AN ADDRESS BY DR. FRANÇOIS TAVENAS, RECTOR OF UNIVERSITÉ LAVAL, AT THE OPENING OF THE ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF UNIVERSITY BOARD CHAIRS AND SECRETARIES, ON FRIDAY, APRIL 19, 2002, AT THE PLACE D'ARMES ROOM OF THE CHÂTEAU FRONTENAC
IN QUÉBEC CITY.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is a pleasure and an honour to welcome you to Quebec City and to Université Laval. I would first of all like to thank the National Association of University Board Chairs and Secretaries for having invited me to deliver the opening address of its 14th symposium. As I perused the two-day program, I noticed that several aspects of the university's mission will be addressed, and I am sure that the presentations and discussions will be a source of stimulation and enrichment for all participants.

I have been asked to speak about the strategic role of the university in the knowledge economy. Here we have a subject that is both promising and somewhat disconcerting. Since it is often useful to start with the terms themselves when exploring a given area of reflection, I will first provide a definition of the knowledge economy and the characteristics of this new economic configuration, and this will lead us to see the dominant role played by the university in such a context.

Next, I will explain how the university takes on this strategic role through the type of training it provides, through those whom it trains, through the research it carries out and through the agreements it reaches with partners from civil society.

Introduction

Although the term "knowledge economy" has been a buzzword for over a decade, it is still useful to recall its semantic contours.

In the Encyclopedia of the New Economy, published in Wired magazine, the term is defined in very clear terms:

"When we talk about the new economy, we're talking about a world in which people work with their brains instead of their hands. A world in which communications technology creates global competition… A world in which innovation is more important than mass production. A world in which investment buys new concepts… rather than new machines. A world in which rapid change is a constant… A world so different its emergence can only be described as a revolution."

Like me, you have heard how these new upheavals are of the same scope as the disruptions accompanying the industrial revolution at the end of the 19th century.

This simple definition is built upon certain key words which are in fact characteristics of the knowledge economy itself: "brains," "ideas," "communications technologies," "innovation," "change" and "global competition."

The same notions are explored by Patrick Épingard in his book entitled L'investissement immatériel, cœur d'une économie fondée sur le savoir (Non-Material Investment, The Heart of a Knowledge-Based Economy). The productive forces are no longer physical, that is, no longer tangible. Instead, it is the accumulation of knowledge, in the form of human and technological capital, that plays a central role in the functioning of today's economies.

These new concepts immediately point to the strategic role of the university, an institution that shapes minds, fosters new ideas (and therefore scientific and technological innovation) and, while preserving an intellectual tradition that goes back to the Middle Ages, is also an agent of change given the scientific progress that it initiates.

It has, moreover, become something of a truism to state that the modern university, as the primary engine for economic development, is at the very heart of the knowledge economy. In fact, its core functions - the capacity for creating and transferring knowledge, the capacity for training researchers (the future agents of knowledge creation) and, above all, the capacity for training graduates (those who are best equipped to transfer knowledge) - have made the modern university a central player, an agent for social, cultural and economic progress, especially over the last half century. In this regard, the rector of the Université de Sherbrooke, Mr. Bruno-Marie Béchard, made a similar point in last Friday's La Tribune: "The most brilliant and renowned minds are a vital asset for our region within the context of a global economy; they represent our capacity for innovation, for producing high-grade expertise, and for establishing international networks of learning and cooperation."

However, the Wired magazine definition does not mention the effects of this knowledge economy. In my view, such an economic structure has four main impacts: First of all, the problems faced by our societies are increasingly complex, and a number of disciplines must join forces to solve most of them, preferably through the interventions of individuals capable of transcending the limits of their own fields of specialization. Secondly, economic activities unfold on a global scale, and this international scope, and thus the interconnection of culturally diverse societies, must constantly be taken into account. Thirdly, interactions, progress and change are occurring at a dizzying pace: ideas travel at the speed of light across telecommunications networks and people jet across the world, with all sorts of consequences for the location - and mobility - of economic activities, as well as for the competitive capacities of organizations, whether businesses or universities. Fourthly, unprecedented ethical problems arise in the wake of scientific and technological progress, as the newspapers remind us by providing examples each and every day. As we will later see, these four aspects of the knowledge economy provide a framework with which to examine the role and functioning of universities, as well as the type of training they should be offering.

