Doctoral Education and the Workings of Canadian Graduate Schools: A Differentiated Tier within Canadian Universities Facing the Challenges of Tension‐driven Functions

Abstract

After a short historical background to Canadian doctoral education, the author addresses the differentiation laws, internal (between undergraduate and graduate studies) and external (strong concentration within a limited number of universities) to institutions, which govern all of North American graduate and doctoral studies. He then details Graduate School functions for twelve leading Canadian universities. They tend overall to assume quite similar central roles, promoting institutional priorities and leadership for graduate studies and exercising quality control functions, enhancing criteria of excellence. A historical drift do show Graduate Schools' tension‐driven functions and very existence are constantly at stake. Well implemented on the academic terrain, Canadian Graduate Schools are key institutional faculties for today's graduate studies, confronting the many challenges of the socially distributed knowledge production system underpinning modern societies.

Notes

1. Their respective titles were evocative: Achieving Excellence: Investing in People, Knowledge and Opportunities. Canada's Innovation Strategy (Industry Canada, 2002) and Knowledge Matters: Skills and Learning for Canadians (Industry Canada and Human Resource Development Canada, 2004).

2. The University of Toronto created a PhD programme in 1897 and granted a first degree in physics in 1900; McGill University created a PhD programme in 1906 and granted its first degree in 1924 (Gingras, 1991, pp. 46 and 58).

3. These institutions are: the University of Toronto (Toronto, Ontario), McGill University (Montreal Québec), the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, British Columbia), the Université de Montréal (Montréal, Québec), the University of Alberta (Edmonton, Alberta), and the Université Laval (Québec, Québec).

4. To the six Universities already identified we have to add: the University of Calgary (Calgary, Alberta), the University of Ottawa (Ottawa, Ontario), the University of Western Ontario (London, Ontario), the University of Waterloo (Waterloo, Ontario), York University (Toronto, Ontario), Université du Québec à Montréal (Montreal, Quebec), Queen's University (Kingston, Ontario), and McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario) to get to more than three quarters of all PhD enrolments and degrees conferred.

5. For more on this see Maheu (2007, pp. 122–124, 2006), Williams (2008), Cameron (2004, 2005), and Prichard (2000).

6. For the total list of these 14 Canadian Universities see footnotes 3 and 4 above.

7. At both the University of Toronto and McGill University a Graduate School or Faculty of Graduate Studies had been created the same year, that is 1922 (Gingras, 1991, pp. 58–59).

8. In the fall of 2005 and winter of 2006 the author submitted a questionnaire “The Graduate School: Its Responsibilities And Functions; a Questionnaire” to the Deans of twelve Canadian universities (University of Toronto, McGill University, University of British Columbia, Université de Montréal, the University of Alberta, Université Laval, University of Calgary, University of Ottawa, University of Western Ontario, York University, Queen's University, and McMaster University). The rate of response was 100 per cent. The information presented in the following paragraphs details the roles and functions of these Graduate Schools as of the winter of 2006, and are based on the data collected through this questionnaire, which in some cases has been followed up by personal exchanges and interviews with a number of Deans in order to clarify more specific points. Since then, to our knowledge, two of these institutions have gone through a review process of at least part of the roles performed by their respective Graduate Schools. In one of these institutions major changes were brought to the role of the Graduate Schools with respect to interdisciplinary studies, up to then regrouped within a specific academic unit. In the second one, on the basis of arguable decentralisation policies (for a discussion of the irrelevant decentralisation policies within research universities see below), crucial roles of the Graduate Schools pertaining to academic issues (admissions, programmes, and degrees) are in the process of being transferred to basic academic units, while the Graduate School keeps its function of institutional leadership for graduate studies. Overall, these changes do not modify the global major trends detailed in the following pages with respect to Canadian Graduate Schools' roles and functions.

9. Actually, to highlight the crucial importance of this function in their overall institutional mandate, some Graduate Schools were recently renamed Graduate and Post‐doctoral Studies Faculty.

10. Within some North American Universities Deans of Graduate Studies will also serve as Vice‐principals Research. This trend though seems to be less frequent than it was before which might have to do with more complex functions a Vice‐principal Research would have to assume in a context where university research is more and more now open to patents ownership and intellectual property rights exercised by Universities.

11. In the fall of 2001 the Canadian Association for Graduate Studies (CAGS) (the equivalent of the American Council of Graduate Schools), the members of which are Graduate Studies academic leaders within Canadian Universities, Graduate Student Associations and Research funding Agencies, held an international conference on the future of graduate studies in Montreal. A CAGS's (2001) publication, Brave New Worlds, Graduate Education for the 21st Century, presents the main outcomes of this conference. Hence, the most important challenges and required innovations for twenty‐first century graduate education were identified.