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The Globe and Mail: ACADEMIC GLAM: MEET PROFESSOR ZIGGY, CHAIR OF STARDUST

We will Rock U; Canadian universities have plunged giddily into the age of celebrity, poaching big-name academics from rival schools to head flashy new foundations and to attract students and donors. But does it hurt serious scholarship and intellectual exchange when you turn the ivory tower into a platform for superstars? John Allemang investigates

2 February 2008
The Globe and Mail
F1
English
2008 CTVglobemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Far from the ivory towers, in a world that Northrop Frye would never recognize as his own, two bald, silver-painted musclemen flex their protruding pecs and buttocks before a captivated black-tie crowd. Naked but for streamlined Speedos that reveal as much as they conceal, the statuesque artists from Cirque du Soleil perform a deliciously languid acrobatic ballet that fills the stadium-sized banquet hall of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre with the potent perfume of homoerotic physicality.

Richard Florida, controversial inventor of the “gay index” recipe for urban success, must feel right at home.

There are 1,600 overachieving partygoers in this dressed-up, silk-wrapped concrete bunker who have come to nibble on smoked salmon and arugula, sip Niagara merlot and hear Mr. Florida give the keynote speech at the 120th annual dinner of the Toronto Board of Trade.

But as the sexually charged warm-up act surely indicates, the recently hired director of the $120-million Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, “one of the world’s leading public intellectuals on economic competitiveness” (to quote his website), is not your typical university lecturer. When a hyper-agitated electric violinist named Dr. Draw takes to the stage and thrashes his way across the jumbo video screens that permeate the cavernous dining hall, the dusty libraries and cash-starved classrooms of the old economy seem far, far away.

But this is just the prelude to the evening’s star performer, symbol of the refreshed face of Canadian academe – a tanned, perfectly coiffed globetrotter who puts chief executive officers and policy-makers at ease with his charismatic visions of the coming prosperity.

When he strides onto the stage, to the retro-cool keyboard notes of a tune aptly titled The In Crowd, Mr. Florida sounds nothing like a traditional professor. Northrop Frye, for example, rarely spoke of himself as “we,” as Mr. Florida is inclined to do, being careful to acknowledge his glamorous wife, Rana, who runs his business operations.

He mentions CEOs such as Jack Welch and Carly Fiorina, with whom he “got to share stories.” He plugs his new book, Who’s Your City?, explaining why where we choose to live is the most important decision in our lives. He gives out his e-mail address and, sensing that a crowd softened up by Dr. Draw could get impatient with too much theorizing, he makes jokes about his own fluent wordiness (“I’m a professor – I come from the Fidel Castro school of public speaking, which means you’re probably dying for a drink”).

To call Richard Florida merely a researcher in urban planning would be to diminish his much-sought-after message that leveraging “the creative class” is the best way to validate a city’s aspiration to greatness.

No, this is definitely an academic superstar in his element, a leader of the new breed of attention-getting, money-attracting celebrities who are changing the way universities approach their intellectual mission.

When the University of Waterloo poached bestselling political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon away from the University of Toronto this month, to help create the Balsillie School of International Affairs (drawing on a $33-million donation from BlackBerry pioneer James Balsillie), or when the University of British Columbia wooed away University of Colorado Nobel Prize winner Carl Wieman to undertake a $10-million study of science education, they likewise were recognizing a fundamental truth of higher learning in the global economy: If you seek status, go for the stars.

Even universities, it turns out, are not immune to the modern obsession with celebrities. For Peter Munk, chairman of Barrick Gold Corp. and the lead donor to the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies, the shift to an academic star system makes perfect sense. “You get more publicity, more recognition, more fundraising. It may be unfair, but that’s how the world works.”

It’s certainly how the university world is working now, even in the social sciences and humanities, which traditionally were viewed as lacking the commercial clout that makes investing in scientific and medical superstars an easy business decision.

“The star treatment is happening to younger people much faster,” notes Linda Hutcheon, who holds the honorific title of University Professor at the University of Toronto. “They’re just getting tenure and already they’re living in the fast lane of academe. Publish a good book, and you’ll find you’re being invited to give a talk at Yale and Harvard.”

Academic administrators now readily acknowledge that the rules have changed: Aided significantly by a Canadian dollar that is trading at par with the U.S., they have become much more aggressive in the hunt for talent as intellectual pursuits are globalized and international rankings determine an institution’s ability to recruit students and to solicit public and private funding, both of which are proving much more responsive to name-brand academics.

