Universities across Ontario are getting ready to compete for a new round of SuperBuild funding after the Progressive Conservative government announced a new cash infusion into the program.
SuperBuild is designed to fund infrastructure and educational projects using a mix of private and government money. Universities use the programme to fund the construction of new buildings on cash-strapped campuses.
The funding increase will try to free up space for 13,000 new post-secondary students in the province. The announcement was made at U of T’s Bahen Centre for Information Technology on the St. George campus.
“We will be putting in multiple projects, at least one for each of the three campuses,” said Sheldon Levy, U of T’s vice-president of government and institutional relations. “The university that was most in need of space is the U of T…we have a serious capital deficiency,” he added.
Levy said the SuperBuild system, which requires universities to propose projects for government approval and come up with a minimum of 30 per cent of the funding itself, is a good fit for U of T.
“We are in a good position. We’ve been in discussions with the government for almost a year on capital needs. When we agreed to take on the additional students [because of the double cohort], it was always conditional on getting additional support. We have been working on what those additional needs would be.”
Levy said the university will try to secure enough money to fund projects on all three campuses. “We will be working on the [project] lists… We know we can’t go in on everything.”
He said U of T is well-positioned to use SuperBuild money because the school combines several funding sources in its projects. “The opportunities that the university had…was that U of T was able to use the research strengths, the SuperBuild funds, and the endowments to put together large projects.”
U of T scooped up almost $59 million in SuperBuild money to fund the Bahen Centre, as well as the Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research now under construction, and the Leslie Dan Pharmacy building, now in the planning stages.
But Mohammed Hashim, university affairs commissioner on the Students’ Administrative Council at U of T, said SuperBuild comes with conditions the university should consider before applying for more money. “It’s selling out our curriculum,” Hashim said, citing the Communications, Culture and Information Technology programme at the Mississauga campus. Paid for with $30 million in SuperBuild funding, the programme is a partnership between U of T and Oakville’s Sheridan College. Hashim said the programme is funded in part by Motorola and Nokia, and the curriculum is based in part on the companies’ technologies.
“We’re giving up our academic freedom,” Hashim said, noting that “47 per cent of SuperBuild funding goes to U of T.”
But Ontario’s Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities, Dianne Cunningham, said SuperBuild is part of “the largest expansion of Ontario’s colleges and universities since the 1960s.”
The Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations is critical of the programme, saying it does not address the “ongoing issues that threaten to undermine the quality of university education in Ontario.”
