U of T is the undisputed leader among Canadian universities in many respects, reported U of T’s Vice-President of Government and Institutional Relations, Carolyn Tuohy last Thursday, but it is slipping in a few areas and still far behind in others.

Tuohy made her report on Thursday afternoon to the first session of Governing Council for the 2004-2005 academic year. It is Tuohy’s annual job to issue the “Performance Indicators for Governance” report which measures U of T against its own standards and against other universities across North America.

“These indicators are a key element of the Governing Council’s responsibility regarding accountability,” Tuohy said.

U of T consistently beats every other university in Canada at winning awards, publishing academic research, and raking in money.

Tuohy noted that U of T had taken more research awards than any other university in three major categories in the last few years: the Ontario Government Research Infrastructure Program (GRIP), the Canada Foundation for Innovation, and the Canada Research Chairs. In the Ontario GRIP awards, U of T took more than 40 percent of the available research grants.

“Among these highly prestigious awards, you can see that the University of Toronto, with about seven percent of Canadian faculty, does take a disproportionate number of awards,” said Tuohy. “It’s an impressive measure of the excellence of our faculty.”

Tuohy reported that U of T produced more journal articles in the past 5 years than any other public university; with private institutions added to the count, U of T came second only to Harvard.

It wasn’t all good news though.

Student-faculty ratios-the number of faculty available per student-ran much higher at U of T than at other schools.

“They are 35 percent greater at the University of Toronto than the mean for our peers. Student-faculty ratios was [on average] 22.5 to one among our peers. Ours is above 30 to one.”

Tuohy identified another worrisome trend, which was that the university’s national research yield-the number of grants it received divided by the number of faculty-had dropped throughout the last three years.

The performance indicators report will be used to identify changes that need to be made at the university, and in the more immediate term, are going to be used to make suggestions to the upcoming “Rae Report,” the study of the Ontario university system being carried out by former provincial premier Bob Rae.

Money continued to be a preoccupation for the university and its students.

“It is definitely the case that in Ontario, student funding lags far behind the rest of the funding,” said Tuohy. “Ontario is in last place in terms of per capita funding.”

The performance indicators report also included information on everything from administrative costs (U of T ranks among the lowest in the country, with admin costing only 3.6 percent of total operating costs), and the number of tenured professors working in Canada who hold at least one degree from U of T (1 in 6).