A World of Difference: How Universities Must Evolve in a Post-COVID World

As difficult as COVID-19 has been, it has also shown us something profound about our collective power to confront and overcome big challenges. It has shone a bright light on the consequences of economic and social inequality. And it has reacquainted us with the idea of a larger public good.

In our response to COVID-19, I see the seeds of a more humane, just, and sustainable future. As president of SFU and someone who believes passionately in the value of higher education, I want universities to help carve out that path forward.

But we have a choice to make.?

Universities can choose to respond to the economic and social forces that are upending our world. Or we can choose to ignore them. The first path can lead to meaningful change. The other leads to irrelevance, or worse, harm. So how must universities change to meet the demands of a world in flux?

I believe embracing difference can help re-invigorate the idea and purpose of a university.

First, for the simple reason that universities like SFU should reflect the diverse and cosmopolitan cities they serve. And second because embracing difference makes us better teachers, knowledge producers, researchers, innovators, and change-makers.

Let me offer an example from my own work.

Before I came to SFU, I was the Scientific Director for the Institute of Gender and Health at the Canadian Institute for Health Research. I was constantly reminded of how we ignore sex and gender differences.

Take something as seemingly straightforward as research into automobile safety. Despite decades of improvements to safety standards, pregnant women were suffering from unique injuries in car crashes. What could account for this?

The answer was quite simple.

Crash test dummies came in a variety of shapes and sizes. But they didn’t come pregnant. No one bothered to account for this difference and the effect it was having on research into car safety. As a result, pregnant women were getting hurt unnecessarily.

The point is that accounting for and understanding difference can significantly propel innovation and discovery. This insight into how difference affects research holds important lessons for how we think about the future of universities.

Different Educational Programming

Let’s begin with how difference can help us develop and tailor our educational programing.

Owing to the work of SFU’s Indigenous partners, faculty and students, Indigenizing our curriculum and decolonizing the university is a major priority for SFU. This effort takes place on many fronts – including the core of our curriculum.

In her recent report on racism and discrimination in B.C.’s health care system called “In Plain Sight”, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond brings this issue into sharp focus. She writes: “…when addressing racism, whether individual incidents or broader systemic issues, we often find the root cause is willful ignorance…the ignorance of distinct cultures and histories as well as the knowledge of bodies, both physical and spiritual.”

The “willful ignorance” Turpel-Lafond identifies runs throughout our society’s institutions and the systems and structures that ground them.

Universities are no exception.

Turpel-Lafond calls on the province to require all university and college programs for health professionals to identify, recruit and encourage Indigenous enrollment and graduation. She recommends that every medical student receives accurate and detailed knowledge of Indigenous-specific racism, colonialism and Indigenous health and wellness. And she says that the B.C. government, working with universities and First Nations, needs to establish a joint degree in Medicine and Indigenous Medicine.

Turpel-Lafond’s report and recommendations articulate a reality that universities and institutions must respond to if we are to stay relevant to the needs of our students. To that end, Turpel-Lafond’s report and recommendations are core to SFU’s thinking and planning for the new medical program that we are designing with the First Nations Health Authority and the Fraser Health Authority.

Our ambition is for this to be a new kind of medical program, one that will train health practitioners to provide a diverse range of primary care services to Indigenous and other historically marginalized communities.

Different Ways of Knowing

In doing so, the new medical program is part of a larger and ongoing shift across the educational landscape. This shift has generated controversy in some places. Incorporating difference into the canon is seen by some as an attack on the university’s traditions and its claims to be the bastion of objective truth.

Needless to say, I don’t see it that way. When we pay attention to different ways of knowing, we aren’t walking away from the enduring purpose of higher education, we are re-animating and re-invigorating that purpose.

Let me give you an example from SFU.

“Extending New Narratives in the History of Philosophy” is a partnership of universities around the world and led by SFU professor Lisa Shapiro. Its aim is to retrieve philosophical works of women and individuals from other marginalized groups to help deepen our understanding of the philosophical traditions that shape us.

