t’s a Monday morning in May on the University of Alberta campus, and a crowd is gathering inside the soaring, glass-walled atrium of the seven-storey Katz Group-Rexall Centre for Pharmacy and Health Research. With most students already gone for the summer, it’s not a flash mob or an outlawed hazing ritual, and anyway these people are too old and too well dressed. And the Tim Hortons kiosk isn’t giving away free coffee, although that would be nice. Looking closer, there are telltale signs: nervous-looking executive assistants with clipboards and Day-Timers; press secretaries giving out folders of PR materials; a line of photographers poised in front of a portable podium; several groups of people in business attire, chatting or fondling their BlackBerrys. Really, it can only be one thing — a rare and special thing for any university in 2010. Some arm of government is giving out an enormous amount of money.

Introductions are made, a federal minister delivers a prepared statement, and someone else says a few words. Then Indira Samarasekera, the president of the University of Alberta, takes the podium, and the whole atrium brightens, if only slightly. She is glowing, and why wouldn’t she be? Today she gets to claim a $40-million jackpot from the federal government’s new Canada Excellence Research Chairs (CERC) initiative, a $190-million recruitment drive to lure nineteen of the world’s leading science and technology researchers to Canadian universities for at least the next seven years. It is one of the biggest-ever attempts to launch Canada into the major leagues of science. “This is a fantastic day for Canada,” she says with unrehearsed glee, “and the University of Alberta in particular.” U of A managed to get twice as many research chairs — and twice as much money — as any other university in Canada, doubling the University of Toronto’s haul, and leaving far behind its rival to the south, the University of Calgary, which received nothing.

To those who know Samarasekera, this victory comes as no surprise. While U of T still dominates Canadian universities in fundraising for research, U of A is the fastest growing of the nation’s top five schools. Since becoming the university’s first female president in 2005, she has made it clear that it will not settle for being among the best in Canada; her goal is to make it one of the top twenty public universities in the world by 2020. The CERC results reflect these global ambitions, as do the construction cranes scattered around the campus. In recent years, U of A has raised $1.4 billion for several major projects, which has already helped it improve its international rankings and solicit additional research funding.

All this despite the harsh realities of the global recession. Thanks to investment losses and provincial funding freezes, the university posted a deficit of $8.2 million in 2008 and a record $60.5 million in 2009, and it projects one of $14.8 million for 2011. The Katz centre remains unfinished, as do several other nearby buildings, including the Mazankowski Alberta Heart Institute, either because of the university’s deficit, or because no research funding yet exists to populate them. The university is betting on its ability to fill the space with gainful projects sometime in the future.

In the meantime, Samarasekera’s goal for U of A to become “Top 20 by 2020” remains very much on hold. The university will see across-the-board cutbacks of 5 percent in all departments next year, and even the president and the senior administration have taken “furlough” days (unpaid days off meant to cut costs). Undergraduate class sizes are growing as contract instructors are laid off. Student food bank usage has increased an estimated 20 percent in the past year, thanks to tuition hikes and rising living costs. When the Edmonton Journal reported in June that the university was expected to lose at least 400 staff and faculty to layoffs and early retirements before the year’s end, the university’s administrators objected, suggesting that the figure would be closer to 250.

None of this is unique to Alberta; every university in Canada is under stress. “Every politician in the country is talking about the importance of an educated population and the importance of post-secondary education,” says James Turk, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers. “But the proportion of funding for our institutions [from government] is declining significantly, and it is having to be met from private sources, primarily from students and their families.” The President, as people at the university often call Samarasekera, agrees that there are challenges, but she remains unapologetic about having lofty goals and taking risks. “The establishment of nineteen CERC chairs across the country is a clear signal of where Canada is heading,” she tells the crowd at the Katz centre. “And that is to the forefront of the global research community.”

Later, back in her office, a sweeping half-oval room lined with oak and windows, she explains why Canadians need to look beyond a few unpleasant years of recession. Like it or not, Canada is now part of a twenty-first-century version of the arms race: instead of amassing missiles, countries are now outbidding one another for smart people, lavishing millions on high-tech facilities and granting programs designed to drive innovation. France has already built much of its $5.9-billion (US) super-university, China is mere months away from the world supercomputing record; and the United States, despite its troubles, still claims the highest number of top-rated universities on the planet. In a single generation, she says, South Korea went from having one of the lowest GDPs to one of the highest in the world — “and it was [because of] significant investments in education and entrepreneurship.” By comparison, Canada’s $190-million splurge on a global headhunting mission, in which half of the prize researchers were lured away from the United States, may not be enough to make us competitive with nations that are investing billions more, and that equate future prosperity with advances in education, science, and technology.

