Impact Podcast | Degrees of change: Higher education’s role in a shifting world

KANINA BLANCHARD: Exclusive insights, actionable strategies and ideas that ignite change. You're listening to the Ivey Impact Podcast from Ivey Business School.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: Hello and welcome to Dialogue with the Dean. The inaugural series on the Ivey Impact Podcast. I'm Julian Birkinshaw, Dean of the Ivey Business School. And in this series, we're discussing some of the present challenges and opportunities shaping business and society today. This episode breaks from my usual format to explore a more fundamental question: in a world shaped by disruption, what is the role of post-secondary learning? Are we adapting quickly enough to meet the needs of today's learners, and are we rethinking outdated models to truly remove barriers and expand access? Very few bring more clarity or more passion to this topic than our guest today, Alan Shepard, president and Vice-Chancellor of Western University. As the leader of our university, one of Canada's best, and as an advocate for inclusive transformational education, Alan offers a thoughtful perspective on the future of higher education and its role in addressing the world's grand challenges. Alan, welcome to Dialogue with the Dean. It's a privilege to have you here.

ALAN SHEPARD: Pleasure to be here, Julian.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: Thanks. And we're going to do this one a little bit different than our usual format, because you're going to be asking me a few questions, as well. But I'll start with the question to you. Everyone knows who you are, perhaps they don't know your backstory. How did you find your way to Western?

ALAN SHEPARD: Yes. Well, I was recruited to Western in 2018 and I started in 2019. These processes take a long time. But I immigrated to Canada from Texas, not quite 25 years ago, having been a visiting faculty member at the University of Toronto and falling in love with Canada. And as soon as I could get back, I did.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: Excellent. And you were also president at Concordia, was it, before?

ALAN SHEPARD: Yes, I was. I was president of Concordia University of Montreal for seven years. And before that I was the provost of what was then Ryerson, now TMU, and in Toronto.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: So, the basic question that we're going to grapple with today is, the world of education is changing. It's being changed by all the geopolitical stuff going on around us, but it's really been changed by technology, as well. So, tell us how you think about the challenge facing higher education, universities, in terms of adapting to these challenges.

ALAN SHEPARD: There's an enormous tension between tradition, as institutions that are a thousand years old, and the speed and pace and intensity of change in contemporary society. And I have to say that as an institution, although we have long and deep roots, we are struggling to keep up with the pace of change in the world around us. And I suppose that's true for most businesses, really, most institutions. So, we are struggling as a sector to make changes as fast as we can, as we need to. I will say that the COVID-19 pandemic probably accelerated things. We, at Western, closed on, as I remember it, a Thursday, and we re-opened the following Wednesday completely online virtually. I'm not an advocate that online is the only or even the best form of education. Just to say that we would never have imagined that we could make such a transformation that fast - and we did. We delivered our entire curriculum, including medicine and nursing and everything else. It was quite extraordinary. 

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: We'll come back to technology, but I do want our listeners to understand the constraints we're under. Alan, could you provide us just a quick overview of the current funding environment for higher education in Canada today.

ALAN SHEPARD: So, the government support for higher education in Canada has been declining year over year for the last, probably 30 or 40 years. There was a time early in my career when about 80 per cent of our operating funding would come from government. And that's still true in Quebec, it's about 75 per cent. In Ontario, it's mostly under 30 per cent. We're at or roughly 28 per cent at Western. So, the rest is coming from student tuition. And that's a public policy choice people can make, societies can make. Who pays? But we know that excellence is expensive. You can't do the work on the cheap. At the same time, we do have an obligation to monitor our costs and continue to seek innovation and opportunities to control those costs. So, we work very hard at that at Western, and I would say across the sector, we're pretty good at that. We could probably be a little better here and there. The tuition in Ontario has been capped now for seven years, and the grant, which is the portion the government would give for educating a student, has been capped for about ten years. So that makes it very difficult.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: Yeah. And every year our costs go up with inflation and revenues stay basically fixed.

