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Since 1993 when it was launched, the Friends of the Library lecture has provided an annual occasion for us to look up from the quotidian and to celebrate the creativity that courses through our enterprise. That creativity will be manifested in the lecture we're about to hear presently. But it's also manifested in the work of thirty authors, faculty, staff, and alumni whom we're celebrating today and I'd like to ask the authors in attendance to stand and let us congratulate you.
(Applause)
The names of the thirty authors on this year's honour roll and the titles of their works are listed in your programme. Following the lecture, you may want to spend some time in the gallery where the works are on display and see whether your own creative proclivities may be excited. And speaking of creative proclivities let me introduce Michael Higgins.
Media personality, raconteur, scholar of religion and literature, selected last year as one of Ontario's thirty best lecturers by TV Ontario, and incidentally, President of St. Jerome's University. Michael's CV is writ large with achievement and reflective of his ebullient personality. A frequent writer, guest, consultant and commentator for CBC he has written many radio scripts for CBC’s Intellectual Affairs Series Ideas; head of the Cultural and Historical Research Team for the CBC series Sir Peter Ustinov's Inside the Vatican; was CTV's prime Vatican commentator at Pope John Paul II's funeral; writes a regular column on religious matters in the Toronto Star; and is a frequent contributor to The Record and the Catholic Register. Michael's scholarly publications, grounded in religion, seek nevertheless to discover and inform on the human level and to tempt with their often provocative titles: Stalking the Holy and Heretic Blood. Two of his works Power and Peril: The Catholic Church at the Crossroads, which he wrote with Doug Letson, his colleague and now President Emeritus of St. Jerome's University and Stalking the Holy: The Pursuit of Saint-Making have become best sellers.
Michael recognized the importance of just this kind of Friends of the Library creative celebration and has from the beginning been an active participant. Always supportive and engaged in behind-the-scenes work we've been privileged to have him out front as well, delivering the second Friends lecture, which was titled "Monks, Monsters, and Manuscripts: Rumination of a Script Writer" and ever since as the voice and personality to introduce the guest lecturer, which he will do again, but for the last time, because on July 1st Michael assumes the Office of President of St. Thomas University in Fredericton.
Michael, on behalf of UW and Friends of the Library, our heartfelt gratitude for your support, your efforts, and the infectious joie-de-vivre you’ve brought to our deliberations and to these occasions...Michael Higgins.
(Applause)
Thank you, Lois. I had no idea that this was going to be a valediction. I was going to introduce Adel Sedra and I will do that exactly now.
It is sometimes said that Adel Sedra was born in Egypt during the time of the Pharaohs. This is not unhappily true. But he was born in Cairo and there is a sphinx-like quality to him. For instance, look at the title of this year’s Friends of the Library lecture: "Universities from the Bottom Up: Personal Reflections of a Lifer." A "lifer." Now those of you are addicted to the television series Prison Break, or the even more explicit Oz, or who may be criminologists, prisoners (( )), or just dull-witted, might conclude that Professor Sedra's talk is an autobiographical rift on his not inconsiderable years behind bars. And there is the sphinx for you. Because the "lifer" has been anything but incarcerated, locked in by conventional thinking, by a failure to take risks, by a deficiency of imagination, or by establishment comfort. Adel Sedra is a different kind of lifer. He is a person who has given uncompromisingly to the cause of higher education, to the pursuit of knowledge, to the larger enrichment of society. This is Adel's life project and this is the kind of lifer that he is.
Here are the bare bones of a skeleton of a CV, much of which is also in your programme. He received his Bachelor of Science degree from Cairo University in Egypt in '64 and a Master of Arts and Science and a PhD degree from the University of Toronto, in '68 and '69 respectively, all in Electrical Engineering.
Adel's career at the University of Toronto is the stuff of legend. He began there in 1969, and rose to the rank of Professor in '78. From '86 to '93 he served as Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering, now Electrical and Computer Engineering. On July 1st, 1993, he assumed the position of Vice-President, Provost and Chief Academic Officer of the University of Toronto and served in this capacity for nine years and with considerable distinction. Those of us who are members of AUCC and other national university bodies know the high regard in which Adel was held.
