Are leading Canadian research universities doing enough to prepare students for life after graduation? Robert Gibbs wonders if they could be doing better by getting undergraduate students more involved and engaged in original research.
Gibbs, a professor with the Faculty of Arts & Science’s Department of Philosophy, cross appointed to the Department for the Study of Religion, has just authored his latest book, What Could a University Be? Revolutionary Ideas for the Future.
“This is a book that people asked me to write,” he says. “I've been talking about these new ideas for 10 years.”
Drawing on philosophical ideas and the history of universities, Gibbs proposes a model that emphasizes teaching students how to conduct research throughout their entire undergraduate education, becoming knowledge creators rather than passive recipients receiving instruction.
“This is an attempt to think about how research universities could be more than they are now. A research university should be teaching all of its students how to do research. That should be the thing around which everything else revolves.”
Currently, Gibbs believes the current research university model promotes recruiting and grooming a small percentage of students to pursue graduate degrees. “And if the graduate students do really well, they become professors,” he says. “But very few undergraduates become professors.”
In fact, the vast majority will pursue careers in a wide spectrum of sectors and industries.
“If we dramatically increase the number of people learning how to do research with the anticipation that they will not end up in a university, they will wind up doing all sorts of things that could truly benefit them and society.”
While some educators see undergraduates as naïve and inexperienced, Gibbs sees them as a valuable resource with untapped potential, though he admits that they have a lot to learn about critical methods of inquiry and research.
For example, an undergraduate student population has the strongest connection to the world outside of campus when compared to postdocs and faculty, making them keen observers of changes and trends in society.
“In the book, in relation to an idea of permeability, I talk about how they study at university, and then they go home, and they talk to people, and they bring stuff home, and then they also bring stuff back in. It's a two-way exchange. They have more contact with those outside than anybody else.”
As well, he believes this young population is the most adept at being future-focused, meaning they are always looking at issues likely to arise in the future — issues of significant importance in a non-academic setting.
“There must be a better way to build a subway,” says Gibbs. “There might be a cure for cancer. Maybe we could do a better job of taking care of the homeless, tackling climate change, building more sustainable batteries.
“There are clients who would like researchers to find things like this out. Sometimes there’s a corporation that wants to pay people to explore this. Sometimes it's the government that wants them to do it.”
The ideas in the book came from not only Gibbs’ decades of teaching, but from his serving on various research committees and research advisory boards for the University of Toronto as well as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).
As well, it was his serving as the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute that he witnessed the benefits of humanities undergraduates involved in various research projects.
“That was not common in the landscape of humanities centres and institutes around the world,” he says. “What we got was a flow of the ideas for research coming not just from the professor to the postdoc to the graduate student. We saw a flow going the other way from undergraduate students. Those experiences were the key to why I started thinking this way.”
As well, Gibbs asks readers to revisit the purpose of a university — what it’s meant to do for its students and for society at large.
“Part of the premise of the book is that we haven't done a particularly good job of articulating what we’re doing in society and why it's beneficial. Just getting people ‘job ready’ is not an adequate explanation, because there are all kinds of ways to get job ready.
“In fact, if you're entering a trade, it would be much better to be in a vocational program and get an apprenticeship than to go university.”
Though Gibbs emphasizes his book is one of ideas, he’s heartened by several initiatives at U of T that mirror his thinking.
“A lot of the things I'm encouraging or even applauding are being done at U of T,” he says. “There are all sorts of examples. I was on the academic board of U of T, so I was reviewing programs.
“I ran into this unbelievable review of the psychology program at UTM which took first-year students and gave them a lab in which they learn how to do research. Over the course of the year, undergraduates learn not just how other people have done research, they design their own experiments, crunch the data and write it up.”
Such approaches, feels Gibbs, harness the curiosity and passion of future problem-solvers who are best suited for tackling today’s and tomorrow’s challenges.
“It would be great if there was a fundamental interest in improving their education and building these models of learning around logic of inquiry and how to do research,” says Gibbs.
“It reflects the key question for education: what would be the best that we could do for these students? By giving them the best kind of education we would be giving the greatest benefit to our world, which would justify why we're here as an institution.”