Faced with chronic “underfunding” which particularly affects the research community, the University of Montreal (UdeM) says it fears “losing brains”, and above all having more and more difficulty recruiting “high caliber” researchers.
The duty spoke for an hour on Wednesday with the rector of UdeM, Daniel Jutras, in the context of a philanthropic campaign recently launched by the University in the hope of raising $1 billion. Already, as of Wednesday, 600 million had been collected.
“We want to affirm that we are not the dunces of philanthropy in Canada and North America,” says Mr. Jutras, who notes a glaring gap between the capacity of French-speaking universities and that of English-speaking universities — in Quebec as well as in elsewhere in the country, not to mention the United States — to obtain donations from former students and various organizations. This is why McGill University has an endowment fund of $2 billion, while that of UdeM, an establishment of comparable size, amounts to $400 million. “We are really late,” continues Mr. Jutras, who wishes to convince the students of his establishment that they have a “debt to their university”, which they must repay over the course of their lives.
Obsolete infrastructure
Once this campaign is over, UdeM intends to invest the funds raised in various projects aimed at “enhancing the quality of the student experience”. In this regard, Daniel Jutras mentions, among other things, the addition of “quality spaces” for students, which are currently lacking on the university campus. “We do not have a student center at the University of Montreal, an agora of sorts, where students could have convivial spaces, but also have access to all the services of student life,” explains M .Jutras, who also notes the importance of expanding and updating the UdeM sports center.
Mr. Jutras does not rule out the idea of possibly dipping into this pot in order to finance certain major repair work that the University must carry out on several of its buildings which are in an “extremely significant” state of dilapidation. and which will require “astronomical” investments. Currently, the Legault government estimates the sums to be invested to renovate the university campus at $459 million.
“But when we evaluate what we would need to do, we are closer to the billion,” says the rector. He indicates as an example that, to replace each window of the Roger-Gaudry pavilion, the University must pay $40,000, the heritage character of this large tower causing the bill to skyrocket.
“Frail” financing
If Mr. Jutras assures that this call for donations is not intended to be a response to the “underfunding” of public universities and research in Quebec, he recognizes that the lack of funds released by Quebec and Ottawa for this purpose “places them in a fragile position in several respects. This is how UdeM has made representations in recent weeks to the Quebec government so that it increases its funding intended to cover “the system costs” of universities.
“We see that we have very significant needs resulting from university underfunding,” indicates the rector, in office since 2020. This situation, combined with the lack of funds intended for research from Ottawa, means that UdeM sometimes struggles to retain its most renowned university researchers and recruit new ones. However, “we need a critical mass of high-level, high-caliber researchers. We have to be able to recruit them,” says Mr. Jutras, who also reports “difficulties recruiting” professors within certain faculties of UdeM.
The lack of research funding also places Canada in a perilous situation which has been particularly notable in recent years, when the country found itself dependent in particular on the United States for supplies of vaccines against COVID-19. . “There is a social effort, a political effort to be made to support research, not only because we see that it is an extremely important vector of social and economic development, but also because the dependence of countries on research which is carried out elsewhere is a real danger,” notes Mr. Jutras.
The American threat
The rector is also concerned about the abuses of academic freedom that have occurred in the United States in recent months. In Florida, influential Republicans – led by Governor Ron DeSantis – have attacked the universities of the American state in an attempt to impose certain conservative ideological visions there. Elizabeth Magill, president of the University of Pennsylvania, announced her resignation last December after coming under fire for her positions on the subject of anti-Semitism on her establishment’s campus.
“It’s worrying, what we see in the United States, what we see on American campuses,” notes Daniel Jutras, who notes “a kind of indictment of universities” in the American environment. “And it’s a movement that is dangerous,” adds the rector, emphasizing the importance of “not importing this model” here, in Quebec, in order to protect “academic freedom” in a university environment.