The federal government invests in research through the Impact+ Research Chairs Program. This is excellent news. But the terms of this investment pose significant problems: they weaken the autonomy of universities, encourage the circumvention of collegial governance and concentrate resources to the detriment of the diversity of knowledge.
Last December, Minister Mélanie Joly announced this initiative: 1.7 billion over 12 years to attract more than 1,000 international researchers to the country. We have every reason to rejoice in this investment, especially in a context where other governments are openly questioning the value of scientific knowledge. And yet, behind these impressive figures lie mechanisms that pose major problems.
The program offers up to $1 million per year for eight years to recruit researchers based abroad. University administrations determine in which fields positions are open, and recruitment requirements are set by the program, without regard to collective agreements. In doing so, the program encourages establishments to ignore employment contracts and circumvent the usual functioning of collegial bodies at the heart of recruitment processes.
However, these bodies – departmental assemblies, disciplinary committees – play a fundamental role. As recalled by the UNESCO Recommendation concerning the condition of teaching personnel in higher education, they constitute a shield against ideological, political or economic pressures. In a context of chronic underfunding, departments are offered the possibility of hiring, provided they support a position in an area of expertise already defined by the administration. It is a market that colleagues, overworked and short of resources, are encouraged to accept, even when the targeted area does not correspond to the needs actually identified.
The program does not just provide funding: it requires universities to contribute to it themselves. Establishments must mobilize resources to ensure the sustainability of chairs and “take advantage of additional resources” to “maintain the research advantage created by the chair.” Using these programs to indirectly impose budgetary priorities on universities is problematic, especially in a context of underfunding that has dragged all Quebec universities into an unprecedented crisis. And by encouraging establishments to always invest in the same sectors, we exert continuous pressure on other fields, pushing disciplines such as art history or ethnology to death, to name just a few – disciplines that are nevertheless essential to the understanding of the social, cultural and historical world.
Finally, Impact+ is based on the imagination of the “star researcher”, according to which scientific advances depend above all on a restricted elite of exceptionally high-performance researchers. However, the empirical data says the opposite. Mongeon et al. (2016), analyzing data from 12,720 researchers in Quebec over 15 years, concluded that the concentration of funding produces decreasing marginal returns. A systematic review by Aagaard et al. (2020) confirms stagnant or decreasing returns beyond a certain financing threshold. Science shows that more is achieved by funding more researchers, more modestly, than by concentrating resources on a few.
Investments from the Impact+ Research Chairs Program are obviously welcome. But their structure poses major problems which, if not entirely new, must be named. The federal government, in consultation with the provinces, should increase basic funding to allow universities to define their priorities in a collegial manner, distribute resources more widely and respect collegial processes by financing establishments without imposing targeted recruitment that bypasses the authorities deliberative.
It is an excellent thing that our universities have the means to recruit the best researchers in the world. But as long as most of the system remains underfunded, this choice will be more of a costly gamble than a strategy to strengthen research. What is at stake is the university as a space for deliberation and diversity of knowledge – the university as a common good and as a public service.