On July 1st, 2003, greatly to our benefit, Professor Sedra joined the University of Waterloo as Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
In 2004 he initiated the University of Waterloo Engineering planning exercise VISION of 2010.
In 1984 he was elected Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineer and in 1999 he was elected Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineers. Just a few years later he was elected to the prestigious rank of Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
In 2003 Queen's University awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Science and in 2005 his alma mater did exactly the same, with a Doctorate of Laws this time, at the University of Toronto.
But Adel can also take on Dan Brown: what is the success of the "Sedra Code"? One of his books Microelectronic Circuits, now in its fifth edition, and in ten languages used in hundreds of universities around the world, and with an estimated 800,000 copies in print is enough to make me mad with envy. Now I have authored and co-authored, as Lois nicely and kindly remarked, some ten books with two on best seller lists, humiliatingly for short periods of time I might add, but how does one stack up with 800,000 and they're not even remaindered?
Adel’s beaming over here, because he knows he has just sold the film rights to Ron Howard. God only knows where you can go with Microelectronic Circuits, but we, well we, we don't have to go anywhere, but sit here, sit here and listen to a lifer, Dr. Adel Sedra, Dean of Engineering at the University of Waterloo and the 2006 Friends of the Library lecturer.
(Applause)
Thank you. Well, good afternoon everyone and thank you all for coming to hear this talk. Michael, thank you for this great introduction. To be introduced by Michael Higgins, without a doubt University of Waterloo's most eloquent speaker, and I know I probably have insulted some of you. (( )) I have long admired Michael. We used to share a convenience store in the neighbourhood and we got to know each other very well and it was a really great privilege for me to have known you, Michael and as I said, to be introduced by you is a real treat. However, it is also terrifying, for the bar has been set way up, so now I have to work extra hard to make any impression.
I am honoured and thrilled to be selected to deliver the 2006 Friends of the Library talk. As Lois said in its relatively short history of a dozen years or so this annual lecture has established itself as one of the most interesting events that takes place on the University of Waterloo's campus every spring. It has managed to attract such luminaries as Richard Gwyn, Pamela Wallin (if you go out you actually see posters of all of these illustrious people), Pamela Wallin, Jim Downey, Howard Turner, and of course, Michael Higgins. To be in the company of this illustrious group of people is indeed an honour. It is also an honour for an engineer to be called a friend of the library. ((For Michael said—Mark’s taking note—Ah)) Engineers, let's face it, engineers are not known to be great readers. However, I thought I should establish some credentials as being a friend of the library and I offer the following, and in fact, I have someone here to prove it. (( )) I offer the fact that during my nine years as the Provost of the University of Toronto only one budget was spared any cuts: the library acquisitions budget. (Unfortunate that—Actually we have Derek McCammond who was Vice-Provost for Planning and Budget at U of T and Derek will testify, I hope. Thank you, Derek. I’ll buy you lunch.) Now this is a fact. But, here I am, I'm already getting defensive!
I am thrilled to be given the opportunity to talk about a subject that's dear to my heart, indeed, to my whole being. I have spent forty-seven of my sixty-two years on earth hanging around universities. Does this make me qualified to talk about these great and wonderful and mysterious institutions? Perhaps not qualified, but I would hope to be permitted to do so for I certainly did my time. I chose universities as my topic also because in inviting me to give this talk, Michael Higgins' instructions were that quote "the talk should be heavily laden with autobiographical material" end of quote. ((I think you recognize Michael Higgins statement in this.)) So, that is what I am going to do, and I ask for your tolerance if at some point I become too self-indulgent. Having spent so much time at universities, my life has become so interwoven with the university that a neat separation is perhaps too difficult a task. Nearly three decades ago, my then already lengthy stay at university prompted an old aunt to enquire discreetly of my mother, "Is Adel still going to university?" Well, I still am and hope to do so for years to come. I consider myself truly privileged to have had this wonderful life of being associated with institutions whose purpose is learning.