“We don’t hide the fact that it’s a coup for us to attract a Nobel Prize winner,” says John Hepburn, UBC’s vice-president of research.

The UBC website devotes a separate page to trumpeting the university’s ascent in a number of independent ratings systems, and the hiring (or “poaching,” as it’s known in the world of academic recruitment) of a Carl Wieman can only enhance the university’s upward aspirations – even as it is being questioned for spending millions on a physicist who has stopped doing research in his field.

“Here’s a case of a university paying big money to a Nobel laureate who’s not even teaching physics,” says Jim Turk of the Canadian Association of University Teachers. “Now, he’s a professor of education, but that’s not what he won his prize for.”

Still, a Nobel’s a Nobel. Academic insiders may know that the difference between a prize winner and the runner-up is infinitesimal, in physics as at the Olympics, but to the wider world it’s what turns a good research school into a great one – by its mere presence, apparently.

A tad more American?

Thomas (Tad) Homer-Dixon doesn’t have a Nobel Prize to his name, but the wide-ranging political scientist has won the Governor-General’s Literary Award for The Ingenuity Gap, a book that analyzed the failure of conventional thinking in an increasingly complex world. In some traditional academic circles, that kind of acclaim in itself is enough to make him suspect. “His big ideas go in one ear and out the other,” one deep-thinking colleague says dismissively.

Mr. Homer-Dixon himself acknowledges his sense of isolation at the University of Toronto as the George Ignatieff Chair of Peace and Conflict Studies: “I never felt like I had an intellectual community there.”

Academic superstars need attention in order to flourish. So when the highly entrepreneurial University of Waterloo came calling, prizing the international reach of his work and reputation, Mr. Homer-Dixon was predisposed to listen. “They’re so interdisciplinary, just like I am. For the first time, I feel like I’m in the same kind of culture. There’s an omnivorous appetite for ideas and knowledge, and that to me is like oxygen.”

Enriched oxygen, in this case. While Waterloo officials say they are not paying Mr. Homer-Dixon a premium to leave Toronto, the associated perks, benefits and general ego-coddling are significant.

“It becomes a question of where you can make a more significant impact,” says Amit Chakma, the university’s academic vice-president. “Here’s an upstart place, it’s innovative, and Tad gets to have an important role in shaping an institution that’s not just a dream but is backed by one of Canada’s most successful entrepreneurs.”

Mr. Homer-Dixon will play a large part in selecting both big-name research professors and promising graduate students for the new Balsillie School.

In return, Mr. Chakma says, “we’ll use Tad’s name as an example to bring other top scholars to Waterloo. This sends notice to the academic community that we mean business.”

Thanks to Waterloo’s energetic pursuit, Mr. Homer-Dixon ought to feel much more wanted than he was at U of T. Yet he is something of a reluctant superstar. “This whole brouhaha surrounding my move struck me and members of my family as bizarre,” he says on his cellphone, while in transit from a conference in North Carolina. “But I suppose it is a reflection of the Americanization of the Canadian academic world.

“I actually wrote about this star system in The Ingenuity Gap. In a global economy, where information can travel across the World Wide Web without friction and people have the ability to relocate relatively easily, those who are identified as best-of-category can market themselves across a wider geographical area. People get bid up, as a result, but the difference between the first and second rank is often minuscule and arbitrary. I’m not sure that having academic stars is a good thing, even though in this case I may benefit.”

Well, we are Canadian, with a lingering sense of egalitarianism and an underfunded (but affordable) public education system that cannot compare with the big-bucks attitude of the well-endowed private U.S. universities. We do not take naturally to an academic star system – and indeed, whatever the privileges of rank accorded to Canadian stars and foreigners lured here, they do not compare with what is currently available at the upper tier of American universities.

Waterloo requires the Homer-Dixons of this world to teach a minimum of two courses, but at a Stanford or a Duke, superstars can avoid teaching altogether, provided that they bring in enough research funding, lure a suitable number of easily impressed graduate students, publish dependable bestsellers or deliver face time in the media and at international conferences. It is often said of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government (with which the would-be world-class Balsillie School is already comparing itself) that at any given time, half of its highly esteemed professoriate is on a plane flight from one conference or consultancy to another.

“We can’t afford to have 50 per cent of our faculty up in the air,” Mr. Chakma admits.

