Piece of Mind

Beyond UBC’s clumsy announcement regarding Gupta’s resignation

Posted on August 10, 2015 by Ghoussoub

There are many puzzled, devastated, concerned and angry friends, colleagues and citizens wanting to learn about what happened at UBC last Friday evening. How can a promising energetic UBC president with far-reaching and refreshing ideas be led to resign after only 13 months in office. For many of them knew that Arvind Gupta is no quitter. This post is the first of a series about the spell that has befallen UBC. Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Arvind Gupta, John Montalbano, Lindsay Gordon, UBC | 16 Comments

Reform(atting) the Canadian Institutes of Health Research – a living autopsy

Posted on July 22, 2015 by Ghoussoub

Last year, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), which is the primary federal funding agency of health research in Canada, embarked on a bold and wide-ranging series of reforms that change virtually every aspect of how health research funding is applied for, evaluated and distributed. On July 15, 2015, the results of the first major competition under the new system were released, as were the first casualties. Judging from the social media firestorm that followed, we felt that Canada’s research community may want to know some more. So I asked Jim Woodgett, Director of Research at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, to help us out. He kindly obliged by writing the following very informative guest blog. Jim was one of the initial F-scheme awardees, so this is far from being a rant of a bitter applicant. The simple fact is that nearly 300 accomplished Canadian researchers (those who submitted to Stage 2 but were not funded) cannot expect to receive funding for the next 12 months, at a minimum. As any responsible research leader in this country should, he worries about both the short and long term impact of the funding reforms on Canada’s health research community. Continue reading →

Posted in R&D Policy | Tagged cihr, Early Career Investigator, F-Scheme, P-Scheme, Virtual review | 46 Comments

A few words at a happy event

Posted on June 14, 2015 by Ghoussoub

Thank you, Mme. Chancellor. Thank You, Mr. President, and Thank you, University of Victoria, for this tremendous honour. I obviously have many connections to UVic, but I should start by mentioning a very special one. Continue reading →

Posted in Banff International Research Station, Honouring friends | Tagged Alan Turing, Alex McCauley, Ed Perkins, Emmy Noether, G.H. Hardy, Honorary Doctor of Science, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, John Nash, Martin Taylor, Ramanujan, Reinhard Illner, Sophie Germain, The University of Victoria | 1 Comment

Light years from the academy

Posted on June 5, 2015 by Ghoussoub

To Joseph on his 20th birthday

Leaning over a game of Backgammon in the main square of this remote mountain village of the Levant, the four unemployed teenagers didn’t see it coming. Youssef Habib lunged at them from the back with his barely visible Swiss army knife. It was late 1943, and the war was raging everywhere, yet elsewhere. Youssef Habib was a communist; his hero Stalin was winning the war, yet the other teenagers constantly bullied him for it. He was fed up. Continue reading →

Posted in Honouring friends | Tagged Africa, Destiny | Leave a comment

The last graceful act of a beautiful mind

Posted on May 31, 2015 by Ghoussoub

Sunday morning, May 24^th: I am having breakfast with a life-long friend, Ivar Ekeland, at his kitchen table in Paris, France. He was just back from Oslo, and was telling me about the ceremony for the 2015 Abel prize, he had just attended. He was invited a few weeks before as a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science, and had declined. But once he knew that John Nash and Louis Nirenberg would be sharing the prestigious prize, he scrambled to get himself re-invited. He didn’t want to miss the historical event involving his friends and idols, who happen to be two of the most beautiful minds. Continue reading →

Posted in Honouring friends | Tagged Abel Prize, Ivar Ekeland, John Nash, Louis Nirenberg, Nobel prize Economics | 1 Comment

An activist you are!