But before we reach that point, we must first go a little further in trying to understand the knowledge economy in order to pinpoint the strategic role of the university within it. Let's have a brief look at its concrete characteristics as well as at the companies and industries that sustain it. A study by Quebec's Ministry of Industry and Commerce, published in January 2001, provides us with more information about the subject: "manufacturers of computers and electronic equipment, aircraft, and drugs, along with information-technologies, communications and business-services firms have become the leading engines of economic growth." Using a six-criteria grid, the authors divide economic activities into three categories, according to whether they require a high, medium or low level of knowledge. High-knowledge industries are characterized by a preponderance of intangible assets and activities that are largely knowledge based, and by the use of a highly specialized labour force. In Quebec, economic activities with a strong knowledge base are growing at a rapid pace, and today nearly 19 percent of all private-sector and commercial public-sector workers are employed in this area. Between 1990 and the year 2000, over 140,000 jobs were created for individuals with a university degree or post-secondary diploma, an increase of 34 percent. On the other hand, the number of jobs for individuals not having finished elementary or high school fell by over 30 percent.

The level of schooling in Quebec has followed the same trend. Last Wednesday's Devoir newspaper mentions that in the year 2001, 25 percent of Quebecers between 25 and 34 years of age had a university degree, up from 19 percent in 1995 and 23 percent in 1999. Such an increase is gratifying indeed, but there is still every reason to fear that a shortage of highly qualified workers will curtail the development of businesses within the knowledge economy unless we quickly learn how to develop continuing education activities for all insufficiently qualified job seekers. The university can no longer offer initial training only; it must also provide continuing education and training for individuals and companies alike. It can no longer only be a launching pad for professional careers based on initial training, no matter how solid; instead it must become a home base to which graduates regularly return in the course of their professional lives in order to update their knowledge. I will return to this point a little later on.

The moral of the story is that post-secondary institutions, especially universities, have had to adapt to this new trend. I would now like to talk about the means developed by universities to meet society's expectations as regards training for jobs that require a highly specialized labour force.

University Training: The Nature of the Training Itself

It is far from easy to meet society's expectations with respect to training given that these expectations are, to a large extent, contradictory. We are expected to train experts with ever-increasing levels of specialization in disciplines that are becoming more narrow and arcane. But since what we know is changing at a bewilderingly rapid rate, the expert training that we provide is useful for an ever-shrinking period of time. Thus we must also offer our graduates basic training that enables them to adapt to the changes that they will inevitably experience; we must teach them to learn. Reconciling these two objectives is no easy task; but there is still more.

As a matter of fact, as I said earlier, our societies must face more complex problems than ever before. For instance, certain types of technological progress have harmful environmental impacts; certain medical breakthroughs raise questions concerning the integrity of the human being; certain pharmaceutical innovations are accompanied by a whole series of social considerations, etc. Thus our graduates must be prepared to act within this interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary context.

Knowledge that is narrowly discipline restricted is necessary, to be sure, but it is also insufficient. During the course of their school careers, university graduates must acquire more substantial baggage in the form of skills transcending those of their chosen discipline. For their initiatives to be productive, they need a broader type of training, one that will enable them to communicate effectively; judge critically; work in multidisciplinary teams; gather, compile and analyse information; master new technologies; become familiar with realities different from their own; and, lastly, adapt to the constant changes that will henceforth characterize the working world.

All of these demands are clearly contradictory if we try to meet them within the regular framework of our three- or four-year programs and our three-credit courses. Moreover, the requirements of the professional orders that accredit our programs often lead to even more complications. In short, we're practically being asked to perform miracles.

