It’s critical to take great care of our universities

By Lethbridge Herald on March 30, 2022.

When I was a kid my grandfather had a pocketknife that I thought was the greatest thing in the world.  It was a genuine Swiss Army Knife with all kinds of weird and wonderful tools that folded in and out of it.  He never had much money, and that knife must have been a pretty costly thing, but he took good care of it and it served him well for many years.  

He always had that knife in his pocket and he would take it out and show it to me.  It had obvious tools like a straight edge blade and a saw, but there were other tools that I didn’t understand.  He would explain what everything did:  “this is for opening beer bottles” and “this is for punching a new hole in your belt if you don’t exercise”. Those tools didn’t seem like they were good for much, to a ten year old.  When my grandfather died my grandmother passed that knife on to me and damned if I didn’t end up using every one of those tools more than once over the years.

Universities are like Swiss Army Knives for knowledge.  They are incredibly useful things made up of teachers and scholars who have spent a lifetime to become experts in all kinds of weird and wonderful topics. 

Those experts fold out of the university and teach something or discover something or create something and then they fold back in and maybe you don’t see them again for a while.  Sometimes it’s obvious that we need those experts, and sometimes it isn’t obvious at all.  It probably makes sense to most of us that Alberta needs people to teach doctors and nurses, geologists and mining engineers.  Surely we could use people to work on cures for diseases and solutions to climate change.  Maybe it’s less obvious that we need poets and art historians, researchers and philosophers – all working on weird and wonderful things that most of us don’t really think much about in our daily lives. 

 But if you fold one of those people out and ask, they will explain what they do and why it matters.  And it might seem like a good idea to just invest in the expertise you’re sure you need right now, but that misses the point of a really good pocketknife.  The whole thing fits together as one unit waiting there in your pocket, ready to fold out whatever tool you didn’t realize you would need until the moment came along.  And like any good pocketknife, you’ll probably find that those tools can be used to together solve all sorts of problems they weren’t even intended to solve.

Nobody knows what sorts of teachers and scholars a thriving, diverse Alberta economy is going to need in five years or 50 years.  That’s why it’s critical to take great care of the excellent comprehensive universities that previous generations handed down to us.  

Whatever the future holds, we should be sure we have those experts right here, ready for whatever job we need them to do.  That’s what a university is good for.

Dr. Matthew Tata, Professor

The University of Lethbridge