Posted on May 26, 2015 by Ghoussoub

The letter from the president of The University of Victoria informing me about my honorary doctorate was a complete surprise. “My former graduate students and postdocs, who are now on the faculty at UVic, must have been behind this nomination,” I thought. Wishful thinking and a healthy dose of vanity made me wonder which aspects of my mathematical contributions would be cited. I eventually asked and ultimately learned that I was wrong on both counts. Continue reading →

Posted in Op-eds | Tagged Basic research, BIRS, Diversity, Honorary Doctor of Science, Mathematics, Mitacs, PIMS, The University of Victoria | 2 Comments

Mathematics, poetry and beauty

Posted on May 14, 2015 by Ghoussoub

“I always thought he didn’t have enough imagination for mathematics”

Peter Cameron's Blog

Comparing mathematics with poetry is an infinitely rich game. For every opinion you express, there is an equally valid counter-opinion. Contrasted to Hilbert’s dismissal of a student who had left mathematics for poetry, “I always thought he didn’t have enough imagination for mathematics”, someone said to me recently that the early death of Schubert was a greater tragedy than that of Galois, since what Galois could have achieved would sooner or later be done by someone else, whereas Schubert’s potential was lost forever.

So it isn’t so surprising that a book by Ron Aharoni, newly translated into English, doesn’t come to a definite conclusion one way or the other. The best we can do in a book entitled Mathematics, Poetry and Beauty is to give many examples of beautiful mathematics and beautiful poetry and discuss what the similarities and differences are.

Ron Aharoni is a mathematician whose field is combinatorics…

View original post 655 more words

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Four lessons from an amazing site visit

Posted on May 6, 2015 by Ghoussoub

A joint site visit to the Banff International Research Station (BIRS) by four granting agencies representing four different governments, happened on April 16 and 17. Eight officials from the US National Science Foundation (NSF), Canada’s Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), Mexico’s CONACyT, and Alberta Innovation and Advanced Education, accompanied an international review panel of five distinguished mathematical scientists to the site visit for BIRS. The four councils had jointly commissioned the panel to evaluate the Station. The visitors listened, asked, conversed, challenged, advised, and will soon be submitting their recommendations. Continue reading →

Posted in Banff International Research Station | Tagged Alberta Innovation, BIRS, Conacyt, Doug Mitchell, Janice Price, NSERC, NSF, Peer review, Rita Colwell | Leave a comment

Why Canada’s research granting councils mean so little to this government’s agenda

Posted on April 30, 2015 by Ghoussoub

NSERC, SSHRC and CIHR, Canada’s main granting agencies in support of university research are not doing well. Their total absence from Budget 2015 is only one of many symptoms indicating how tired they are. Tired are their ways in trying to justify themselves to government, and tired they must be of having essentially nothing to offer to the political agenda. Continue reading →

Posted in Op-eds, R&D Policy | Tagged 2015 Budget, CERC, cihr, Harper Government, Mitacs, NRC, NSERC, sshrc, Thirty meter Telescope | 3 Comments

How dare UBC take diversity so seriously?

Posted on April 24, 2015 by Ghoussoub

It has been a year since UBC announced its very first …“president of colour”. And as of yesterday, UBC-Vancouver has its very first woman provost. On the surface, these look like de-facto corollaries of a post-racial, post-sexist era, at a post-modern university whose student body looks futuristic in its amazing diversity. Don’t be fooled! Continue reading →

Posted in Op-eds | Tagged Change of the guard, Diversity, leadership, UBC, UBC Provost, Women in leadership | 5 Comments

On the “clientèle-based” logic in redefining academic units

Posted on March 28, 2015 by Ghoussoub

Are we just a service department?