And yet universities don't really have any other choice. We must find a happy medium between providing general education and specialized training, between offering discipline-related training and an opening to other fields. Thus we have to think not only in terms of what should be taught within a given discipline; we must also develop personal skills that transcend specialization. At Université Laval, we have restructured all our undergraduate programs with these strictures in mind in order to provide discipline-related training while fostering general personal development.

This is why all our programs must now include 15 credits "outside" the discipline in question and why a number of faculties have begun to incorporate "competency-based" approaches in all their courses. This is also why faculties have put in place measures to ensure that each and every student will become familiar with new information and communications technologies. For instance, the Ulysses project, designed by the Faculty of Administration, involves the use of computers in the classroom. You will immediately gather that teaching methods have been modified as a result of this initiative and that courses have been designed to take the many and varied possibilities offered by Internet into account. Moreover, the increased use of information technologies opens new doors with respect to university teaching. An important development at Université Laval has been the adopting of the pedagogical platform entitled WebCT, the preferred new tool for the designing of on-line courses. A pilot project carried out in 2000-2001 has yielded excellent results and has made it possible to clearly identify the conditions under which professors can use this tool for the benefit of their students. In the fall of 2001, 120 courses in 10 faculties were using WebCT. On a more general level, there are, at the present time, approximately 150 courses with Web sites, proposing course material at various levels of development; a sort of grassroots movement has begun in a number of faculties and a good many professors have shown interest in such initiatives.

Please allow me, if you would, a brief digression through which to underline a few of the difficulties arising from the rapidly increasing integration of new technologies in teaching. On the one hand, we are required to move forward in an empirical manner in this area, without having at our disposal all the means by which to verify the relevance and effectiveness of our actions. In fact, we still do not have a research base concerning university learning in a multimedia environment; neither have we succeeded in convincing the various levels of government to invest in this crucial area. On the other hand, new university-teaching technologies are very expensive indeed: they are costly in terms of time, since it takes a great deal of time for professors to reformat their courses, a process that also requires technical assistance; they are also costly in terms of infrastructure, for classrooms must be properly equipped to receive the new technologies. And all such steps must be carried out in spite of the fact that this pedagogical material and these infrastructures have, as it were, a very short shelf life; hence they must be paid for in a very short period of time. In other words, the pedagogical advantages have to be considerable, reflected in improved learning, if we really wish to capitalize on such investments. For the moment, we have noted a great deal of enthusiasm on the part of students, as well as the development of new interactions among them and with their professors, a very positive trend in itself. But we are also well aware that implementation and operations costs are substantial indeed. For the moment, the possibility of opening up new markets in the area of distance education by using pedagogical material developed for courses on campus remains just that: a possibility. To make a long story short, the revenue-generating virtual university is probably not for tomorrow.

Let us return to the restructuring of programs, another means by which we have tried to imbue a good number of our programs with an international dimension. Mastering a second, even a third language, spending a study term abroad, becoming familiar with other cultures - these are the principal elements of the "international profile" established within our undergraduate programs. In the spring of 2001, we conferred the first diplomas with an "international profile" mention, and by the fall of 2001, 52 programs were already using this distinction. Our goal is to see at least 20 percent of all students from each graduating year complete an educational program with a significant international dimension.

By addressing in this way a very real social need - that of organizations and companies looking for personnel capable of working abroad - our university has staked out an avant-garde position among Quebec and Canadian universities as concerns the internationalization of its programs. In order to make this orientation more concrete, the University has established alliances with foreign universities chosen for their high-quality programs and their interest in organizing student exchanges.

