May 29, 1998


 

Brain drain

GEOFF MCMASTER
Folio Staff

When the bidding war over Edmonton Oilers goalie Curtis Joseph starts this summer, his situation will be remarkably similar to many professors at the University of Alberta. As a star goalie who hit his stride with a young team and went on to demonstrate exceptional talent, he has attracted much attention south of the border. Now that he's at the top of his game, it's unlikely the Edmonton franchise will have pockets deep enough to keep him.

While the university may seem like a far cry from the world of professional sports, the competition for talent can be just as fierce. The U of A has already lost several international stars, mainly to more affluent institutions and companies in the U.S. And with the already alarming discrepancy between Canadian and American research funding expected to grow, holding our best and brightest may be the toughest challenge of the next decade.

"You can beat your head against a wall for only so long before you say, 'I'm going where there's more money,'" says Dr. Joel Weiner, associate dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Oral Health Sciences. "We're in a very mobile business where people are always being recruited. They're hot property, like a free agent with the Oilers, and if you can't come up with the money, they'll go where the opportunities are best."

The most competitive disciplines, not surprisingly, are in rapidly growing, high-tech fields such as biotechnology, computing science, and engineering. Perhaps more surprising though, salaries are not the primary incentive for those who leave. What it almost always boils down to, says Weiner, is research funding.

"The dollars available to carry out competitive international research programs are very difficult to get here. So people spend all their time writing grant proposals to try and remain competitive, or they move to the States where they get the money they need to be at the top."

When you consider the Canadian government spends only $9.25 per capita on research compared to $73 in the U.S., says Weiner, it's no wonder running with the international competition can feel like a losing race. And things are likely to get worse before they get better. The U.S. National Institute of Health, for instance, the country's largest medical research body, will increase funding by $1 billion in the next year, and double its $9.5 billion budget over the next five years.

"Ours is now back up to 1994 levels, but that's small potatoes," says Weiner. "We need $500 million more into the system in Canada (immediately)."

Precise figures on just how many of our professors have fled to greener pastures are not available, says Associate VP Research

Dr. Ron Kratochvil. But according to Weiner, statistics don't begin to tell the story anyway, since it is indeed the Curtis Josephs of the academic community we tend to lose.

"If you look at the gross numbers, we've recruited more people than we've lost, but most of those are junior people," says Weiner. "You have to distinguish between total numbers and key people. There is 10-20 per cent of faculty who are leadership -- the university has its reputation because those people are here. Over the past year we've had four or five of those people leave, and that's a significant hit." Major recent losses in medicine include Drs. Susan Rosenberg and Lung-Ji Chang in biochemistry, and Drs. Randy Read and Zygmunt Derewenda in medical microbiology and immunology.

Kratochvil says his big worry is that the U of A will become a "farm team," training junior academics only to watch them head to the major leagues to make their most significant contributions or breakthroughs. "It's going to be a growing problem with us because we have, in the last ten or fifteen years, hired some really top-notch people who are really coming into their own now, and we are losing some of them. And we have a lot of people coming in now that we're going to have to worry about soon."

"As soon as we get through this hiring phase, where we've been given some funding earmarked for start-up for new faculty, we're immediately going to have to go into a retention phase to keep these people."

Acquiring the powerful Cray Origin 2000 computer will no doubt go a long way to raising the university's research profile. In fact, says physics professor Dr. John Samson, the computer has already played a big role in attracting new faculty.

"This gives us an opportunity to be competitive with industry," he says. "In fact we've already had two very good hires in the Faculty of Science where having these new facilities helped expedite the hirings quite a bit."

Administrators agree maintaining state-of-the art research facilities is crucial to plugging the brain drain. That's why the latest batch of proposals for Canadian Foundation for Innovation funding, sent to Ottawa this week, is being so closely monitored by university brass.

Put simply, careers hang in the balance. If big money doesn't come through for some extensive physical renovations and equipment, many professors could soon be packing.

The computing science department, for example, is planning a major expansion in the next five years. Their proposal involves renovating three floors of Athabasca Hall and building a new annex to consolidate its faculty, now scattered among several buildings. So far the department has managed to hang on to its strongest people in one of the most cutthroat sectors of the economy. But without CFI funding, that success story could turn on a dime, says computing science chair Dr. Paul Sorenson.

"We've done fairly well.Last year we were quite successful in terms of filling positions that were open, but over the next five years it's going to be a big thing. I think if we're not able to get the infrastructure the building will provide, and some other things, there could be a pretty big exit here."

According to Kratochvil, the university must adopt a two-pronged strategy to win the recruiting and retention war. Aside from ensuring the best possible research facilities, it must also build "critical masses" to create a stimulating intellectual community of scholars.

"For most disciplines you find that you get a core of strong people, and this tends to attract other strong people." That means "not just hiring here and there, but deciding what areas you're going to build into real areas of excellence."

Amidst all the doom-and-gloom forecasting, however, it's reassuring to know the university sometimes comes out on top in the battle over brains, and occasionally even ends up hiring people back from the U.S. The return of nursing professor Jan Morse from Penn State last year, for instance, is one of several cases where "we're actually reversing the brain drain a bit," says Kratochvil.


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