I doubt that Princeton’s Mathematics department thinks it is, neither does any Chemistry department on this continent. Yet, a Vice-President of the Canadian Mathematical Society wants us “to come to the realization that in almost every university in the country, the department of mathematics is a service department.” My friend and colleague, François Bergeron, from the Université du Québec à Montréal begs to differ. He wrote: Continue reading →

Posted in Op-eds | Tagged canadian mathematical society, Francois Bergeron, professors of teaching, Robert Dickeson, Service departments | 4 Comments

UBC’s free fall in university rankings

Posted on March 16, 2015 by Ghoussoub

University rankings may be questionable. Their evaluation criteria may be flawed or unrepresentative. They may be based on false or manipulated data provided by some institutions. They can even, occasionally, be bought. But the reality is that they do matter. Another reality is that UBC’s standing has lately been in a free fall. The 2015 Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings placed UBC at #37, down from 33rd in 2014, 31st in 2013 and 25th in 2012. This is bad news for UBC’s new president, Arvind Gupta, who pledged in his installation speech last September to lift UBC up to the top 10 public institutions in the world. This recent setback is not the only reason why Gupta may be facing a bigger challenge than what he had bargained for. Continue reading →

Posted in R&D Policy | Tagged Arvind Gupta, research, TA strike, UBC, University of Toronto, University rankings | 7 Comments

To some a citation is worth $3 per year

Posted on October 31, 2014 by Ghoussoub

US News and World Report: Even “less perfect” than the Maclean’s ranking.

Bits of DNA

Earlier this week US News and World Report (USNWR) released, for the first time, a global ranking of universities including rankings by subject area. In mathematics, the top ten universities are:

1. Berkeley
2. Stanford
3. Princeton
4. UCLA
5. University of Oxford
6. Harvard
7. King Abdulaziz University
8. Pierre and Marie Curie – Paris 6
9. University of Hong Kong
10. University of Cambridge

The past few days I’ve received a lot of email from colleagues and administrators about this ranking, and also the overall global ranking of USNWR in which Berkeley was #1. The emails generally say something to the effect of “of course rankings are not perfect, everybody knows… but look, we are amazing!”

BUT, one of the top math departments in the world, the math department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is ranked #11… they didn’t even make the top ten. Even more…

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Highlights from the installation speech of UBC’s 13th President, Arvind Gupta

Posted on September 13, 2014 by Ghoussoub

Here are excerpts from the speech of Arvind Gupta at his official installation as UBC’s 13th president. Canada’s post-secondary system should take notice.

“We recognize UBC as a Place of Mind, but also as a place of shared cultures, traditions, and history. We come together as a community striving to excel in a spirit of integrity, diversity, inclusiveness and mutual respect. Continue reading →

Posted in Honouring friends, Op-eds, UBC Presidential Search, Uncategorized | Tagged Arvind Gupta, Installation speech, UBC 13th president | 1 Comment

The President of the University of Alberta asked us to think twice, and we have!

Posted on June 4, 2014 by Ghoussoub

Back in 2009, a dozen faculty members from 10 different Canadian universities initiated an open letter to the Prime Minister imploring him to “not leave Canada behind.” The federal “stimulus” budget had just announced a substantial cut to the three federal granting councils, and more than 2800 senior researchers across the country had signed against it in protest, causing a major stir on Parliament hill. Two of the letter initiators were summoned by the presidents of their respective universities for “questioning” and for a piece of unsolicited “advice”. The idea of doing so never crossed the mind of the president of UBC, Stephen Toope, who happened to both understand and uphold the principles of academic freedom and free speech. The actions around the latest events at the University of Saskatchewan made me appreciate more than ever his principled stand. Continue reading →

Posted in Op-eds, Uncategorized | Tagged Academic freedom, Free speech, Ilene Busch-Vishniac, Indira Samarasekera, Robert Buckinghamn, Stephen Toope, UBC, University of Alberta, University of Manitoba, University of Saskatchewan | 4 Comments

A ton of career blood in the cause of clearly defining academic freedom

Posted on May 22, 2014 by Ghoussoub

“This letter is also to advise you that the administration leave scheduled to begin on July 1, 2014 is hereby revoked…You are to receive your final pay on May 30, 2014, as per the normal payroll cycle. You are to leave campus immediately and are not to return to your office, the School of Public Health or the university. All benefits and pension cease as of today. Please contact … Human Resources … to make arrangements for the return of university equipment and your office keys, as well as to arrange a time that is appropriate to collect any remaining personal effects.” Continue reading →