Moreover, university training should more than ever combine theory and practice in order to ensure that prospective graduates have some contact with their future working world during their university careers. A number of our programs include mandatory field work enabling the student apprentice to put into practice the theoretical knowledge acquired in the classroom and perhaps touch base with his or her future employer. Among the activities that seem to me the most beneficial, I would like to mention the trade missions abroad that the Faculty of Administration organizes for business administration students. And, I might add, these initiatives are beneficial in more ways than one! Participants in these missions have, in fact, the opportunity to apply marketing concepts acquired in the classroom and to experience the economic reality of another country.

I would now like to focus for a few moments on another aspect of the university's strategic role in a knowledge-based economy, that of training graduate-level researchers. This is a crucial mission since these are the individuals who will engender new ideas. Canada is lagging far behind the majority of highly developed countries with regards to the number of Ph.D. holders it produces. There is much work to be done in this particular area. The consultation paper on innovation policy published by the federal government highlights this need and suggests interesting possible sources of financial support for master's and doctoral-level students and for the development of a suitable research environment. This being said, the universities have to carefully review how these training programs are organized. In fact, master's and doctoral programs have generally been designed to prepare graduates for careers as university professors. But the fact is that for the last several years, the majority of Ph.D. holders have actually pursued careers as researchers in industry rather than in the university environment. With the development of the knowledge economy, this trend should become all the more pronounced. It seems to me that we should review how our programs and supervision practices are organized in order to provide our students with training that is better adapted to research practices in industry, where strategic considerations, such as choosing research paths, optimizing the use of infrastructures, planning budgets, and respecting deadlines, have a far greater importance than they do in university laboratories.

I will finish this discussion of the nature of university training with a few reflections concerning the planning of workforce requirements. Universities are often criticized for failing to train the number of specialists required by industry, when the latter requires them. Examples of these erstwhile missing experts abound: computer specialists on the eve of the notorious year 2000 bug; optics and telecommunications specialists during the on-line and .com craze in 2001; Ph.D. holders in biotechnologies to accompany the explosion in the area of genetics and the growth of pharmaceutical companies, etc. Thus we have witnessed various specific actions undertaken in Quebec in each one of these areas, complete with programs and targeted government funding. The government is convinced that it has been making the right choices in this regard, but the results are far from conclusive. In fact, given the speed with which the knowledge economy is changing, combined with the reaction time needed before government programs are established, and above all given the time required by universities to design training programs, recruit professors and set up the necessary infrastructures, the rule in the last few years has been that targeted programs became operational only when the need for them had already disappeared: the year 2000 has come and gone without the predicted horror stories having materialized and the speculative on-line bubble has burst with the ongoing confusion in the area of optical telecommunications. As for the crying need for Ph.D.s in biotechnologies, our friends from Montreal Technovision have had to face the fact that it takes six years to train a doctoral-level researcher and therefore that it is impossible to envisage an ad hoc program designed to meet an immediate need for workers.

In a more general way, we have to realize that university training programs and companies from the knowledge economy are changing at very different rates so that it seems utopic to continually look for a perfect match between the skills of university graduates and company workforce requirements. In this context, what should be done?

Since by all accounts the economies of various technological sectors experience brutally varying cycles, it is absolutely essential that the universities be provided with the sufficient financial means to offer basic training in all areas and to foster research projects enabling them to contribute to balanced economic and social development. They must be given the necessary leeway to adjust their training activities to the changes professors perceive in their respective fields of endeavour, based on contacts within the international research and local industrial communities; and these adjustments must be facilitated with the understanding that the fit between supply and demand is not always going to be perfect. Moreover, isn't all this indicative of the dynamics of any robust economy?

Rather than offering us - belatedly in most cases - financial support targeted to meet already out-of-date needs, government should rather guarantee the universities sufficient resources for the ongoing development of their entire range of programs in all sectors, since nobody can predict in which area the next technological and economic breakthrough will occur. In geomatics, nutraceuticals, digital vision, intelligent plastics, or elsewhere - who really knows?

Beneficiaries of University Training

With your permission, I will now address the changes we can observe in the beneficiaries of university training. Traditionally, universities have provided programs for undergraduate and graduate students enrolled full time and taking their courses on campus; in addition, we should mention continuing education courses and programs, traditionally referred to as extension education.