Universities are responding to this new reality in two ways. On the one hand, they are reinventing themselves as agents of change in a world clamouring for solutions. Indeed, we cannot cure cancer, respond to global warming, or even maintain our current standard of living without thinkers, researchers, trained professionals, and educated citizens. On the other hand, universities are increasingly defined by the commercial forces around them, including governments that actively reward growth-friendly research and scholarship. University campuses are therefore becoming communities of academic haves and have-nots, the various disciplines divided by their perceived contributions to GDP and their capacity to attract funding. The result isn’t just classrooms named for corporate benefactors, which is old news, but a narrowing of society’s field of inquiry. A pay-per-view style of sponsored research gives those who have the money the power to determine the questions being asked, and sometimes to profit from the answers as well. So it isn’t surprising that views about Samarasekera diverge. Depending on whom you ask, she is either Canada’s bright future, or a threat to all that is sacred and good about higher education.

An Engineer from Jaffna

ndira Samarasekera has been bridging worlds since she was a child. She was born in 1952 into a Tamil family in Sri Lanka, though her earliest memories are not of Ceylon, as it was then called, but of England. When she was three, her father, a surgeon, took his young family to the United Kingdom for a period of post-graduate work. Consequently, her early impressions were very different from those of her peers back home: ballet, English gardens, very proper schooling, and the full gamut of Western technology, including television. But with this worldliness came challenges. Returning home three years later, she had to become trilingual in order to reintegrate into post-colonial Sri Lanka’s complex and divided society.

At the time, the country was drifting toward a lengthy civil war that would displace nearly 500,000 people and leave an estimated 70,000 dead. After the first countrywide riots broke out in 1958, permanently dividing the nation, Samarasekera’s family fled to the city of Jaffna, in the Tamil-dominated north, nearly losing their lives in the process. “We felt it would be safer for us in the north,” she says. “It was an incredible place to grow up: culture, hard-working people, extreme climate — it reminds me a little bit of Alberta.” However, the influx of Tamils attempting to escape violence meant that her young world was complicated: “There was a growing political tension, although there was a great deal of goodwill at the population level. My best friends are Sinhalese, and I [eventually] married one.”

She was the eldest of four children, and while none of the women in her family had ever been to university, it seemed clear early on that her father, in particular, “was absolutely determined that his daughters for sure — obviously his sons — four of us would receive a university education.” She excelled at math and physics, and became fascinated with the notion of developing technology to improve her world amid the strife of politics and religion. What would the world be without airplanes that never fall out of the sky? she wondered. After prep schooling in Colombo at the Ladies’ College, which featured debating and athletics, she enrolled at the University of Ceylon, and in 1974 became the first woman in her country to become a mechanical engineer. But she had to push her way forward: “I wanted to do mechanical, and they hadn’t allowed any women up to then,” she says. “I went in and said, ‘I want to do mechanical, and you are going to have to let me.’ I think that helped me overcome natural fears of operating at the frontier, of pushing boundaries.”

At about this time, Sri Lanka passed laws making it more difficult for Tamils to enter university and find public employment. That, she says, was when “young Tamils began to mobilize around the notion of having to fight for their rights and for their independence — which to me was writing on the wall.” An early incarnation of the Tamil Tigers had emerged in the early 1970s, and they were already experimenting with bombings and other tactics that would help define modern terrorism. Samarasekera loves her country — she still returns at least once every three years — but she knew she had to leave. After a brief stint as a maintenance engineer at a Shell oil refinery (“It was very boring”), she was awarded a Fulbright scholarship. “So I got married at age twenty-three to a fellow mechanical engineer, and we came to the United States.” To the University of California at Davis, to be precise, and then on to the University of British Columbia for her doctorate. Along the way, she had two children, one of whom grew up to study law, and the other, medicine.

She became a Canadian citizen in 1980, amid a challenging period of balancing her young family and a demanding career. At one point, she was on the brink of quitting her doctorate studies, until her thesis adviser pulled her aside. “You have no right to do that,” he said. “You have been given all these talents. Don’t waste that.” Upon graduation, she could only find a temporary teaching contract at UBC, but in time it led to a tenure track position, and she became only the second woman appointed to the university’s engineering faculty. Her marriage eventually failed, but her career thrived: she went on to have a major influence on the international steel industry, using mathematical models to predict and correct subtle defects, which facilitated major advances in quality and efficiency. After twenty years, the list of consultancies, grants, and publications on her CV is eleven single-spaced pages long. She guesses that she has visited more than 100 steel plants around the world, including one in Alberta with no women’s washroom.