Posted in Board of Governors | Tagged Brett Fairbairn, Ilene Busch-Vishniac, Robert Buckingham, U. Saskatchewan | 3 Comments

On the dark side of philanthropy

Posted on May 11, 2014 by Ghoussoub

“We are deeply disappointed that Janis Sarra has had to step down as Director of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies… Like her, we will all work to secure the academic independence of the Institute and its programs, and to reform its governance.” This open letter signed by 16 UBC distinguished scholars –associated in one way or another with the Peter Wall Institute– took many by surprise. The consensus on campus is that the relatively newly appointed Director has been doing a good job. Continue reading →

Posted in Board of Governors, Op-eds, Uncategorized | Tagged Academic freedom, Independence, Jim Balsillie, Munk Institute, UBC, Wall Institute, Waterloo, York University | 1 Comment

Return on investment in faculty rarely captured by university CFOs

Posted on April 23, 2014 by Ghoussoub

“Mr. President, We are not employees of the university. We are the university.”

With these words, Isidore Rabi, a distinguished faculty member at Columbia University, interrupted Dwight Eisenhower, who had started off a speech by addressing the faculty as “employees of the university.” Generation after generation of faculty members has repeated this inspirational anecdote from the early 1950s, though they know very well that their universities are increasingly becoming about everything other than the faculty. And the situation appears to be worsening. To the professional managerial class that nowadays run the neoliberal version of post-secondary education, the faculty is often seen as merely the source of the university’s problems. So, before too many of my colleagues get used to being seen as a cost, not a resource that provides net positive value to the university, I would like to use charter accountants’ speak to argue that investment in university research excellence could be and should be viewed as a possible driver of future revenue. Continue reading →

Posted in Board of Governors, Op-eds | Tagged Faculty, Provost, Return on investment, UBC | 5 Comments

UBC appoints a doer as its 13th President

Posted on March 12, 2014 by Ghoussoub

Once again, UBC has steered clear of appointing a career university administrator for its top position. Unlike UofT and UVic, who opted for the ultimate insiders, and McGill, who went for a consummate bureaucrat, UBC has chosen to appoint a man of vision, with hardly any record in traditional university administration. But in Arvind Gupta, UBC is also betting on a formidable man of action, with considerable experience in conceiving, implementing and delivering innovative programs for advanced research, university-industry synergies, academic training, and job placement for university graduates. With this choice, UBC continues an honorable tradition of calculated risk-taking when dealing with its leadership. Continue reading →

Posted in Banff International Research Station, Board of Governors, Honouring friends, Op-eds | Tagged Arvind Gupta, BIRS, Martha Piper, Mitacs, PIMS, Stephen Toope, UBC President | 3 Comments

Bye Bye Board

Posted on March 1, 2014 by Ghoussoub

Yesterday was my last day on the UBC Board of Governors, the end of an extremely rewarding six-year stint. To the faculty who elected me decisively twice for the Board and another time for the Presidential search committee, I say thank you for your trust. I have tried to the best of my ability to present your perspective. I have also strived to inform about the issues, hence this (dreaded!) blog. My take on the experience? Well, it is a piece of cake for those who are in it for the cocktail parties. But it is surely stressful and exhausting to those who choose to speak their mind and stick their neck out when need be. The Board aspect of university governance works if and only if you work hard at it and speak up. “Governing” during the time of Stephen Toope was relentless, intellectually stimulating, and somewhat empowering. Yes, I have managed to accomplish a couple of things, and yes the experience was enriching, but these are not the only reasons why I feel fortunate to have served. Let me explain.

Continue reading →

Posted in Board of Governors | Tagged Board of Governors, Brad Bennett, Doug Mitchell, John Montalbano, Stephen Toope, UBC | Leave a comment