Broader Excellence is Needed.

The Alberta Ministry of Innovation and Science (headed by Victor Doerksen) announced this week partnerships with three large computer technology conglomerates: HP, IBM, and Microsoft. These companies will invest significant amounts of money and efforts to advance various Centres of Excellence. These centres are located around the province, and they affect many post-secondary research institutions, including the Banff Centre. This is good news for Alberta, and for Alberta students.

Asleep at the wheel seems to be the newly minted Ministry of Advanced Education under the leadership of Dave Hancock. Their grandest announcement is the $500 bonuses for new born babies --which may be a good thing, but it is hardly the stuff that will rock advanced education in Alberta. If the point of creating a new ministry was to showcase the government's plan to advance universities and colleges in Alberta, somebody forgot to tell Mr. Hancock.

The Microsoft announcement caught my eye:

Students at the centres will gain the expertise necessary to help Alberta's energy manufacturing sector reduce operational costs, improve customer service and gain a better understanding of globalization and outsourcing.

I am not doubting that in reducing operational costs and outsourcing one can come to understand some aspects of globalization. But I would challenge the blanket statement that one would "better understand globalization." In fact, the very creation of these Centres and the partnership of government with industry is an aspect of globalization. And while I am not anti-industry and anti-government (far from that), I do not think that either industry or government have the capacity to detach themselves from their creations, to examine critically the phenomenon in order to reach some kind of beneficial understanding for the public.

This is where Mr. Hancock's department should come in. It would be good to see Hancock encouraging the folks who can ask the questions that would help us understand globalization, industry and technology in a more detached and a more comprehensive fashion. That is where the Ministry of Advanced Education should be present. How about fostering greater understanding of these Centres by funding serious research by social scientists (economists, for example) and humanists (philosophers and ethicists, for example) to ask the questions.