The Extending Narratives in Philosophy project isn’t breaking with the enduring idea of the university, it is prying open the canon to different intellectual traditions, to different philosophical perspectives, and to different ways of knowing about the world.

In other words, it is doing what a university does best.

Different Ways of Learning

Let me shift gears and bring this discussion to the classroom.

Difference not only expands the ways we generate knowledge and deepens our understanding of the world, it also expands the ways in which we transmit knowledge and engage with ideas. COVID-19 has offered us a very practical demonstration of how this works. Almost overnight, universities and colleges had to move from in-person to on-line learning. Almost two years later, I am delighted that students have returned to on-campus learning.

I love a vibrant campus. But as a university administrator, I also recognize that COVID-19 showed us that there is more than one way to teach and learn.?

We will still teach and learn in the classroom, but the classroom will expand and change in a myriad of different ways. I have no doubt that years from now COVID-19 will be seen as a pivot point in this regard, an accelerant that unleashed huge changes to the university environment.?

And I believe that if these changes serve to expand the reach of university education to more people in more places – as they have the potential to do – then COVID-19 will have had at least one very positive legacy.

Seeing and Responding to Difference in Our Community

This legacy will be compounded and amplified if we take COVID-19’s other lessons to heart.

Of those, perhaps the most consequential is what COVID-19 did to expose the costs of economic, social, and racial inequality and inequity. Indigenous people, Black people, people of colour, women, new immigrants, people living in poverty – all suffered the pandemic’s health and economic impacts more than others.

At the same time, powerful new social and political movements like Black Lives Matter gathered force in response to institutional violence inflicted on communities of colour and the institutional racism that normalized it. And the discovery of hundreds upon hundreds of unmarked graves at residential schools across the country brought into stark relief the heart-breaking legacy of colonial injustice. These events and political movements are having a profound impact across our society, including on our campuses.

We are called on to look anew at how we see difference in our communities. We recognize that today’s gaps in access, participation and outcomes are based on yesterday’s ignorance and oppressions.

The conversations have sometimes been difficult. The issues can be extremely challenging. But we are working to confront them – not perfectly by any means – but in good faith.

We have a long road ahead, but there are demonstrable signs of progress.?

For example, the Scarborough Charter on Anti-Black Racism and Black Inclusion in Canadian Higher Education signed by more than 40 Canadian post-secondary institutions holds us accountable for combating anti-Black racism.

At SFU, we are working with BIPOC faculty, students, and community members to open up new pathways for people to attend and succeed in university. We are engaging with refugee communities in a number of important ways, including research, scholarships, and additional supports for refugee students. And we are working on our structures to create accountability with a new Vice-President responsible for People, Equity and Inclusion.

At SFU and across the post-secondary community, this progress is grounded in the recognition of our responsibility to expand the reach and impact of university education.

Making a Difference

Since the end of the Second World War, in Canada and elsewhere, the expansion of university education has tracked the growth of new social movements, the creation of the welfare state, and a re-distributive economy that has greatly increased the well-being of millions of people. Today, the challenges we face are very different than they were in the mid-twentieth century.

But that purpose endures.

As we stare into an uncertain world, universities can – we must – remain engines for expanding the economic and democratic franchise to more people in more places.

At my university, this ambition is part of our identity.

We started as the “radical campus” and are now known as the “engaged university” - a brand that comes alive in the many different ways we work to cross the bridge from campus to community and to be an engine for positive social and economic change.

At the end of the day, I believe that that is the power attending to difference can make. It is an idea that reflects the moment we are in: a moment filled with tremendous anxiety but also tremendous potential.

Through “difference” we can help tackle and overcome the biggest challenges of our time. We can help to heal and repair a broken world. We can build trust, empathy, and solidarity. And we can expand the horizons of the possible.

In short, through difference we help make our collective future in a better image.