David Turpin became president of the University of Alberta in July.Amber Bracken/The Globe and Mail
In spite of the downturn and in the face of criticisms, the Alberta government's budget at the end of October boosted spending for postsecondary education. For David Turpin, the new president of the University of Alberta, the money is a welcome recognition that higher education can provide an alternative to jobs in the cyclical oil industry.
Higher education is a sector in which he is heavily invested. Before the University of Alberta, Dr. Turpin, a biologist by training, was president of the University of Victoria for more than a decade. At U of A, he wants to shift the focus from the school's international connections to its local, provincial and national impact.
How to do that while the province's economy sputters is another question.
You will give your official installation speech on Monday. What will you say to the university about how it can help the province right now?
University and postsecondary education in general tend to be countercyclical. As the economy declines, the demand for postsecondary education and university education grows. One of the things that we can do is work with government to make sure there is room within the system for that increased demand.
What is your long view of where the economy goes next?
My maternal great-grandfather was a rancher in southeastern Alberta, and my mom was born in Calgary and went to elementary school there. My maternal grandmother came from a ranching family in Saskatchewan. She moved from Ontario in the late 1800s, spent the first winter in a sod hut and ended up a wheat farming family.
I know the history of the Prairies is all resource-based. The challenge for Alberta is diversifying the economy and preparing for an as yet-undefined future.
When the price of oil was more than $100 (U.S.) a barrel, everyone was looking to Norway's sovereign wealth fund as an example of how to make the most of the boom. Now that the rainy day is here, is it time to revisit that idea?
Norway did it right. They came to Alberta 30 years ago and asked questions about how to set up a sovereign wealth fund and then went away and did exactly what they were told they should do. Now, it's worth over a trillion dollars in assets.
Unfortunately, what we've tended to do in Canada is to take national resource revenues and to expense them, to use the money to cover operating costs, rather than taking the revenues and endowing them so there is inter-generational equity.
You must think about that a fair bit when you walk around on campus.
Yes, generations of students who will live here once the resources are extracted could receive some of the benefits.
What about employers? Have you seen a shift in thinking from them in terms of what they want from new hires – if they're hiring? Just a couple of years ago, a high school grad working in Alberta could earn more than someone with a BA in other parts of the country.
Leaders in industry recognize the role of universities is not to provide industry-ready worker capital. It's to provide people with excellent judgment that can be adaptable. I think those skills come to the fore in a downturn. If you are trained to be adaptable, if you're trained to use good judgment, that is going to serve you no matter what. If you only have a single skill, and that skill moves out of fashion, then you're in trouble.
Your neighbours at the University of Calgary are in the news over how they handled an agreement for a research centre funded by Enbridge Inc. Will you be making public the agreements you have with donors to your centres, such as the Institute for Oil Sands Innovation, partly funded by Imperial Oil?
Most of our donor agreements have confidentiality clauses. Donors don't want their personal finances put out in public. We have in place a donor acceptance policy, which explicitly states the university will not accept donations if they would compromise the university's integrity, autonomy or academic freedom.
This interview has been edited and condensed.