Ever since von Humboldt sold the Prussian Government on the idea that research universities were a tool with which to increase national power, they’ve been publicly funded to pursue precisely those ends.  The definition of “national power”, and the role universities are asked to play in developing it, has of course varied over time and by region.  Nowadays, we talk of power in terms of “national competitiveness”, and universities are supposed to play a role in ensuring that.  But even though competitiveness has been the watchword for going on two decades now, universities still struggle to determine how to fit into that agenda.

So what should they be doing?  To start, it’s important to think about what we mean when we say “national competitiveness”.  It’s not a straightforward concept because nations do not literally compete with one another.  When most people say this, they are really asking: “is our economy growing faster than others?” Or more narrowly, “are we attracting more foreign investment than others?”  And those things depend, effectively, on what happens inside firms.  If firms are financially healthy, then they are hiring, investing, and doing all the sorts of things that make economies hum.  So the big overarching question is: what can universities do to make firms financially healthier?

(Before anyone has conniptions, I’m not saying that this is the only thing universities are for.  I’m saying that if one wants to argue for universities on the basis of increasing national competitiveness, this is the logical conclusion of that argument.)

To simplify things a bit, consider that universities have two sets of outputs: graduates and ideas.  The way graduates help firms is by being more productive.  What that means in practice varies by industry, but in most white-collar jobs it means some combination of: i) being a fast learner, ii) being a good communicator, iii) being able to deal with ambiguity, iv) being able to make decisions without bothering the boss every few minutes (note: public sector employers like this stuff too).  If you’re running a university, or a faculty, or a department, you need to ask yourself: how do our teachers and our curriculum work towards giving students those skills?

The ideas part of this is a bit trickier.  What governments tend to focus on are ideas that lead to patents and licences: notions that are excludable, and can be given or sold to business in ways that allow them to make new products and develop new lines of business.  But the problem is that firm-strengthening ideas pass between academia and firms in a variety of ways.  Silicon Valley, for instance, would never have become what it did if Stanford had focussed on patents and licenses.  Rather, it arose because Stanford embraced the sharing of equipment and ideas, and of professors and entrepreneurs working with each other.

So if you’re running a university the question really should be, “what am I doing to make sure that ideas are flowing between universities and firms faster and more freely?”  That’s not an exercise in increasing publication counts, it’s an exercise in getting people to collaborate with those outside academia.

Where things get even trickier is with the fact that, in some cases, the conduit for sending ideas back and forth between universities and firms is students and graduates themselves.  This is most obviously true in the case of co-op students (which former Waterloo President Jim Downey calls the “human bridge” between universities and firms); but it’s also true in many professions, and even in business, where ideas taught in the classroom eventually seep into everyday practice, as graduates who’ve learned new ways of doing things flood the labour force.

(One area where more of this is desperately needed is in business.  Canadian business on the whole is simply not attuned enough to international markets, which is why there is always pressure to maintain a low dollar so we can pursue the lazy strategy of selling to the Americans.  A greater focus on developing markets in Canadian business schools has to be part of any national competitiveness agenda.)

Again, I’m not arguing that this is a university’s sole purpose.  Arts, culture, and the spirit of free inquiry are all central to university identities.  But if universities want to claim a significant share of public monies (equal to 1% of GDP, last I checked, and that’s not including any research money) on the basis of making the country (or the province) more competitive, these are the kinds of agendas that need to be in play.