Success of the University of Lethbridge facing a real threat
By Lethbridge Herald on December 6, 2024.
Dan O’Donnell
One of the greatest stories in the University of Lethbridge’s 57-year history is how it rose to become a strong research university.
When the U of L was founded in 1967, it was to stop the “brain drain” that saw talented young people leave for university elsewhere.
Established initially at Lethbridge Community College — Canada’s first publicly funded community college — the U of L aimed to offer students a top-tier undergraduate education in Southern Alberta.
In its early years, research was encouraged at the U of L, but not required. The focus remained on purely undergraduate education.
This began to change in the 1980s and 1990s. A graduate school was created. Soon we were granting PhDs. By the early 2000s, we had become a truly comprehensive research university. In fact, it was our former Vice President of Research, Dan Weeks, who helped set up the Association of Canadian Comprehensive Research Universities that today represents research institutions like us.
Since then, we have achieved remarkable success. We often rank among the top undergraduate institutions in the country for our grants. From physics to Indigenous Studies, U of L faculty are building global research profiles and winning major awards.
These don’t only help our university’s reputation. They directly benefit our students.
Research grants provide financial support, create jobs, and bring graduate students to Southern Alberta, where they mentor and inspire our undergraduates.
This success is now under threat. Alberta’s universities saw a 35 per cent inflation-adjusted funding cut in three years. At the U of L, this has stretched budgets to the point that even core undergraduate programs are in trouble.
My own department, English, has gone from just below the national average to one of the most poorly funded in the country. Only bankrupt Laurentian University and foreign-student-dependent Cape Breton are worse off. The real hit, however, has been to our research and graduate programs. Four years ago, the U of L acquired the Canterbury Tales Project, a renowned initiative applying techniques from evolutionary biology and artificial intelligence to Chaucer’s works.
This project brought almost $350,000 in federal funding to Lethbridge and attracted graduate students from Canada, Europe, and beyond. It has given undergraduates valuable experience with cutting-edge technology that has applications in the workplace far beyond medieval studies.
But we are in danger of losing it. The lead researcher, who brought the funding and students to the U of L, has been working on temporary teaching contracts that her faculty can no longer sustain.
Without this position, we risk losing not only the project, but the students it supports. We may have to hand the hard-won funding over to a larger university that can afford to support the project. Or worse, return the remaining money, unspent, to Ottawa. Members of the senior administration in various units have worked hard to find ways to keep this project, but without a cross-university effort, we are in danger of losing it.
This isn’t just about one researcher. Funding like this is hard to acquire and even harder to replace. Universities that abandon funded research projects send a clear signal: they can no longer afford to be serious about their research. This doesn’t just drive away potential faculty and make future funding harder to get, it tells students too that they should consider going to a university where they will be able to enjoy a wider range of experience than we can offer.
I recently testified before the federal Standing Committee on Science and Research about these challenges. One key issue is the growing concentration of research at our largest urban universities at the expense of more regional comprehensives like the U of L.
This recreates the very “brain drain” the we were founded to prevent. If we can’t keep the research projects that allow us to provide an exceptional educational experience, our very best students will be forced to move to universities that can support this training.
We spent more than half a century building the University of Lethbridge into a place where local students can access both a world-class liberal arts education and cutting-edge research opportunities. After years of government neglect — and at times outright hostility — it is a question whether the “Lethbridge model” can survive.
Dan O’Donnell is Professor and Chair of English at the University of Lethbridge. The opinions in this piece are his own.
20-19
….another reminder of how this UCP government is gutting its own public universities and destroying education. For me, this is yet another reason I do not vote for the UCP/TBA.
Smart countries/jurisdictions, do not, underfund postsecondary education. They see it as ‘money in the bank’ to be at the top of everything, i.e. economics, education, medicine, the arts, law, physics, chemistry, agriculture, horticulture…., to compete at the top globally. To be crass, would the UCP/TBA wish to keep the plebs in the dark with enforced lack of educated intelligence? To create a lack of critical thinking skills and a lack of acquiring creative and independent thought?
And, for those who see through this, they will just go to other provinces/countries for a significant post-secondary education. We should be keeping our own post-secondaries strong.
Premier Smith has hurt Albertans in every area, especially health and education. We will be voting in the West Lethbridge election because it’s the one time that we can express our frustration at her callousness. It’s our only chance to give her a boot in the rear.