Today students enrolled at both levels of initial training still constitute the main beneficiaries of a university education, but another, highly diversified student population requires university services as well. Thus we must arrange to meet all these training needs, in this way breaking free of the traditional initial-training framework.

A university degree is of enormous value in a knowledge-based economy. According to an Industry Canada analysis, the average 1997 hourly wage rate in Quebec for highly knowledgeable workers, in other words workers with a post-secondary diploma, was nearly $18 per hour, whereas the hourly wage for workers with a low level of knowledge was approximately $12 per hour. In the five years that have gone by since the study was carried out, this gap has surely widened. Thus we should not be surprised to see a steady increase in the demand for access to all areas of university studies. The young students we receive are not all equally ready to undertake university studies; but rather than being too selective in our admissions policies, we have the responsibility, or so it seems to me, to offer upgrading courses and careful supervision and support in order to provide those who are less well prepared, as well as all the rest, with the best possible opportunities for success. We have to take the necessary measures to increase the graduation rate as well as to reduce the length of graduate studies. This is what must be undertaken in order for Canada to produce highly qualified individuals in sufficient numbers to meet the growing demand on the part of companies from the knowledge economy.

The university must also take on the responsibility of educating an ever-increasing number of foreign students. Indeed, the very presence of foreign students on our campuses offers a great many advantages. On the one hand, they serve to enrich the learning experience of all students by bringing a different cultural perspective to our courses, and in may cases, by dint of their numbers, they make it possible to maintain a critical mass of students in our programs. Moreover, since a certain number of these students decide to stay here after completing their studies, their having been recruited by Canadian universities constitutes a means of increasing the nation's bank of highly qualified workers. Lastly, the majority return to their home countries to take on highly placed positions, thus becoming perfect ambassadors for Canadian companies doing business throughout the world. In a global knowledge economy, foreign students, without a doubt, provide the country with an excellent means by which to stake out a privileged position in the competitive international marketplace.

University graduates make up the third group of clients whose importance is constantly growing. In an ever-changing world, university studies represent a starting point, not a finish line. As I have already mentioned, throughout his or her professional career, the university graduate will increasingly experience the need to update his or her knowledge, so quickly will it become out of date. After learning to learn during their initial school experience, the next vital asset for life-long students will be to know where and how to hone their skills. In a report published in the year 2000, entitled Stepping up: skills and opportunities in the knowledge economy, a group of federal government experts recommends that continuing education be taken very seriously given the close link that exists between skills and individual, employer and national success.

Through both their initial-training and continuing-education programs, all universities offer graduates the means to reach this goal and to keep their jobs or reorient their careers; but it cannot yet be affirmed that continuing education is well accepted and integrated into the activities of most universities. We must make great efforts in this area, using the very best institutions as our models. Did you know, for example, that Harvard, everybody's number-one university, receives only 12,000 traditional students (that is, young people enrolled in initial-education programs), whereas over 70,000 adult students are enrolled in its continuing education programs? It is high time that all universities look at continuing education in a serious way, with an eye to offering their graduates true "after-sale service." The advent of information technologies should make our lives easier in this regard by enabling us to propose distance courses and programs, and to offer them on-line. At Université Laval, the number of on-line course credits offered rose from 150 student credits in 1997 to 11,700 student credits in 2001. We currently offer approximately 50 on-line courses, and the list is getting longer from one session to the next. In this way, Université Laval can meet student demand no matter where it materializes, with a "just-in time" and "made-to-measure" approach that respects time and place constraints imposed on adult students by their professional and family lives. The approach also enables the university to become an actor on the international stage and to compete with various new players.