ALAN SHEPARD: Yes. We have employee agreements, we have a number of unions and associations at Western that we've made fair, collective agreements with them. And as you would anticipate, they expect their salaries to increase over time with inflation, sometimes a little more.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: And I think Western is, compared to other universities in Ontario, anyway, is in reasonable financial shape, at least compared to some of the others.

ALAN SHEPARD: Yes, we have a lot of assets under management and we're quite fiscally conservative and careful, and we try not to do foolish things that will get us into trouble.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: Indeed. And the other thing you touched on, which I want to now dig into, and I've got some views on this as well, is technology, artificial intelligence. Right, I mean, we all know this is going on. Students come to class, they're meant to read a case study, they're a bit distracted, they're a bit behind. So, what do they do? They plug it into ChatGPT. ChatGPT gives them, you know, a summary of the case. It gives them answers to the assignment questions, so they can kind of fake it, right? But I can't help thinking that they are shortchanging themselves. And that strikes at the heart of, you know, is the whole process of learning going to have to be rethought because of the way technology's changing?

ALAN SHEPARD: I'm a huge fan of technology generally, and I think it can be used for good. I am deeply worried about the impact it's going to have on people's educations. For AI, I would use the same word you use, which is shortchange, right? So, I teach literature and writing when I'm teaching and there is no substitute, no computerized substitute for sitting down with your thoughts, trying to organize them, make them coherent, have evidence, write persuasively. And if you ask a computer to do that for you, it will do so. You are sort of going from A to Z without going through all those steps. They're not just some horrible thing you have to do, like that is the training of your mind. So, I worry deeply.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: Me too. And, at Ivey, of course, we've been having all these debates about what is the nature of case study teaching when people have essentially kind of summarized the case without reading the case. And the current view, of course, is that the we as faculty, it relies on us to be pushing our students to justify their arguments, you know, what's the basis of that statement? And if the student says, “well, that's what ChatGPT taught me,” that’s a fail, right? They wouldn't say that.

ALAN SHEPARD: Western and Ivey students are too clever to say that.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: But, we know it's going on, so we have to push them. What's the basis of that? What are the facts that bring that up? And then for us to then move the conversation onto a higher plane so that they are actually debating the pros and cons of different points of view. Building an argument for a course of action, developing their critical thinking skills so that they can challenge and understand different people's views. I mean, our view, I suspect you'll agree but I'll say it anyway, is that as information gets commoditized through ChatGPT and other AIs, the value of the interactive case method actually becomes greater than ever, because that's the style of learning which never sort of, you know, involve the professor just lecturing to the students. And so, the skills you gain through the case method, I think, are skills you will need forever, regardless of what the technique.

ALAN SHEPARD: Absolutely. So, Ivey was ahead of its time and added up to the case study model. And that was probably what, 50 years ago or longer, I think.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: I mean, certainly longer than I'd been.

ALAN SHEPARD: Yeah, a long time ago. It was a brilliant move then, and it still holds today. I worry a lot about people taking shortcuts. As I said, I'm even getting annoyed with my own email. Like I upgraded my computer the other day when I opened my email, now it summarizes the email for me. It'll say, you know, “Julian invited you to do a podcast,” and I'm going crazy because I don't like the fact that it's surveilling me, but also that it's doing all my thinking for me.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: Right, as you say, there is a value. I mean, there's a little bit of us being the age we are and sort of not seeing the technology. But I like to have to work through the detail of a message or a paper to come up to my own view about what that says.

ALAN SHEPARD: Yes. I just worry that the technology is so fast and so powerful that it will steal away our students' opportunities to really grow and develop. And that's why they're here. They're not just here to get a piece of paper and if they can get it faster with GPT, all the better. Like, they're here so that you educate them and that our faculty trains them how to think and to pursue ideas.

MUSICAL INTERMISSION

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: Okay, let's talk about international relationships, international students. As we've already established, I was an international student coming to Ivey 35 odd years ago. You've moved here. Perhaps it goes without saying that, an international student body is a good thing, but perhaps we should just articulate why that's the case.

ALAN SHEPARD: I saw a picture of you in some Ivey materials the other day from when you were a graduate student. Delighted me. You looked younger, Julian.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: I certainly did. Yeah, it was a while ago.