I entered Cairo University in 1959 at the age of fifteen to study electrical engineering and to begin my journey of learning. I came to the great city of Cairo from the countryside where I had grown up and which I thoroughly disliked for what I perceived then to be lack of intellectual stimulation. To my young mind, all the people who wrote what I had read were from the big city, and I wanted to be close to them and maybe someday to be in their company. Indeed, my choice of program of study was motivated, at least in part, by the desire to work in the big city. I stayed away from my father's beloved profession of medicine and even within engineering I stayed clear of Civil Engineering, for both might have resulted in a return to the countryside. I thought electronics engineering would be a safe enough bet to keep me in an urban environment.
I received a great undergraduate education at Cairo University. This was a time of great optimism in Egypt, which after years of foreign dominance was awakened in the middle of the twentieth century to the need to industrialize, hence the tremendous encouragement for education in general and for technical and engineering education in particular. I was taught engineering by professors who had received their PhDs abroad; most in Britain, some in the USA, and who were struggling to continue their research in the face of antiquated equipment and almost non-existent research infrastructure.
Apart from the great teachers with whom I studied, two lessons learned then had an enduring effect on me. One had to do with textbooks. First of all, there was a dearth of textbooks, and professors relied on mimeographed lecture notes, a situation that I found less than ideal for learning. Whatever textbooks were available were British and though sound and chock-full of knowledge, they were not easily accessible or student friendly. (Of course, at that time we didn't know the words student friendly.) To this day I recall encountering in the very early sixties my first American textbook, a book on electric circuit analysis by then Stanford Professor Hugh Skilling. Here was a clearly written, well illustrated, nicely designed book that also included worked out examples and exercise problems--what a wonderful new tool for teaching and learning.
The other lesson was in the interaction between research and teaching. I was very fortunate to be exposed to research in my fourth-year design project which required the use of transistors. Now, these were relatively new devices that had appeared on the scene only a decade or so earlier. Knowledge of how they worked or how to use them was very limited. It was my good fortune that the Professor who supervised my project was engaged in acquiring this understanding. Hence began my life-long interest in microelectronics and perhaps more importantly in the need to do research in order to do a better job in teaching. This nexus between teaching and research became a life-long obsession of mine and one that defines for me what we now call the Research University.
All my research that I conducted with my sixty-plus graduate students was motivated by the need to learn so that we can teach. Of course, some inventions happened along the way, but I have always considered that the end result—I always considered these inventions to be by-products of the learning process. The end product for me was always better understanding, or when one really succeeded, a unifying theory that can help us in teaching a subject.
I have also looked at teaching as a vehicle to try new ideas or new ways of doing things, on an intelligent group of learners; that is, as a vehicle for teaching research results. In my experience, this kind of teaching is the most stimulating and motivating to students. I have also uncovered many interesting research problems in the course of teaching a subject. It is this unity of research and teaching, their close connection, and the benefits garnered by exercising their interplay that to me characterizes the successful professor.
When, years later, as provost of U of T, I led the university in a major academic planning exercise in 1994, I made the integrity of teaching and research the central theme of our planning framework. Fred Terman, one of the pioneers of the post-war renaissance in engineering education and as Stanford's Dean of Engineering and later its Provost, the man credited with the launch of Silicon Valley, was quoted to say, quote "My University is neither a teaching institution nor a research institution, rather it is a learning institution."
I have always maintained that setting teaching and research as conflicting tasks, vying for the limited time of a faculty member misses the point of what the University is all about. It is for this reason that I dislike the language of teaching relief which conjures up the image of pain and suffering rather than the excitement and exhilaration that for me characterize teaching. It is for this reason that no professor of engineering at Waterloo teaches less that two courses per year, no matter how large their research enterprise is or how many chairs they hold. (I hope this doesn't lose me some friends.)
Just as I was fortunate to enter Cairo University in the late 1950s, I was equally fortunate to arrive at the University of Toronto in the mid 1960s. I am often asked about the decision process that I went through to select Canada and U of T to do graduate work. The answer is, like many things in life, pure chance. After graduating from Cairo University with a BSc in Electrical Engineering in 1964, I was selected by the University for appointment as a full-time teaching assistant. This honour was conferred on the top few graduates in each class. The idea was that you become an apprentice for a couple of years and prepare to do graduate work. I spent two years in this position, simultaneously working on a master's degree on modeling the transistor. My research required both digital computation and precision instrumentation, both in very short supply in Egypt of the mid 1960s.