Lastly, there is a fourth beneficiary of university training: organizations and companies. Changes in the realm of knowledge create considerable needs for continuing education, as we have seen, as well as for made-to-measure training adapted to each company, organization or group of specialists. Moreover, rapid changes in the knowledge economy force all companies to become learning organizations, in other words flexible organizations that are constantly reviewing their structures and operations. There is a very pressing need for continuing education to help companies manage permanent change. Universities will therefore be called upon to play a lead role in maintaining the professional skills of graduates. Université Laval has been particularly active in this area over the past five years. In the first place, we have developed a change-management and executive-training program in order to assist the Mouvement Desjardins in its full-scale restructuring process; and I would like to underline, not without a certain pride, that the Conference Board named this organizational-management and -development certificate program, designed in conjunction with the Mouvement Desjardins, one of Canada's best company-teaching partnerships for the year 1998. Based on this model, we have since designed the organizational-management and -development diploma program to assist Quebec's entire health network in dealing with the important changes that it has to face. Thus our continuing education department has become the recognized trainer for groups of professionals from regional health boards in most areas of the province. Here we can see a dynamic partnership between groups of senior managers who have been able to pinpoint their training needs and a university that has had the capacity to meet those needs. A made-to-measure master's project should now enable a number of these professionals to further improve their job-related knowledge and skills.

I would like to take a few moments to discuss a fifth group that represents a burgeoning clientele for university courses and programs. I am referring to educated retired people wishing to study in disciplines other than their former areas of specialization. In this respect, language courses and culture courses (in the broadest sense of the term) are in increasingly high demand, and the universities have an important role to play in servicing those people with considerable intellectual and professional baggage reaching their so-called golden years.

Research

In the knowledge economy, universities are also major players in the area of research and technological transfer. This is especially true in Canada where university research represents a very important part of the national research apparatus. Thus we should not be surprised to see governments express high expectations with respect to university research initiatives, nor to see them take more and more significant measures to increase the share of applied research as a proportion of university research in general and to encourage universities to develop their technological-transfer and industrial-development activities based on research results. Universities clearly must make a concerted effort to contribute more fully to the development of the knowledge economy, but it is equally clear that they must do so without neglecting their primary mission: to foster knowledge and expertise and to train researchers.

Our first obligation is to protect our capacity for basic research, that is, research without direct targeted aims carried out for the pleasure of enhancing our general knowledge. In fact, who is to say which area of knowledge will become the next engine of development? Who would have predicted, at the beginning of the 1950s, that optics would become the vector for the entire telecommunications area? Well, it was at that very moment that a few colleagues from Université Laval's physics department decided to establish an optics and laser research laboratory, thus setting the stage for Quebec City to become, 50 years later, the number-one centre for optics, complete with a flourishing industrial sector. It is vital, for the future of our economy, that universities maintain their capacity to pursue basic research in all areas of endeavour, and I hope we can convince our governments that this is indeed the approach to take.

Now then, the criteria for public organizations and the private sector with respect to the distribution of grants have been established in such a way as to favour innovation, defined by the Quebec university professors' federation as "the process consisting in marketing new products and services, or the result of this process." Marie-Hélène Parizeau, a professor at Université Laval's Faculty of Philosophy, has recently published a critical analysis of this trend in the Canadian Journal of Policy Research. She warns against what she calls the disappearance of so-called basic research, that is, research without a direct economic and technological purpose, from government discourse. According to the author, this new split between "useful" and "useless" research represents a de facto undermining of part of the university's vocation: the quest for knowledge for its own sake. I concur completely with the conclusions of the study and maintain that the universities must pay close attention to this drift, which leaves little room for the humanities and thus for critical thought.

