have been calling the diplomacy of knowledge.
Thomas Jefferson’s brilliant metaphor of a burning candle is still, I think, the best way to illustrate the concept of the diplomacy of knowledge and its incredible power. The candle aflame symbolizes not only enlightenment, but also the transmission of learning from one person or group of people to another.
When you light your candle from the flame of mine, my light is not diminished. Just the opposite. The light from both our candles shines a more dazzling glow on all around us. In physics, it’s called candlepower.
History gives us vivid examples of this candlepower—of the precious value of working across disciplines and across borders. Consider Leonardo da Vinci in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. The Renaissance genius fused several disciplines of the arts with those of the sciences to reveal and interpret knowledge, and thereby advance human understanding.
Now consider Zheng He in the early 15th century. This explorer from the port city of Nanjing—which was a key stop on my recent state visit to China—used the intercontinental voyages of his fleets to share Chinese knowledge with peoples throughout the world.
His fleets journeyed to the far reaches of Africa many decades before Vasco de Gama left Portugal to explore points along the coast of that continent—and Zheng He had a lot further to go. Some scholars even reason that Zheng He’s fleets landed on the shores of the Americas many years before Columbus and circumnavigated the globe several decades ahead of Magellan.
Now consider Genghis Khan in the early 13th century—a seemingly unlikely purveyor of knowledge and enlightenment. And yet I learned a great deal about this Mongol leader in the lead-up and during my own recent visit to Mongolia.
The Mongol conquest of all the lands from the Pacific Ocean in the East to Vienna in the West saw Genghis Khan and his descendants share knowledge, thought and new devices—the stirrup, compass, gunpowder and printing press—with peoples across the vastness of Asia and into Western Europe.
We’re only now beginning to learn that many of Leonardo’s insights, and the age of discovery, invention and understanding he helped ignite, may have been sparked by Mongol and Chinese ingenuity. In essence, then, these were three very different men, from three very different backgrounds and cultures, who worked across disciplines and borders to propel some of human civilization’s greatest advances.
The success of Ontario’s colleges and universities—and the students in them—depends now and will even more in years to come on how willing they are to connect with institutions of higher learning and with various teaching and learning mediums around the world.
I’m a product of these very connections: my first two university experiences were abroad at two prestigious schools of higher education. If I have brought anything useful to higher education in my 27 years as a university president and five years as a dean of law, I believe it is a breadth of judgement and a curiosity to see things new and whole.
This approach to seeing the world and my place in it began when I did my first two degrees in the US and UK, even though I was quite firm in the knowledge that my destiny and home was Canada.
When I became a university dean, principal and president, I relied on this understanding to travel widely and strike alliances with many colleges and universities so that Canadian students can enjoy the same advantages that I had overseas, so that foreign students can enjoy them here in Canada, and so that professors from both sides could take part in research and teaching beyond the walls of their home schools.
And did that work end in my current role? No. My installation speech was entitled A Smart and Caring Nation: A Call to Service. One pillar of a smart and caring nation is learning and innovation. I’ve continued this learning and innovation work as a key part of the Governor General’s mandate.
For example, I’ve journeyed to 27 countries around the world, telling businesspeople, government officials, researchers, school administrators, teachers and students that we are enormously proud of Canada’s educational system; that we Canadians want to work, study and research together with the rest of the world; and that we want ever-increasing numbers of our people and theirs sharing and learning together across disciplinary and geographic borders.
I’ve been to Brazil to encourage our two countries to inspire men and women to overcome the language barrier that prevents our two peoples from working more closely together.
I’ve been to South Africa to urge men and women of that country to use our shared interest and expertise in scientific exploration to rekindle the whole relationship between our two nations.
I’ve been to Mexico to talk with businesspeople about sponsoring bilateral exchanges in education, sports and culture to forever smash the stereotypical images that Canadians and Mexicans still hold of each other.
I’ve been to Ghana to call on university executives, researchers and teachers to lead their country in reaching further afield to solve problems and stimulate new ideas and solutions.
