Spurred in part by budget cuts, Quebec universities are working together more closely on the academic front -- offering a greater number of joint programs, for instance. What are your feelings about this trend? Do you see benefits or dangers in these sorts of collaborations?




Malcolm Baines, Associate Professor of Microbiology and Therapeutics

Collaboration is always useful but is less effective as a function of distance -- collaboration with a distant department on campus or units at distant campuses or universities is logistically much more difficult for both staff and students. As for other benefits or dangers arising from a policy of program collaboration, the benefits are clearly financial. Two universities may provide complementary but essential parts of a program, but each need not hire the specialized staff to teach a full program. If a university no longer needs to teach all of a subject, the relationship becomes parasitic. One program can't exist without the other and I believe it is inevitable that one or both programs will fail. Smaller units will lack the critical mass of intellectual interchange needed to produce significant academic research, to create knowledge and train graduate students. I believe that universities must provide all or none of a program, even if this creates focused universities. There can be no half-measures where specialized university education is concerned.



Peter Daly, Professor and Chair of German Studies

With a full complement of programs (BA, MA and PhD), research in many fields and international cooperation in conferences and publications, our department, with nine academic staff, is one of the largest and most active German studies departments in Canada. Budget cuts are a challenge which encourage cooperation with other Quebec universities. The Université de Montréal has been awarded the German-funded Centre for European and German Studies and we've offered to provide a professor to teach a course for the centre. Doctoral students from Concordia and U. de M. have asked McGill professors to direct their research. No formal merging of programs is presently envisaged because there are logistical problems and McGill needs assurance that our programs won't become dependent on endangered departments elsewhere.



Olivia Jensen, Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences

As recently as three years ago, there were five university departments in Montreal serving the geological and geophysical sciences. Two remain: our Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and UQAM's Département des sciences de la terre. Moreover, both of these surviving departments have faced severe staff compressions during this period. We really have no choice but to cooperate in serving our students and researchers in the earth sciences. We welcome more collaboration with our sister universities and colleges.



Sam Noumoff, Associate Professor of Political Science

The budget spur should be looked at, not as a reason for, but an opportunity to engage in a re-examination of the rich intellectual resources in all four Montreal universities. To prevent the trivialization of the process, a baseline survey of all disciplines, focusing on the identification of areas of complementarity, would surely be a healthy beginning. Each institution must, however, be capable of serving and expanding, at a level of quality, both its domestic and international constituencies.This would impose upon all of us a new degree of language flexibility.