ALAN SHEPARD: We were all younger. So Western, Ivey, we want to be an internationally private institution. Our alumni want that. Our faculty, our students, and we feel like we can do a lot of good in the world by having that kind of prominence. You can't be a great university and get everybody from 40 kilometres away.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: And of course, I wholeheartedly agree. And at Ivey, I mean, you've got to separate out undergraduate and master's level to some degree because at Ivey where, you know, 93, 94 per cent of our MBAs are Canadian, whereas our master's programs are sort of 50/50ish. I mean, it's slightly more Canadian, but I think it is understood that most people stay in their original country for undergrad. Perhaps, even that is starting to change. So, I guess the obvious question is what can we do to attract more overseas students to Canada and to Western, specifically at both the undergraduate and graduate level? I mean, having a strong brand is good, of course that's a good thing. I mean, what other thoughts are on your mind in terms of some of the ways that we can do that?

ALAN SHEPARD: Strong brand, for sure. Rankings make a huge difference, particularly with international students and for Canadians, word of mouth is a sort of a substitute for international rankings. And I do think that. So, at the university broadly, we have about 80 per cent of our students are from Ontario, about 10 per cent are from the rest of Canada, and the final 10 per cent, from elsewhere in the world. I would love to see that number climb in the rest of the world to roughly 20 per cent, that would be the industry standard, if you will. And I do think that fundamental to a 21st century education is that you're seated next to somebody who grew up in a different culture, maybe a different religious orientation or economic situation. So, I think all that's really important.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: And, you know, there's lots of stuff happening in the U.S. right now. I'll give you my view and you can react to it, as the U.S. turns a little bit in on itself, I would like to think that that's an opportunity for Canada because, you know, we will be one of the most attractive places for English language education for people around the world. We've got a new government. This feels like a time when we can actually take advantage of our innate attractiveness as a country to the rest of the world. There's something about Canadianness that I think people around the world find compelling. So, we've got to make the most of that, right?

ALAN SHEPARD: Well, as an immigrant and now Canadian citizen, I think this is a wonderful place to live and work. I will say that I've been speaking to senior levels of the federal government, the new federal government, about our competitiveness as a sector and higher education. When the previous government made new regulations regarding international students, I think there was, a setback for Canada, and we have a bit of an uphill to climb now in terms of reassuring international students. So, their interest in Canada has never waned. It's actually stronger than ever for the reasons you just said. But their confidence that they could come here, that they would find a place, that we would be fair with them after they completed their studies, that's all been a bit banged up. And so, the federal government is now working hard to restore that. Canadian culture and Canadian higher education has long been sought after as one of the highest quality programs in the world. You have to respect, all around the world education is very highly valued. Maybe less so in my home country, at the moment. But Asia, Middle East, Africa, there's a great reverence for learning. Yeah, indeed.

MUSICAL INTERMISSION

ALAN SHEPARD: In 2009, the huge banking crisis that hit the world, Canada fared relatively well because our banks had not been out making foolish decisions, I think I can say. But I'm just sort of curious how a business school like Ivey has learned and responded, that's 15, 16, 17 years ago. How did that impact the curriculum and how people think about their role as a model for future leaders of business?

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: Yeah. So, and this is, of course, secondhand because I wasn't here in that period. But Ivey took that period very seriously as a sort of catalyst to rethink a couple of things. I mean, we've been teaching business ethics before, but that was a point where we realized that it doesn't matter if you just sort of teach it on the side, if it's not part of the way the students look at the business world, there is a risk of those sort of bad decisions to emerge. So, out of that, we use the Ivey pledge, which is a commitment that we all make orally every time anyone graduates, they submit to a series of statements that we put together. I've given that pledge, every graduate gives that pledge. Out of that period, Ivey's work on leader character emerged. So, this is Professor Gerard Seijts, Professor Mary Crossan, and several others. I think, Jeffrey Gandz, who was a professor, now retired, was also instrumental there. They developed a whole point of view about leadership isn't what you do, it's who you are. And essentially this notion that basic integrity as an individual and a point of view, which is the right way of looking at the world, has to be built into your training as an individual. So, we're now world famous, actually, for the research that those individuals and others have done on leader character. We now build it explicitly into their courses from the beginning. So, you know, literally in the first couple of weeks, students will take classes around leadership and character and integrity and ethics. We even get in, this is quite fun, actually, we even get in speakers such as a guy called Andy Fastow. You might remember that name? He was the CFO of Enron.