And I was in China just two weeks ago where I challenged Chinese and Canadians to lead the world in working across borders and disciplines in education, science and innovation.
Now comes your part. Your task is to make good on the promises I’ve made in these and many other places around the world.
If you’re a senior executive with a university or college, your task is to reach out to other schools around the world and give your professors, researchers and students opportunities to teach, study and learn in environments other than their own—and in turn welcome students, researchers and professors into your school.
Fewer than eight out of 100 students studying in Canadian post-secondary institutions come from abroad. Surely, we can do much better than this figure when we know that for France the number is 16 and for Australia it is 23.
On the flip side, a recent Queen’s University study shows us that fewer than three in 100 Canadian undergraduates venture to other countries as part of their studies.
As Amit Chakma—the president and vice-chancellor of the University of Western Ontario who headed up the Advisory Panel on Canada’s International Education Strategy—said, that's a small fraction of the many who would like the experience of studying abroad but don't because of cost, difficulty in meeting degree requirements or lack of awareness about the opportunities.
If you’re a department head at a university or college, your tasks are threefold:
- first, to ensure you have a vibrant career-services office that excites students to seize the co-op and career opportunities that are out there waiting for them;
- second, to make sure your faculty teaches communication and collaboration as core competencies so that all students enjoy a greater ability to work closely with a variety of professionals in many countries; and
- third, to ensure we take full advantage of the latest advances in information and communications technologies, and completely put into practise the latest revelations and understanding about the processes and psychology of the mind and how it learns.
If you’re a teacher or researcher, your task is to travel widely physically and digitally, and make the kind of unorthodox connections that make you a better professional and lead to distinctive, meaningful learning experiences for your students.
Spark some creative, constructive chaos in your lives and the lives of your students, especially in those young people who see higher education primarily as a game to be played and won or a hurdle to be cleared before they can get on with what they truly want to do in life.
If you’re a government official involved in education, your task is to encourage and support intelligent experimentation within colleges and universities so that new learning ideas can be developed, tested and refined. Minds are like parachutes: they work best when open.
And as Oscar Wilde said: “An idea that isn’t a little bit dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.” So don’t be afraid of where new ideas can take students and teachers—especially when they take those ideas in directions you never anticipated.
Let me mention two of the most important systems changes in Ontario in the last six decades: the experiential or co-operative education program developed at the University of Waterloo; and the teaching of patient-centred case management carried out at McMaster, which is an approach that has been shown to save money, relieve pressure on the health system and improve patient care.
I’m surprised that these two Canadian experiments in higher education have received much traction outside Canada but much less here.
This conference is an ideal place for you to talk at length about intelligent experiments, delve deeply into new ideas, and identify and celebrate the champions of change in our cause of higher education. We have one here this morning: John Baker. I had the pleasure of knowing John when he was a co-op student at the University of Waterloo.
In fact, John started his company, Desire2Learn, during one of his co-op terms by putting a professor’s course online. By the time he graduated, he was employing another five or ten co-op students himself. And today, ten years later, while still housed in the Communitech Hub in downtown Kitchener, his company employs about 500.
John has shown me vividly that today’s students will challenge us to give them the learning methods and tools that suit them best, or they will, as in John’s case, create these new methods and tools of higher education themselves.
The tables have turned: the student is helping the educator rethink higher education and the role online networks and digital technologies play in satisfying the learning needs of students.
In this spirit, we should all remain learners even as we become leaders. Indeed, we must. As scholar Martin Palmer so wisely pointed out, “The secret to mastery in any field is to forever be a student.”
I salute you all for remaining learners; for your eagerness to rethink higher education; for your determination to move beyond the buzzwords and explore genuinely fresh thoughts; and above all for your visible willingness to work together here and more widely in the future—across borders and disciplines—to find the smart answers we all need to make higher education a more enriching, rewarding, fulfilling experience for our students.
Thank you.