By the summer of 1966, I was ready to give up on continuing my research in Cairo when I ran into a former classmate who informed me that he had been accepted for graduate work at both the universities of Toronto and Waterloo. He said that Waterloo was a new university and that he was particularly attracted to Waterloo's offer and was planning to accept it. He suggested that he would write to Toronto declining their offer and that I might then write applying for this position. That is exactly what happened. By the way, my friend went on to receive his PhD from UW and is now the Dean of Engineering at Ryerson University.
Although U of T replied with an acceptance in less than three weeks, it took me two months of knocking on the doors of an endless number of officials in Cairo, including the Prime Minister, to secure permission to leave the country on a study leave. (Mind you, I was just a lowly demonstrator at Cairo University, but I needed all of these approvals.)
Canada in the mid 1960s was a very exciting place, full of optimism and vigour. The country was readying to celebrate its Centennial in 1967 and the place felt young and full of energy. The Department of Electrical Engineering at U of T was in the process of doubling its size. New professors, new students, and new equipment were arriving at all times, and I felt truly privileged to be part of that excitement. It seemed that everything was possible; you only had to work hard. That I did, and in the short period of 30 months I was able to complete a Masters and a Doctorate. (Things were much simpler then.) Before I had a chance to defend my PhD thesis, the department chair called me to his office and offered me a faculty position which I accepted on the spot without enquiring about salary or other such detail. There followed a 34-year career at U of T.
Among the highlights of my years at U of T are: meeting my wife, a fellow graduate student, and getting married in a university chapel; having with her two children whose lives evolved and continue to revolve around universities; having the good fortune to write a textbook that ((Michael, that was a great introduction, Michael. Thank you. We’ll have to talk about you helping me out in the agency)) I had the fortune to write a textbook that continues to dominate its market a quarter of a century after the publication of its first edition; working as a fully-functioning faculty member, which is a concept to which I will return later; a department chair; and Provost of the university.
I would now like to move from the personal to the general and make a number of observations about universities. First, I would like to discuss the subject of leadership in a university setting. As we know, universities are non-hierarchical organizations, and a lot has been written and said about how difficult it is to manage such an organization. The university has been likened to a battleship that is very difficult to steer and nearly impossible to turn around. University faculty have been likened to cats, (I must say I’m very partial to cats) – University faculty have been likened to cats who are difficult to herd, and so on. I should say that I do not agree with most of these observations. Yes, universities are non-hierarchical and have flat structures, but flat structures have lots of advantages that appear to have been recently rediscovered by business. Yes, faculty members do not respond to orders, but they readily accept leadership that they respect and trust. They are trained to be sceptical of authority but they appreciate being consulted. They like to be led by one of their own, one who has practiced their craft, has proven her worth, and paid his dues, and who would disagree with that?
Yes, one can turn around an academic department, a faculty, and indeed a university. Yes, one can develop and execute a strategic plan for an academic unit and indeed for an entire university. Success stories, however, are not many and these usually remain untold. Also, there are many more failures than successes.
I have had the opportunity to lead two university-wide, long-range planning exercises at the University of Toronto, in 1994 and 1998. In my perhaps immodest view both were successful and indeed they contributed to U of T's weathering the storms of the mid 1990s that resulted from the huge reductions in the public funding to universities among other institutions. Veterans of university administration in Ontario in that era will recall the Liberals' Expenditure Control Plan, the NDP's Social Contract, and the Tories' Common Sense Revolution. I apologize if I have brought back bad memories.
My point, however, is that rather than hunkering down to hold the fort and wait for the bad times to pass, the University of Toronto, under Robert Prichard's presidency, took a very different approach. We decided to diversify our income sources while simultaneously engaging in serious academic planning, planning that was intimately linked to budgeting. The planning process that we put in place then involved every stakeholder in the institution and as a result served to bring us all together to contemplate measures that would keep us strong and indeed would make the future brighter. The process we devised involved a careful mix of top-down and bottom-up actions: while the plans were developed from the bottom up, they followed a vision and a framework devised by the Provost and fine-tuned through an exhaustive (and exhausting) consultation process with the entire university. Subjecting the vision and the planning framework to the scrutiny of the university community not only improved it, but it also generated the buy-in needed for the planning process to succeed.
