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Within
the last hour, wending my way home from my customary morning coffee, I walked,
as usual, through the McGill University campus, only to find that what was
going on there was far from usual.
It just happened that as I passed the
immense tent that has covered the front lawn for the last week or so,
Wednesday’s edition of the annual spring graduation ceremonies was just
concluding, and graduates, their attached proud families and friends, and I
suppose the occasional professor, came pouring out. The families came out of
one door, and around the other door, watching the graduates emerge in their mortar
boards and flowing gowns, adoring relatives formed a guard that reminded me
very much of how the Rugby teams I watch on TV every Saturday emerge from under
the grandstand on to the field of play, the fans waving and cheering
(or, in this case, taking selfies.)
By asking a very pleasant young woman
who was standing free of friends or family, I discovered something I never knew
before. Many of the graduates were wearing bright red --- I guess you could
classify them as scarlet --- gowns, and she told me such a gown indicated
someone who has just graduated with their doctorate. I was surprised at how many, what a high
proportion they seemed to be. I asked
her what she had graduated in, and she said she had won her master’s in
architecture. It had taken her five and a half years, she said in reply to my
further questions, and she had a follow-up internship set up which was to be with
McGill University itself.
This outpouring of
graduates really seemed like a lot to me, especially since the
entire ceremony is repeated, apparently, for seven consecutive days. I tried to find out
from their web site how many students have graduated this year, but all I could
discover was that there have been 40,000 full-time students at the university,
comprising more than 27,000 undergraduates, 10,000 post-graduates, and about
2500 post-doctoral, residents, fellows and others. (If we figure that, on
average, maybe something less than a third would graduate each year, that would
mean at least 12,000 graduates stepping forward for their diplomas, at the
spring and fall ceremonies. This is just an uninformed observer’s guess.)
Of the student body one in every
three is international in origin, and 10 per cent are studying for doctorates. They
are taught by a staff of more than 1700 brainy people, and the university has a
research budget of more than half a
billion. As I am certainly not the first to remark, the modern university is as
big as a good-sized city, with a plethora of faculties, schools, just the list
of which is kind of mind-blowing --- 11 faculties, and 14 schools or “other
academic units,” as the web site says, covering just about every subject of
interest in the modern world,
That a third of this immense
intellectual factory is at the disposal of foreign students is a fact that
should be taken into consideration when arguments are raised about the supposed
habit of economically and socially developing countries to steal our
technological and scientific achievements. In short, it makes nonsense of such
arguments. Why would we worry that a firm like Huawei is, like a thief in the
night, taking advantage of our
technologies and so-called “intellectual
properties”, when we are already willingly
devoting untold millions in educational spending to help along the upgrading of
the educational level of their young men and women? That
many millions of these costs come from our domestic taxpayers is a fact
that should fill us with pride, for it means simply that in this particular at
least we are helping the poor and dispossessed nations of this world to claw
and fight their way out of the poverty in which a cruel history apparently had
consigned them for good.
McGill is only one of the many Canadian
universities that are playing host to some 533,000 international students across
the country at the last reliable count. Of course, like other students they are
paying for the education they are receiving, paying handsomely for it, it
seems.
In 2016 the $12.8 billion foreign student
enrolments provided Canadians with an estimated 168,000 jobs, and tax
revenue of $2.8 billion. Still, these students and the countries they come from
were using the facilities of the
universities that are kept in business by the contributions of Canadian taxpayers,
48 per cent of McGill’s revenues, for example, coming from the Canadian and Quebec
governments.
It is churlish, in the extreme, it seems
to me, to argue that China is stealing our intellectual property, the theft of which
is so common as to have become a permanent feature of human society. That is
exactly what Japan did, in an earlier generation, exactly what the United
States and Canada did. And, if you want to go further back in history, exactly
what Europe did as the achievements of the Chinese percolated around the world ---
something that is elaborated in detail in
Joseph Needham’s monumental16-volume work on the history of Chinese science and
technology.
Well, this brings me to a point in
time where I really can summarize by using my by now well-worn mantra:
Wot the hell, wot the hell, toujours
gai, toujours gai.
Just as all those students, foreign
and domestic alike, were feeling today.
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