ALAN SHEPARD: Oh, Enron. I was in Texas when Enron melted down.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: Yeah. I mean, and Andy Fastow was the guy. I mean, he went to jail. He really spent probably 15 years in jail. I don't know exactly, but he went to jail, rightly so, for his sins of cooking the books. But he's out of jail now, and he's trying to rehabilitate himself, and he comes in to Ivey. He has to come on video because he's not allowed to travel, but he comes in on video kind of confessing his sins and saying, “look, you know, I didn't start out as a criminal. I found myself in a position where gradually I was being asked to make slightly more stretched goals and try to sort of massage the books in order to make things work. And then at some point I crossed a line, and I started creating illegal, off of balance sheet financing stuff.” And, and so having him come into class and talk about how it all went wrong and how a guy who started out on the right side ended up on the wrong side, I think that's the sort of story that our students really find quite powerful.

ALAN SHEPARD: I would like to hear that story, and I would love to see that myself. I don't think it has much impact of having someone come in and say they've been a Boy Scout or a Girl Scout for their entire career, and it's easy to do because there are these pressures they will encounter in the business world. I think that's magnificent. The leadership piece that your faculty have pursued has been very good. And they were doing it even when it wasn't that fashionable.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: I think that's right. I think they would definitely, as with any sort of academic pursuit, you know, when you're first branching out into an area, people say, “who are these guys? What is that? Why do we need that? But it has taken off, and it's a very, very compelling argument to make. And because nowadays, when you look at certain leaders in the world, we don't need to name them, who lack integrity, any sort of moral fiber at all, it's a reminder that actually, who you are as an individual matters. It matters to the people around them. And so, we work very hard to try to build that point of view into our students at an early age.

ALAN SHEPARD: I think the leadership focus at Ivey is actually drifting sideways across the campus. I hear other faculties talking a lot about leadership in ways that they probably wouldn't have ten years ago. So, I'm curious, Julian, about your new graduates this year and the next couple of years, what are some of the ethical challenges you think they're likely to face? And they're entering a world that's very topsy turvy, I’ve got to say.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: There's a whole category of just doing the right thing when under pressure internally, and then there's a whole bunch of ethical issues that are emerging. There's the issue about how do you get the right balance between making money and doing good for the world and balancing sustainability and doing the right thing for people versus doing the right thing for your shareholders. There's going to be issues around AI and property rights and trying to figure out how much information I can reveal about myself. So, data privacy becomes an issue in a way that perhaps it wasn't before. So, I think there's a bunch of new issues that are emerging that we need to get regulatory clarity around. And I don't want our students just to wait to be told what to do. I want them to try to figure out how can you understand who you are well enough that you can make good decisions about getting the right balance in a changing world.

ALAN SHEPARD: And it's challenging, when you first graduate and you're in a corporate environment, let's say for the first time as a young adult, how to do that. So, business leaders for a while, there was a movement, I don't know the name of the movement, there was a movement about trying to check unbridled capitalism, trying to balance. Obviously, I believe in capitalism and presumably you do too, but to kind of ensure that it has some guardrails on track. I don't know what the movement was called. Is that still a thing, or no?

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: No, no, 100 per cent. I mean, and essentially, we teach it in a variety of different forms, but, the simple language I use is, profit, people, planet. The three Ps, as business leaders, and of course, we're trying to help our Ivey graduates all to think as potential business leaders, is you have a job to balance those three. In other words, if you go too far down the profit route, you are almost certainly going to be cutting some corners on some aspect of people and planet. And yet if you go all the way down, tree hugging sort of extreme of “we are here to make the world a better place,” then you don't make enough profits, literally, to sustain yourself, at which point you go out of business. So, we're trying to find the right way of putting those guardrails in place at a personal level in terms of building a statement of purpose, what your company is trying to achieve that incorporates these different attentions, because you can make an argument in the long run that all these three things are aligned, but in the short-term, they're never completely aligned, because you can always do things in the short-term, which is taking money away from supporting your local community, supporting sustainability, which increases your profits. So, we're trying to get them understanding the short and long term.