I should, however, emphasize that the actual plans were developed by individual departments and faculties and made their way up the administrative ladder where the responsibility for plan approval and the provision of the resources required for implementation resided. These plans not only guided the academic development of the university over an eight year period, they also informed and drove the U of T billion dollar campaign. We had a very simple rule: no project appeared on the campaign list unless it arose through the academic planning process.
Next, I want to say a few words about my concept of the fully-functioning faculty member. Let me begin by saying that if I had my life to live again, I would still pursue an academic career. There simply is no better choice. Where else is one allowed to set one's own priorities? Where else is one, one's own boss? Where else does one have the freedom to tailor one's mix of activities to suit one's interests and talents at different stages in one's career? Where else is one surrounded by people who come together to learn or to facilitate the learning of others? I worked my way from the bottom up to become a fully-functioning faculty member, namely one who teaches both undergraduate and graduate students, does research and supervises graduate students, helps run the department, and contributes to the well being and development of one's discipline and professional societies. Over the years, however, my interests varied, and I was able and permitted to vary the mix of my activities. In later years, I branched out in two directions: textbook writing and academic administration.
My next point has to do with demystifying the university by providing information to our many publics. Earlier I used the word mysterious to describe the university. I think this is both positive and negative: positive in the sense that it makes the university an exciting institution worthy of exploration and understanding. Certainly U of T presented me with that challenge, and UW is doing the same now. I spent 34 years−37 if you count my years as a graduate student−uncovering the mysteries of U of T. There, I was fond of saying that, when I know all there is to know about U of T, I will leave. As it turned out, I left without completing the task.
As exciting as the mysterious nature of the university can be, it has been in my view a real problem in our relationship with society. By and large universities have failed in communicating with their many publics: the governments that fund us; our prospective students and their parents; our alumni and friends; industry and other organizations that employ our graduates and which can benefit from the knowledge and the technology we create; and so on. We failed because we never made it a priority to provide objective information about our activities, our successes and failures, and our challenges, in a systematic and accessible fashion. Because of the lack of this information provision, which we sometimes excused as an exercise in protecting our autonomy, we have managed to frustrate governments and bring on ourselves such interventions as value-for-money audits. We also allowed government to use such simplistic measures as the percentage of our graduates who are employed after "n" months of graduation to determine the quality of the education we provide.
Our failure to measure our own performance and to report the results in a systematic, accessible and transparent manner, opened the field of ranking our performance to newspapers and news magazines, such as the Globe and Mail and Maclean's in Canada and the US News and World Report in the United States. Although, of course, as a UW Dean, I now fully believe in the soundness of the Maclean's rankings. (Maybe I should say that again.) I don’t think this sentiment is shared by other universities across the country. In fact, there is a move afoot by a number of major universities to withdraw from-- (including my former institution)-- to withdraw from the Maclean's survey. This, I believe, would be a big mistake. Simply put, the public has the right to know how well their universities are doing. If for whatever reason we are unwilling or unable to provide the information required, others will do it for us, and I would think, less well.
While we are on the subject of informing the public, I must take this opportunity to register my amusement and perhaps some horror at the efforts of some universities to portray themselves as places only to party and to have a good time, a sort of "Good-Time U." I have recently viewed a rock video produced by one such institution of higher learning! (I will not tell you which – Maybe after lunch.)
Let me conclude by going back to the personal. I am often asked, why did I come to Waterloo? The answer is simple: I could not resist the challenge of taking an already excellent school of engineering and making it even better. Now, a little more than
half-way through my term as Dean, we have just unveiled a very ambitious plan for our Faculty; Vision 2010, which is a blueprint for excellence in engineering education and research will make Waterloo Engineering one of the leading engineering schools in the world.
As for me, I will then go back to writing so that I may be invited to the Friends of the Library event of perhaps 2010. Thank you very much.
(Lengthy Applause)
(Question and answer period followed)
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