Nevertheless, we also have the obligation to expend more energy and make greater efforts in the areas of applied research and technological transfer. In fact, the key to success lies in establishing a healthy dynamic balance between basic research, applied research and technological transfer. I believe that we have discovered this balance at Université Laval, where applied research, carried out in conjunction with companies, generates approximately 30 percent of all our research revenue and where we have established structures such that approximately ten enterprises are created each and every year based on the results of our research, whether by graduates, professors or partners. In order to encourage student entrepreneurs, we have established Entrepreneuriat Laval, an organization designed to train and assist students involved in company-creation projects. In order to foster the development of research ideas and company creation we have set up, with the support of the Quebec government, the SOVAR corporation designed to seek funding for the development of research results and for the launching of companies that will draw on these results. But we have been careful to act at arm's length in order to maintain the necessary distance between these and traditional university activities - and to maintain the necessary transparency as well. We still have a long way to go with respect to establishing an intellectual-property policy! Intellectual property is a contentious issue at Université Laval, as it is at all Canadian universities at this moment. The debate is a difficult one because all sorts of interests are at stake, because of the high hopes for significant profits fuelled by certain celebrated success stories, and because of interventions by new outside partners, particularly from the finance sector. In this regard, I would like to leave you with a few paths for reflection:

1. It is essential to recognize that today's research is the result of teamwork; the solitary inventor-genius is more and more the exception rather than the rule; thus we have to establish intellectual-property policies that recognize this fact and that protect the interests of all participants.

2. With respect to intellectual property, as is the case for real estate, a joint ownership policy simply doesn't work; there must be one sole decision-maker during the commercial-production phase, and this individual must both maximize the spin-offs from the production process and ensure that there is a fair division of the dividends among all players involved in the creation of the property in question.

3. As a general rule, university research leading to the development of any given type of intellectual property will have benefited from significant Canadian public funding, if only because researchers have been able to take advantage of university infrastructures; thus it is essential that intellectual property be developed in the public interest and that the spin-offs from it benefit, first and foremost, the Canadian economy.

4. Lastly, it should be recalled that no university in the world has become rich because of the patents it holds. In fact, in the best-case scenario, revenues from intellectual property represent a small fraction of total university operating revenues.

All this being said, I still believe that the Canadian situation is actually better than the tone of current public debate might suggest. If we compare the level of our technological transfer activities by volume of subsidized research with the same indicators from the United States, we see that the performance of Canadian universities at least matches that of its American counterparts; the difference resides in the volume of research actually being subsidized.

Lastly, I would like to reiterate that the true contribution of universities to technological transfer is not so much with respect to the ideas and patents we produce as to the researchers we train since the latter become key players in the area of industrial research and development. A strong national innovation strategy must be based, first and foremost, on strengthening the capacity of Canadian universities to successfully train researchers.

Partners

In order to perform its strategic role in community economic and social development, the university of the 21st century must establish and maintain ongoing and deeply rooted relations with all its partners from civil society. Who are these partners? I think we can point to three groups: First of all, there are those responsible for pre-university training, most notably the colleges and the school boards in charge of high school education; next we have community, economic and social players who draw upon contacts with the university in order to enhance their own initiatives; and, last but not least, there are the various levels of government and public organizations that support university endeavours and that have certain expectations concerning what these endeavours should produce.

Over the last few years, Université Laval has established close relations with a first group of partners, the CEGEPs, in order to harmonize the programs of the two levels of education and to create pathways enabling college graduates with technical diplomas to pursue university studies, if they so desire.

Our collaboration with the second group of partners - community, economic and social players - has many and varied dimensions. Our faculties have teaching and research vocations that cut across most fields of knowledge. Thus they all have the potential to play the role of major partners - and not only in the area of technological transfer and in support of economic development, even if such initiatives serve as the basis of the vast majority of our partnerships. Research in the humanities and social sciences is as essential to the progress and quality of life of our society as is research in the area of biotechnology or pure science. Our researchers have a profound impact on society: whether they are studying high school drop outs, the effects of legalized gambling on the behaviour of compulsive gamblers, the development of new functional and nutraceutical food products, photonic switches or tissular regeneration, they help fuel and focus the debates that are of concern to people everywhere and contribute to the development of concrete measures that bring about cultural, economic and social progress. Moreover, as I have already mentioned, in these times of rapid and profound change, all our partners from civil society have continuing education requirements for their personnel, who must master new work methods, take on new responsibilities and deal with new in-house and outside expectations.

