Roderick Fraser
Dr Roderick FraserConvocation Address
University of Alberta, November 16, 2005
Eminent Chancellor
Madam President
Mr Chair of the Board of Governors
Graduands, Friends, and Family
Thank you all for your warm welcome on this beautiful big blue and clear Alberta sky day.
As I have prepared my remarks, I have thought back to the early 1960s as I finished my Masters Degree in Economics and prepared to go off to the London School of Economics.
My overwhelming recollection was of confidence, excitement, some apprehension, and how lucky I was to have persuaded my spouse, now of 42 years, to marry me and set off on what as been such a marvellous journey.
To each of you, my fellow graduands, I hope that you today have that same sense of excitement and promise. I wish you the best of luck in whatever you choose to do.
Professor Doug Owram, thank you for your generous introduction. I have been honoured and humbled to have been President of this wonderful University whose enormous potential has been unleashed by the pursuit of our aggressive bold vision and thus foremost on my mind is thanking so many of our University of Alberta family who strove so hard to generate our powerful momentum:
- Students, faculty, and staff, Board, Senate, and Alumni Council, who put their shoulders to the wheel during the mid-1990s when 21% was cut in our provincial government grant. Our community's response to our call to action. Pocketbooks opened and we collectively raised more than $450 million in private donations and our University is now one of the most partnered in Canada.
- The Federal Government and especially our Deputy Prime Minister, Anne McLellan, but especially for the support of the transformational National Institute of Nanotechnology.
- Our Provincial Government: of special importance to me was the unprecedented positive Throne Speech and Budget in Spring, 2005.
- Doug, your superb direction of the implementation of our bold Faculty Renewal program, successfully launched in early 1995 in the teeth of government retrenchment without government support. The work of the Deans, the Department Chairs, staff, and students led to the outcome of well over 50% of our faculty newly hired in the last ten years.
I want finally to thank my fellow graduates, our students. Over my ten-and-a-half years as President, there was never a time that I was not buoyed by them:
- the white glove ceremony for Dean Emeritus Lorne Tyrrell and his colleagues three years ago;
- the successive Top Ten rankings of our science students in the annual world-wide computer programming competition;
- the powerful international success of our Faculty of Nursing;
- the enormous success of our graduate students in national and international competitions;
- the repeated successes of our students from Agriculture, Forestry, and Home Economics in the annual North American-wide competition in range management and plant identification;
- the absolutely stellar performance of our pharmacy students in the national examinations.
To each and all who have been and are part of our vibrant University of Alberta community: thank you.
I would now like to turn to some reflections on "equal opportunity" and the role of education. More and more research is emphasizing the vital importance of a child's earliest years in creating or failing to create such opportunity.
First, I believe equality of opportunity is both a necessary condition for a free and democratic society and an indicator of the robustness of that society.
Secondly, the absence of equality of opportunity means that the talents of many individuals are not developed — with often traumatic impacts both on such individuals and the community at large.
Thirdly, I believe the marked absence of equality of opportunity in a community predisposes it to long-run instability. To ensure peace and security, the distinction between the quality of life of "haves" and "have-nots" simply cannot become too large.
Fourthly, I note that the values of our University are a "one-to-one map" on equality of opportunity.
The focus of our first president, Henry Marshall Tory, on a university dedicated to the uplifting of the "whole" people. Premier Alexander Rutherford's articulation of the necessity of our province to leave nothing undone, "to leave no stone unturned in order to ensure that each boy and girl had the opportunity for the fullest and most complete education."
How close are we to equality of opportunity and what might be done to better achieve it?
I have chosen literacy levels as my proxy for equality of opportunity. I do so because:
-literacy levels are strongly associated with life expectancy
- inequality in literacy is strongly associated with inequality in income
- literacy is strongly associated with poverty
- literacy is strongly associated with serious health problems
So where do we stand in Canada in terms of literacy levels?
The most recent OECD study indicates that Canada stands in the middle of the pack similar to Australia and the United States. Some 42% of the adult population in Canada is judged to be in the lowest literacy levels 1 and 2.
To give a concrete example of what this might mean, it has recently been reported for two American public hospitals that "a third of patients could not read and understand basic health-related materials and 42% could not understand directions for taking medication on an empty stomach."
One can speculate that the 42% of Canadian adults in literacy levels 1 and 2 would have little chance of completing high school.
I believe we can infer that in Canada, we are some distance away from equality of opportunity.
So what can we do? What should we do?
To answer these questions, we need to consider the key determinants of the potential to become literate.
The focus of programs supported by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and of many researchers has been the central role played by brain development. Many scientists now refer to the "wiring of an individual's brain" for learning and language.
This wiring of the brain begins to take place before birth and thus, before language and cognition.
Sensing pathways of the brain for vision, hearing and language seem to develop before birth and by two years of age, the wiring of the brain is all but complete.
The list of conditions that dramatically constrain the development of the brain and its potential include:
- the absence or near absence of human touch, love, sound;
- the presence of child abuse, drugs and alcohol use, and abuse on the part of the mother and adult care-giver;
- poor nutrition
Conversely, we have emerging evidence that parenting programs and pre-school programs that begin at birth, coupled with special programs in the primary grades, can do much to help otherwise disadvantaged children to achieve their potential.
So where does that take me?
I would like to take a leaf out of the policy binder of one Governor of Scotland over 300 years ago. He was given the freedom to establish a school in every parish of Scotland and to ensure that each school had a teacher for the purpose of educating literate citizens.
So what is the analogue for better ensuring equality of opportunity?
It is that there be established in every community an "early childhood development and parenting centre"; that such a centre be appropriately staffed and resourced; that it have a mandate to encourage, persuade, cajole, even bribe every pregnant mother, especially those least advantaged (the have-nots) to become involved at conception; that it have a variety of programs for pregnant mothers that are some combination of health care, pre-school education, nutritional parenting and counselling; and that these be combined with preschool programs for the newly born.
In support of this proposal I note the work of Professor J. Heckman, the year 2000 Nobel Prize-winner in Economics. He has demonstrated that the private and social rates of return of investments in preschool programs such as these are greater than for any other educational program. He has said, "We cannot afford to postpone investing in children until they become adults nor can we wait until they reach school — a time when it may be too late to intervene." He thus joins three other Nobel Economics Prize winners — Professor Jan Tinbergen, Robert W. Fogel, and Amartya Sen — in underlining the importance of investment in human development in early childhood.
Secondly, I note that a number of countries have achieved much greater success than Canada in reducing the percentage of adults in literacy levels 1 and 2. Sweden, for example, is at 23%, about one half of Canada's 42%. Interestingly, going back some 35 years ago, the Scandinavian countries were all embarked on establishing in every community "public" health clinics focused on parenting and well-baby care. Today, according to the most recent OECD study, they are characterized by the world's lowest levels of literacy inequality and the lowest levels of income inequality.
Let me conclude by issuing a call for reflection and thence a call to action to each of you in your professional lives as care-givers, in your careers as research scientists, in your role as knowledgeable and responsible citizens, in your capacity as leaders of tomorrow.