ALAN SHEPARD: You've had a long career already in higher education, business education. Do you see any changes in the student profile like, on ethics or anything else? Like, what are you noticing about this crop of students versus twenty years ago.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: Yeah. So, I mean, the biggest change in the world of business education, in terms of the students coming through, is that for a long time, particularly at the master's level, a business degree was a route to banking and consulting, if you see what I mean. And those continue to be, of course, hugely attractive. They are well paid roles. But the world is changing. There aren't enough roles, frankly, in those areas. And so, we are starting to see a much greater mix of students coming through who have different interests. So, as a big chunk, who actually want to be entrepreneurs and, you know, you celebrate that, as do I. Trying to get not just business students, but students across the entire university thinking like entrepreneurs. So, I see that happening. I see increasing numbers of students, for example, going into technology jobs, because that's a growing area. Some of them want to get jobs in sustainability, in social enterprise. And so, for me, broadening the outlook of our student body in terms of the types of careers that they might have, is the biggest change in terms of the student mix. Say a bit more about Western and entrepreneurship; we could have touched on that earlier.

ALAN SHEPARD: I think that in terms, you're speaking about changes in business education. For me, the most important change, really since probably 1965 or something like that, is around entrepreneurship education. The last big shift in undergraduate studies was internships, co-ops, and so forth. And what was shocking about those in the day was that university professors were conceding that other people who were not university professors could supervise our students, could teach them important things, and could evaluate them clearly. That was a big concession for faculty members back in the day. Now, the big shift is around entrepreneurship and acknowledging that entrepreneurs come in all flavours, they're in all faculties, from music to neuroscience to business to anywhere, across the campus. And that part of our responsibility is to establish an environment where, for those who are interested, they can develop their entrepreneurial chops. Some of them will arrive saying, “what's an entrepreneur?” Others will arrive saying, “I started a company in my parents' basement and I need advice.” And so, one of the things I'm really proud of at Western, and Ivey plays a key role in this, is that we offer entrepreneurship education that’s from entrepreneurship 101, all the way through to demo days and investments by our alumni in our students companies and everything in between. This is extremely powerful. It's absolutely right for the time. And our students, when we did a survey of them a couple of years ago, you know, what do they want? 40 per cent of them said they wanted entrepreneurship, engagement, and education. They won't all be entrepreneurs, I get it, but some number of them will, and they will probably create a lot of prosperity and stability for Canada. So, I'm really thrilled by that.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: Yeah. And the entrepreneurship certificate, I think is what we're calling it, is going to be launched. I mean, the students have already signed up, it will be taught for the first time this fall.

ALAN SHEPARD: And it's been important to me that it sit kind of on the divide between the regular curriculum and extracurricular work, what you find when you go - we opened a new building for entrepreneurship in the fall, the Schmeichel Building for Entrepreneurship and Innovation - when you go there on a Friday night, they are not working on projects so they can get an A plus, they are working on things that they're passionate about, that they brought to the table, and not received as an assignment. I think that's fantastic. And the Morrissette Institute, you know, has been the leader of this across Canada, and we're really happy.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: For me coming Ivey after being away for a while, entrepreneurship is clearly one of the things Ivey does well. I mean, we talked about leadership as well and, indeed, we have a leadership certificate, as well, which is now a Western-wide thing.

ALAN SHEPARD: I just think that all of these areas are important, right, in different combinations. But the entrepreneurship, for me, is the biggest change for undergrads in a generation.

MUSICAL INTERMISSION

ALAN SHEPARD: It has been almost a year since you started as Dean, when Western was able to recruit you back. That must have been, from one London to the other London, that must have been kind of a culture shock, I'm guessing. I'm just curious to know, what are you thinking about so far? What have you noticed?

