As I said, from my point of view, having served as the vice-president of research and innovation, a lot of what has been discussed about the political bias I have no experience with or have not seen broadly within the university. What I would say that I have seen is that the traditional measures of excellence like citations, publications and research funding tend to be discipline-specific. I can give you a good example. When I came in as the vice-president of research and innovation, the first thing I was presented with was a report on the best researchers at TMU. I looked at the best researchers at TMU and saw that they were all men and that they were all in engineering. Why? It was because the measure of excellence was the amount of research funding. As you would know, faculty in engineering departments need a lot of funding to do their research whereas someone in a business school, a philosopher or history professor doesn't necessarily.
If you use research funding as the metric of excellence, you are going to exclude a lot of people. We shifted it to say, “Okay, in engineering, here are the metrics. In the arts and social sciences, here are the metrics.” In business, we're concerned about publications and top-tier journals, but we're also interested in impact. How do we drive change? My personal bias, even though I've sat on a lot of the traditional academic committees, is towards impact as part of the way that we assess excellence. We know that Canada has a productivity gap. We know that Canada has an innovation gap. I believe that research and evidence-based solutions can help solve some of those big problems, but we can't just be thinking about how many publications are coming out of a research grant. We have to be thinking about how it is actually shaping policy, practice, and people's attitudes and behaviour. That's where my bias comes in as a more applied researcher.