Universities are the intellectual batteries of community

By Lethbridge Herald on January 16, 2025.

DAN O’DONNELL – GUEST OPINION

Universities are where we collect advanced knowledge and tap into the most important intellectual and scientific currents around the globe. Because their faculty almost all come “from away,” universities are where we benefit from the research, education, and creativity developed in other cities, provinces, and countries. When we attend a university — or send our kids to one — we are, in essence, exposing them to something they could otherwise only acquire with decades’ worth of travel and networking, introducing them to what people think, and know, and do all around the world, as taught by experts from around the world.

It was this fact that led our civic leaders to push so hard for the creation of the University of Lethbridge in the middle of the last century. Not only is a university in our own community an opportunity to educate and train our children at home — giving them opportunities they could otherwise only have if they traveled and went to school in other, usually larger, cities and provinces. It is also a way of bringing the world’s expertise back home to our community.

Only in the world’s largest cities could you hope to staff a university solely with citizens who were raised and educated “at home” — though even if you could, I doubt you’d want to, since it is precisely the fact that universities attract people from all over the globe that makes them such vital places. For a city like Lethbridge — a regional hub that is always struggling to escape the pull of a much larger metropolis a couple of hours’ drive to the north — the presence of a university within our city limits acts as a counterweight, bringing people to us from elsewhere and providing our home-grown talent a reason to stay.

For most of the last fifty years, we have benefited from this ability of the University to attract and retain talent. When I first moved to Lethbridge from England in the fall of 1997, the University had about 5,500 students, just under twice the number it had had a decade earlier.

Although we had started out as a teaching-focused institution, we were now growing our research, bringing in master’s students (and later PhDs) along with experts from across the disciplines and around the world. The last members of the university’s founding faculty were retiring, and, with them, the last few professors who had been hired and promoted without an active research program.

Unfortunately, the last few years have seen this growth slow down considerably. Our domestic enrollment is back down to around 6,000 after reaching a peak of 7,800, and while our foreign enrollment has tripled over the last five years (from about 350 to over 1,200), changes in the federal government’s student visa policy mean that we are unlikely to see significant additional growth.

Our funding, too, has been hit hard. Like everything in Alberta, the U of L has been a frequent victim of our boom-and-bust economy. The Kenney administration, however, introduced what have been among the worst cuts to this sector in Canadian history — more than 20% (before inflation) in the space of three years. Universities in Alberta went from being among the best-funded to among the worst-funded in Canada. They were forced to institute hiring freezes, cut essential staff, and allow core research and teaching positions to go unfilled as existing faculty retired.

That is how you drain an intellectual battery. When universities can no longer hire, the communities they serve lose access to the world’s experts and the knowledge they bring. At Christmas, for example, my department was forced to let go of a world-renowned researcher who was leading a program on the intersection of computers, AI, ethics, and culture because there was simply no money to support her position in a department that struggles to deliver its basic undergraduate program. But this means we also reduced our ability to teach these cutting-edge topics to our students, even as the rise of AI means that universities around the world are rushing to provide students with programming in precisely these areas.

We built the U of L to ensure that people in our city had reliable access to global ideas and expertise. If we want to keep the intellectual lights on, we need to help the politicians in Edmonton understand just how much damage they are doing by starving our university of the resources it needs to stay internationally competitive.

Dan O’Donnell is the Department Chair and Professor of English at the University of Lethbridge