Meric Gertler, president of the University of Toronto, named leveraging location, strengthening international partnerships, and reinventing undergraduate education as priorities for the university’s future at last week’s Business Board meeting.

Gertler initially identified these three priorities last year when he became president and is opening the priorities for discussion to the general population. 

The university in the city

Gertler, an urban expert, plans to capitalize upon the university’s location in Toronto to enhance its reputation as a city-builder. “The better we make Toronto, the easier it is for us to attract and retain talent,” he said during his presentation to the board. 

In October, a Varsity investigation found that a dispute between researchers could damage the university’s involvement in the international Centre for Urban Science and Progress partnership.

Gertler also said he wants to leverage the university’s location to provide opportunities for students and faculty. “There are tremendous research opportunities here in the city region around us… and tremendous opportunities that we can leverage for the better of students’ learning experience,” he said, adding that he also intends to work with the city-region to identify areas of research for faculty members.

International partnerships

Gertler acknowledged the global scale of many current complex problems, thereby making it important to enhance the university’s ability to meet global challenges through mutually beneficial relationships with global partners. 

U of T hosts around 10,000 international students from over 150 countries.

He also cited the need to encourage more students to pursue inbound and outbound international opportunities.

“Despite the fact that we live in such a globalized city-region, it is striking how a relatively small proportion of our students take advantage of outbound international opportunities,” he said about the current proportion of students enrolled in the university going overseas. 

He added that the university is working towards removing the obstacles to students trying to pursue international opportunities.

Gertler expressed his desire to come up with creative means to improve the international presence of the university. He acknowledged that building overseas campuses, as some other universities have done, is not a viable option for U of T.

Undergraduate education

In order to reinvent undergraduate education, Gertler wants to take advantage of the university’s strengths in research and international partnerships.

“We’re learning through inverted and hybrid classroom models that these tools in fact can help us to completely rethink how we use the time in the classroom and what kind of ways we can make that experience more rewarding for students and faculty,” Gertler said.