Star systems and bidding wars make much more sense south of the border than they do here – or did until Canadian universities started figuring out ways to get around their funding constraints. As university business schools, for example, find ways to deregulate their tuition, it becomes more logical to lure a guru like Richard Florida, knowing that his name (to say nothing of his non-stop blogging) will reach a global network of well-heeled applicants.

“I don’t like being considered an academic rock star,” says Mr. Florida, sounding more and more like a low-profile Canadian than a go-getting native of Newark, N.J. But even though he rejects the label – because it implies an absence of basic seriousness and academic purpose – he recognizes the phenomenon, one that he believes will soon overwhelm what he calls “the quasi-socialist system” of university rewards.

Seven-figure scholars

“There’s a need in this world for public intellectuals,” he says. “Which is why, 20 years from now, star professors are going to be making a seven-figure salary. If you compare the superstar phenomenon in art or music or sports, there are academics who are creating something much more saleable.”

And then there are all the other academics who are making brilliant discoveries that have no intrinsic market value, at least not in the culture we inhabit, such as the classics professor who can decode ancient Greek mathematical equations from withered fragments of long-buried Egyptian papyrus. In a more hierarchical, star-driven academic world, where what is saleable becomes more valuable, what does not sell is in greater danger of being neglected and discarded.

This is where disinterested public funding is meant to pick up the slack, but even government agencies now feel the pressure to reward research that is demonstrably practical, useful and, if you believe the desperate sales pitches, profitable.

Is that such a bad thing? Jim Turk, of the university teachers association, thinks so. “Increasingly, the federal government is acting in a manner consistent with the private-sector approach,” he says. He points to the 2,000 Canada Research Chairs endowed by Ottawa at a cost of $300-million a year to help universities arrest the brain drain of their top academics and attract big names to Canada from the rest of the world: “Only 20 per cent of the chairs are in the social sciences and humanities, even though half of our students study in those areas and half of our faculty teach there.”

When Chad Gaffield, president of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), hears complaints about non-useful research projects, he tells what he calls “the Sept. 10, 2001, story ” – as in, “You’re funding work on the 15th-century Middle East. Who cares about that?”

But even SSHRC accepts the enhanced value of big-name researchers and the combination of money and talent they can attract. “I wouldn’t trade for a minute what we’ve got for the environment on campuses 30 or 40 years ago. I’m really energized by the environment on campuses today.”

Daniel J. Levitin knows about this new energy if anyone does. He is a former California session musician and record producer who now – take a deep breath – runs the Laboratory for Musical Perception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University as a James McGill Professor and is the holder of the Bell Chair in the Psychology of Electronic Communication.

He is also the author of the New York Times bestseller This Is Your Brain on Music, lists seven other academic affiliations on his website, is sponsored by the likes of Sony and Apple, earns appreciative blurbs from Sting and David Byrne and still finds time to post his iPod playlist for anyone who wants to know what a superstar McGill professor listens to in the new economy. (Answer: a worrying amount of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.)

If anyone should be an expert on the world of the academic rock star, it’s Mr. Levitin, who is reached by phone on a shopping expedition to The Bay. “Do I feel like a rock star?” he asks. “Not really. I certainly like the opportunities I’ve had to talk to the public about the brain and thought in general since the book became successful. But I’m just doing the same thing I’ve been doing for the last 10 years, the daily struggle to get students to think the way I want. The only difference is that more people are willing to hear what I have to say.”

There are perks, of course – a high enough salary to let him turn down the half-dozen offers he has had to leave McGill, the resources for a medium-sized lab and a cross-appointment to McGill’s music school, where he gets to teach a course on his pet subject, the philosophy and aesthetics of music production (with special reference to the “alchemy of interaction between recording technology, art and the artists responsible for its creation”).

But that by no means makes him an overprivileged superstar, and when he has had enough of the rock-star references, he answers with a personal story. “I was with the Police as a guest for part of their tour. The three of them had read my book, contacted me and set up a meeting in Montreal, at which point they invited me to come on tour. You know, the outside world sees the limos and the fancy hotels, but Sting is playing and practising four hours a day. They all have personal trainers; they’re always working out. They’re not lounging around or getting high. It’s not the hedonist life all the time.”

The message is clear: It’s hard work being a superstar. So don’t take these rockers so lightly. They’re giving it their all.

John Allemang is a feature writer for The Globe and Mail.

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