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: Yeah, so I noticed that a lot of things changed. I mean, a different building than the one I studied in. A lot of things are actually remarkably similar. And we talked earlier about the case method earlier, the case method is alive and well, and it really is a better way of learning. And I was pleasantly surprised to come back here to realize that it really is still the way in which our students learn, it's a better way. So, I'm extremely happy by seeing what Ivey’s become. I'm overwhelmed, I'll be honest with the quality of the alumni network. They are so passionate about Ivey. I really haven't seen that elsewhere. So, we've actually just launched what I call our Bold Ambition, which is our new strategic plan going forward. And at the heart of that, we've come up with this vision statement, which is, “to reimagine experiential business learning for the world.” And reimagine is deliberately about looking for some creative ways of doing things differently without a clear point of view and exactly where we land. We talked earlier in this discussion about how artificial intelligence is changing things. We talked earlier about some of the international challenges. Experiential business learning, of course, is basically the case method. And I think having it for the world is a sort of statement of ambition. I don't want Ivey just to be the best business school in Canada, we have to be one of the best business schools in the world. We need to become one of the more respected and recognized brands. And so underneath that vision statement, there's a whole bunch of stuff we're doing. One of them is absolutely around digital innovation, seeing if we can use AI to complement our traditional ways of working, opening up new pathways. We had a whole conversation about accessibility; that's going to be a big part of the story. We want to, of course, invest in our research ideas that match ideas that really make a difference in the world. And we touched on some of that with our conversation about leader character. And then finally, I want Ivey's global impact to be better. And ultimately, Ivey’s success as a business school rests on its brand, and that brand has to rise beyond just being best in Canada. And so, a couple of the things we're doing, for example, we already have a publishing business, Ivey Publishing, which is a global business. Students around the world read cases with the Ivey name on it, and we can really grow that business quite a lot. We already have an executive education business, which is in Hong Kong, which is starting a little, toehold of an operation in the Middle East, again, something we touched on. And then we like to send our students off to other parts of world, particularly emerging economies, sometimes even to teach students in some of these locations, to make them global citizens. I mean, our hope is that many, if not most of them, come back to Canada. But the best way to be a successful businessperson in Canada is to have seen something of the world, as well. And so, opportunities to get our students taking jobs in the U.S., in London, U.K., and Hong Kong and to do some expeditions to emerging economies is healthy for them. It's good for Canada. And arguably it's also good for the world. So, I want us to sort of take Ivey to the world and to bring the world back to Ivey. So that, in a nutshell, is the plans we've got. It's ambitious stuff. But I do see a huge enthusiasm, appetite, if you like, for trying to change things. And so that's what I’m engineering here.

ALAN SHEPARD: The title Bold Ambition, I'm completely in sympathy with where you're taking this. I think that's what our alumni expect of us. It's what our students crave, and it's what our faculty and staff can deliver. Sometimes, you know, with a bit of encouragement to take risks that maybe historically Western wouldn't take. And that's fantastic. The internship piece and experiential learning is not just the case study method. It's also, as you say, having people for a period of time located in East Africa or wherever they may be in the world, you can't really substitute for that kind of experiential learning, like that is very powerful. So, I know that at the moment, globalization is sort of a bad word and all of that. But I don't see how we put the genie back in the bottle. I think it is a global world. We can pull up the drawbridge or whatever metaphor you want.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: But, that's just not going to help Canada.

ALAN SHEPARD: It’s not going to help Canada and Canada is not doing that. I'm really thrilled by it.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: So, I think we should wrap it up there. Thank you. Alan, you've been a perfect guest. Thanks very much. You've been listening to Dialogue with the Dean from Ivey Business School. A sincere thank you to my guest, Alan Shepard, for his time and insights. And to you, our listeners, for joining us. As we look to the future of education, one thing is clear, universities have a vital role in shaping the leaders, ideas, and solutions the world needs. I'm Julian Birkinshaw. Until next time, goodbye.

KANINA BLANCHARD: This was Dialogue with the Dean, an Ivey Impact Podcast series. For more insights from Ivey, including thought leadership on critical issues and additional podcast episodes, visit iveyimpact.ca or subscribe on your preferred podcast platform. Thanks for tuning in.