This process is by no means a one-way street: our partners make an essential contribution to improving the quality of our programs as well. Some faculties have, for example, established consultation committees composed exclusively of the employers of graduates. Employers can identify training deficiencies after having worked with our apprentices or hired our graduates. We need their input and support; but since each group has different concerns (theirs being of a rather short-term nature), employer groups cannot be allowed to impose their own particular vision when it comes time to develop training programs.

Lastly, I have put the various levels of government and public organizations in the final grouping of partners. First and foremost, we have, of course, the government of Quebec and its Ministry of Education, since Quebec provides over 80 percent of our basic funding. A number of other Quebec ministries are also very important for Université Laval: Research, Science and Technology; Health and Social Services; International Relations; and the ministry responsible for the Quebec City region, not to mention the Ministry of National Resources and the Ministry of Agriculture with which we must maintain very close cooperative relations on behalf of our faculties specializing in those sectors of activity. In this group, I would also include Quebec's funding organizations that subsidize our researchers and research centres and the government of Canada and its major funding organizations, as well as foreign institutions such as the U.S. government's National Institute of Health, where our highly qualified researchers perform remarkably well.

I refer to governments as partners, but I think that they could be better partners. Higher education, the source of all cultural, economic and social development, is provided in an international context characterized by increasingly spirited competition, and Quebec can ill afford to see its universities badly equipped to face this competition.

Thus I hope that the various levels of government will provide us with the means to prepare successor generations in all areas where Quebec can and must make its mark: medical biotechnologies, nutraceuticals, environmental economics, geomatics and biophotonics, as well as (and on an equal footing with) the arts, multimedia, ethics and philosophy, economics and political science, languages and literature, and sociology and sustainable development, for, in fact, any society that based its development on technology alone would be devoid of culture and social conscience - and doomed to failure. Above and beyond targeted interventions, it is the responsibility of governments to pursue a policy of comprehensive reinvestment in higher education in order to enable our universities to prepare a promising future by developing world-class research projects and training programs in all areas of knowledge, since all these fields - from science to culture, from sociology to the technologies - must contribute to the development of a modern Quebec, a society assuming its rightful place on the world stage. For we must never forget that university teaching is the only public-sector activity that is open to international competition.

As for the Canadian government, it has undertaken extraordinary initiatives over the past five years. As I have often noted, successive federal budgets have pressed all the right buttons with respect to university research development, for instance by creating the Canada Foundation for Innovation, providing new money for major funding committees, founding Canadian Institutes for Health Research, establishing Canada Research Chairs and, just recently, underwriting the indirect costs of research. The most recent throne speech stated that Canada's objective was to move from 15th to 5th place in the world as regards the intensity of its research efforts; the recent consultation paper concerning innovation policy reaffirms this objective and indicates various ways of proceeding. I can only applaud such initiatives and hope that we will get down to work without delay. The challenge is enormous since a tripling of our research investments is required, given forecasted needs in the area of university research infrastructures and, above all, expected demands for researchers. For Canadian universities, the future promises to be exciting, to say the least.

Conclusion

I would summarize my talk by insisting on the fact that, in order to play its strategic role in the knowledge economy, the university has to distance itself from the ivory tower model with which it is usually associated. And it is, moreover, doing just that! I believe that there is a growing awareness within all Canadian universities of their central role in the process of training both researchers and a specialized labour force.

In a knowledge-based economy, success is the result of creativity and high-level cognitive skills, as well as of basic competencies. Societies that discover how to foster these capacities among a large percentage of their citizens will come out winners in the long term. Canada is very well positioned in this respect, and it is up to us to mobilize our collective energies so that Canadian universities, and the training they provide, will become the acknowledged engines of the nation's economic, social and cultural development.

Thank you very much for your attention.