George Connell, LLD’85, the renowned Canadian biochemist who served as president of both Western University and the University of Toronto, died Friday at the Kensington Gardens nursing home in Toronto. He was 84.
Upon his arrival as Western’s sixth president in 1977, Connell began restructuring the administration to group responsibilities and enhance managerial efficiencies. He helped create a sense of Western’s corporate identity as an institution with a dual commitment to both teaching and research.
Admired for his academic leadership at Western, Connell also developed strong relationships with the university Senate and Board of Governors, while adjusting to a time of declining government support. He actively campaigned within the community for help and developed alternative funding sources during a time marked by financial restraint and uncertain student enrollment.
On Oct. 17, 1985, Connell delivered a few remarks to the Empire Club of Canada in advance of National Universities Week. His lecture, From the Ivory Tower to the Corporate Tower, encapsulated many of the struggles and debates postsecondary education wrestles with still today.
Western News offers a selection of that lecture as a memorial to Western’s former president.
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Universities are important to you as individuals; they are also important to business and industry-to the innumerable corporations and enterprises of Canada – large and small – which are the economic engine of this country.
There are many signs that we are in the midst of a major transformation in business-university relationships in Canada. The ivory towers and the corporate towers are no longer remote from each other and intellectually isolated. The traffic between them is now very busy indeed. The joint enterprises are too numerous now even to count. The reason? Both sides see very clear benefits from these associations-the sharing of physical and intellectual resources can be as advantageous to universities as to corporations.
I want today to speak to you about only one aspect of university-industry relationships, but it is without any question the most important aspect. This is the flow of new graduates who go from universities each year to jobs in Canadian companies.
More than half of all our graduates are employed in Canadian business and industry. What happens to them is extremely important to us. It is even more important to their employers. Most Canadian companies that are successful will succeed because Canadian graduates perform well in the roles that are assigned to them and the roles that they create for themselves.
Sometimes you will hear from educators the proposition that university experience is not intended to prepare graduates for jobs. You will not hear that from me. Universities have always prepared students for jobs. In the very beginning, the original ivory towers, the universities of Italy, France and England in the 12th and 13th centuries, educated their graduates for work as lawyers, physicians and clergy. In the late 20th century, we still educate lawyers, physicians and clergy, but we also educate many others, both specialists and generalists, whom we expect to earn their livelihood in the world of business.
… In recent years in the manufacturing sector, there has been a renewed interest in quality control-recognition that quality is the essence of effective marketing and competition. If quality is important in manufactured goods, how much more important it is for the development of intellectual ability and professional skills for the next generation of Canadians.
So how are we doing? There are some positive signals. Every major campus in Canada is host to corporate recruiters, literally by the hundreds. They evidently find what they are looking for. Many thousands of graduating students are placed in jobs each year and the recruiters keep coming back. We are encouraged, too, that the unemployment rate for university graduates remains low-lower, in fact, than for any other educational level. In 1984, unemployment for university graduates was 5.4 per cent compared to 13 per cent for those with only high-school education.
… (As part of my ole with the Corporate-Higher Education Forum,) we decided to make use of the companies that are members of the forum as the target of a survey. … What are the major findings and conclusions from our study?
- In general, among the graduates of Canadian universities, Canadian corporations are finding recruits who are capable of serving their companies well;
- Graduates, particularly those with Science and Engineering degrees, are relatively well-prepared for mathematical and technical aspects of their jobs, but less well-prepared with regard to broader managerial skills.
- Among the problems that have been identified, one that stands out is the relative weakness in communication skills, or, to use the old-fashioned terms, writing well and speaking well.
It seems to me imperative university graduates, whatever the nature of their programs, should have the ability to use at least one of our national languages at a level commensurate with their other educational achievements. This is not a goal the universities can achieve on their own.
Effective writing, speaking and comprehension should be identified as the foremost general objective for all levels of the educational system-primary, secondary and tertiary. I believe strongly universities should affirm their dedication to this proposition and should work in close collaboration with Ministries of Education, with school boards and with practising teachers to bring about a dramatic improvement. …
- We (need to) think of the first phase of higher education as a six-to-eight-year process, co-managed by the universities and the organizations that employ their graduates. Some parts of the total educational task can be done well and efficiently by corporations. It would be undesirable to assign responsibilities for such tasks to the universities.
What is desirable is to have comprehensive mutual understanding among all parties as to the educational goals of each, and the division of responsibility. …
- We must assume that most graduates will change jobs, perhaps many times, in the course of their working lives. In a sense, the most important part of their university education is the part that remains important to them throughout their careers.
It is for this reason that technical programs such as Engineering and Computer Science should not sacrifice general liberal-arts requirements as the fields grow more complex. …
Finally, I should like to add some personal observations. The first is universities, corporations and, indeed, the public should find solid reasons for satisfaction in the survey I have described to you today. The conclusion is clear:
A representative group of large Canadian corporations consistently finds capable, well-prepared employees among the graduates of Canadian universities. We should be satisfied, but we should not be complacent.
There are also several reasons for vigilance:
- The world is changing rapidly, not only in science and technology, but also in many other ways that will reshape our private sector-design and production techniques, patterns of trade, financial strategies. What is appropriate education for the graduate of today may be obsolete in part in as little as five years. Just one example: A number of senior corporate executives have brought to my attention the growing importance of mastery of foreign languages on the part of their employees.
- Some of the companies in our survey may have recorded their satisfaction with graduates in the context of the status quo – that is, they may not have perceived a need for a major change of company strategy or style. If and when such changes do come, the need for corresponding change in university programs will become more pressing.
- The state of public support for higher education in Canada is critical. During the last five to ten years, I believe every university in Canada has actually lost ground in the struggle for quality in education and research. The cold fact is that quality in education costs money. If we are to meet the demand for quality in the highly educated work force, there will have to be a radical change in public policy for universities, both in Queen’s Park and in Ottawa.
The fact is no university in Canada, including my own, has resources that come close to those of the major universities of the United States. Our performance has been reasonably good in the circumstances. That cannot last.