How should a university interact with people and places beyond its national borders? That is the question asked by geographer Merrick Gertler, who has spent his entire career at one institution, when he took over as President of the University of Toronto in 2013.
In the ninth part of our Talking Leadership series Times Higher Education How he developed the strategy he hoped would boost Toronto’s standing on the world stage, and his views on brain drain and why he remained fascinated by the city of Toronto for nearly four decades.
re-striking
When Gertler became president of the foundation, which he first joined in 1983, Toronto had no international strategy; Its ties with the rest of the world have grown organically over the 200 years of its existence. About half of the faculty and a quarter of the students were from outside Canada, yet “we’ve never deliberately focused on internationalization before, and everything we did was kind of by accident,” says Gertler.
The university’s ability to maintain its position at the top of the world rankings (Toronto is at number 18 in the latest the The World University Rankings), to entice international students and solve global problems through international cooperation, meant that for the quiet and resplendent Gertler, “the international world has become so important to the success of the university that it cannot be done by chance or done without a deliberate strategy.”
“It made sense that we hit the reset button,” says Gertler. If the task scares him, he hides it well.
The first stop on his journey to “double internationalization” was a departmental tour, presenting his ideas about going global and listening to his staff. Then, he appointed Vice President with a new specialist – international – because the assignment was “too strategically important for us to run from someone’s desk side”.
The new Vice President was sent on their own college tour, and the strategy began to take shape. Using seven metrics – international student recruitment, student mobility abroad, academic partnerships, industry partnerships, entrepreneurship, fundraising and reputation – they created a target list of countries and institutions.
Spit with the Saudis
One of the goals was to increase the number of countries students travel from. In 2018, the exposure that comes with relying on so few areas for incoming students was revealed: a tweet from a Canadian politician criticizing Saudi Arabia’s treatment of women led to the largest country in the Middle East recalling its students.
It was a relatively small number [of students], but has had a significant impact in certain colleges, such as our medical school,” says Gertler. “This was a timely reminder that while you succeed in internationalizing your enrollment, you need to be alert to the risks that come with it.”
Now they have identified new countries to take advantage of, such as Mexico.
“There are a lot of middle-class families who send their children to English secondary schools, with the aim of doing university studies in an English speaking country. Traditionally this has been the United States, and to some extent the United Kingdom. But given that we are on the same continent, we thought it was crazy not to Recruit more Mexican students in a place like Toronto.”
brain imigrante
There is a deep hatred in some quarters for hiring high-achieving students from low- and middle-income countries. In 2020, Adam Habib, Leader of the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa and current Principal at SOAS University of London, said that universities’ efforts to recruit students from developing countries had “weakened” the progress of these students’ home countries. Many argue that institutions in rich countries should vaccinate those in poor countries rather than dispense with their best talent.
“I don’t think the idea of brain drain is really helpful in this conversation,” Gertler says. He favors the idea of a “brain chain,” citing research showing that students from India, Taiwan, South Korea, and Israel who studied in Silicon Valley set up start-ups that then created connections to their home countries, “which is actually a really important phenomenon that has helped drive those countries’ progress.” and its type of innovative economics.”
He notes that Toronto has been working in partnership to promote Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia for 20 years, and to build its capacity in medicine.
“Ninety-five percent of the students involved in this program, or faculty involved, stayed in the country after participating in the partnership with the University of Toronto. So I’ve really had a track record of building capacity locally that stays in the home country. And I think that’s important. very much,” says Gertler.
Toronto’s new strategy includes expanding this type of business into Africa, which is “a really exciting new element… that’s leading us in a different direction,” he says.
“It’s not about collaborating with the usual suspects – the UK, Australia, the US or other English-speaking countries – it’s about taking advantage of different kinds of exciting learning and research opportunities.”
In addition to much-needed cash, international students benefit from different perspectives for all to learn from. But how do you counter the human tendency toward intimacy and ensure that students of different nationalities mingle?
Toronto has developed “first-year learning communities,” where about 12 students from different countries are brought together in a support network, with a faculty member to support them. “We compose these groups in a way that highlights cultural diversity as much as possible,” says Gertler.
push back
Not all of his academics welcomed the new strategy with open arms. Those who have pre-existing relationships with peers in the regions Not On the target list was troubled. “The kinds of colleagues I work with at this university halfway around the world or in this country are less important?” They put it.
When asked if there was anything Gertler would have done differently if he had started the process over again, he was reluctant to be critical, but said there was something he would have started earlier. It has expert committees from different countries called “International Presidential Councils”. Made up of academics who specialize in particular areas as well as those who have grown up or lived in them, they provide strategic advice and “provide real value”.
Pause in travel
On a pre-pandemic student recruitment trip to China, Gertler promised high school students an international experience if they crossed the Pacific Ocean to come to Toronto.
The pandemic has interrupted the usual training periods and trips abroad, of course, but one aspect has been able to continue. Online Global Classrooms for Undergraduates has been a successful introduction to internationalization for Toronto students.
Toronto faculty collaborate with those at another university to design and teach an online course to a class of students from both institutions, and students work in mixed teams.
“It’s one of the best ways we’ve been able to internationalize the experience for undergraduates at a time when they can’t travel,” says Gertler. “And this was really important because we created all this demand from our undergraduates, and encouraged them to look for an international experience.”
globalized higher education
In 2018, Gertler wrote a paper warning of the rise of nationalism and narrow-mindedness, and suggested what universities could do to counter it. Does he stand by those feelings today? “We see some very interesting and somewhat contradictory trends,” he says. On the other hand, the kind of global cooperation that led to the production of vaccines against Covid-19 in unprecedented record time. This has been a huge win for open and collaborative science.
“The other side of that is a bit less attractive and troubling: the phenomenon of vaccine nationalism. The fact that when it comes to vaccine distribution, geography is much more uneven, and that countries tend to emphasize self-sufficiency above all when it comes to personal protective equipment and vaccine supplies.”
one city
Gertler is somewhat unusual for a university leader in that he has spent his entire career in one institution. He sees the pros and cons of it.
“If you recruit from abroad, you may benefit from new perspectives and new ideas from other contexts and environments that may be beneficial to Toronto, and that benefit is real,” he says.
But the University of Toronto “is a big and complex place, it’s a very complex environment to work effectively. I’ve lived here for 35 years or more, and I’m still learning new things about the place…its structure doesn’t necessarily all make sense…a newcomer may take several years to be effective. Really working in this environment.”
Doesn’t a comparative urban geographer have a desire to live elsewhere, perhaps to experience the bustle of New York or London? Gertler has made short trips to other regions for research purposes, and he believes that most academics are “globalists at heart.”
“When I started my career, I figured I’d probably stay in Toronto for a few years, maybe get a position, and then consider moving,” he says. But his classmates kept him intellectually motivated and Toronto became more diverse and interesting than ever.
Perhaps he will leave the University of Toronto for a new pasture when he steps down as president? “I have no intention of that,” Gertler says, adding that he will stay and look for new avenues of investigation. “My work as president has opened up a lot of interesting research questions for me.”
quick Facts
Boy: Edmonton, Canada 1955
Qualifications: BA in Geography from McMaster University. MSc Town Planning from University of California, Berkeley; PhD from Harvard University
I live with: his wife and cat
Academic hero: British economist Joan Robinson. “You’ve challenged the orthodoxy of mainstream economics and confronted some very powerful personalities.”
This is part of our “Leadership Speaking” series of 50 interviews over 50 weeks with the people who run the world’s best universities on how to solve common strategic problems and implement change. Follow the series here.
the the A list of the most global universities will be published at 10 am GMT on January 19.