U of T interim president Frank Iacobucci delivered a keynote address to the Canadian Club of Toronto on Monday titled “Universities Today: No More Myths, Just the Facts.”
It wasn’t false advertising.
In his half-hour address to the Club in a banquet hall at the Royal York hotel, Iacobucci listed off the figures and statistics that represent the state of Canadian universities today. Iacobucci threw his support-and that of U of T-behind the recommendations made in the Rae Report, former premier Bob Rae’s recommendations to the provincial government on Ontario’s postsecondary system.
Iacobucci called Rae’s suggestions “thorough and comprehensive…and their recommendations are an essential first step to reinvestment in Ontario’s universities…we strongly urge the Ontario government to implement them as a whole.”
Then came the math lesson.
“We face enormous challenges at a university that currently enrolls some 67,000 students, as compared to 54,000 just over ten years ago,” Iacobucci said. “We will need an additional $180 million just to bring us up to the national average and to get student-to-faculty ratios back to where they were in the mid-1990s.”
Iacobucci said that the funding crisis in Ontario was primarily due to the growing population.
“In the early 1960s, eight per cent of all students participated in postsecondary education,” Iacobucci said. “That figure is now more than 40 per cent. The quality of education these students are receiving is vastly different from the one their parents received. And, I believe, overall it is not as good.” Iacobucci also warned against universities turning into degree granting mills that he said will eventually bring down the prestige and quality of a Canadian university degree.
“There should be more-much more-to going to University than simply getting in and getting out.”
Currently, Ontario is tenth out of the ten provinces in per student postsecondary funding, and to give an example of the dire need that Ontario universities are in, Iacobucci highlighted the increasing public support of universities in China, Germany, and the U.S., where university funding is rising. He also pointed to Alberta’s intention to establish a $3-billion-dollar endowment fund in that province to boost its under-funded postsecondary system.
Iacobucci said that, while on the surface U of T may seem like an extraordinarily rich school in the midst of a building boom, there are some major caveats.
“The government is providing about one-third less in operating funding per university student than it did a decade ago,” Iacobucci said. Therefore, “many students are studying in classes of 1,000 or more…and cannot expect that their professors will either recognize them, or know their names, or know them well enough to write a reference letter.”
Iacobucci said all the new construction on U of T campuses doesn’t necessarily mean that everything’s OK.
“There are two facts about the current building boom on our three campuses that need to be made clear,” Iacobucci said. “One: it is driven by an attempt to catch up to the increasing demand for university education in the province. And two: it is not without cost; in order to find the funds necessary to match and supplement government and private funding for these projects, the University of Toronto carries a half-billion-dollar debt, and an estimated $315 million in deferred maintenance.”
Iacobucci said that since U of T is “Canada’s leading research and graduate university, it has a special role and obligation in making the case for increased provincial funding.”
“If the University of Toronto is weakened as a centre of higher education,” Iacobucci said, “the entire system is weakened.”
Iacobucci said that Canadian students “do not deserve a higher education that is second or third best. Should it be the Canadian way to go for the bronze? With a thrust of substantial new investment, our universities will achieve a status worthy of a province and nation that should continue to be the envy of the world. I ask all of you for your support as together-we can go for the gold.”
