Momentum builds as SSHRC prepares for transformation to knowledge council

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) is wrapping up an exhaustive consultation process that it hopes will set the stage for a breakthrough in its quest to reinvent itself for the 21st Century. If its efforts are successful, the new SSHRC will almost certainly receive a new name and substantially more funding to modify existing programs and create new ones to meet a series of new priority areas (see chart).

Within the next month, staff at the 25-year-old granting agency will begin preparing a draft strategic plan for consideration by SSHRC’s governing council, with a final document slated for public release early in 2005. Officials hope its objective of transforming itself from a granting council to a so-called knowledge council will be endorsed by government with a substantive response in the next Budget.

“We’ll lay out a roadmap to a renewed SSHRC and our community and then work on an operational plan,” says Christian Sylvain, SSHRC’s director of corporate policy and planning. “We want to create new business lines and substantial increases will be required, although how much depends on various scenarios. We can’t disassociate the reality that our disciplines have been struggling for decades. There’s currently a strong culture of poverty.”

Attempts in recent years to redress the imbalance in funding between SSHRC and the other granting councils — the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) — have largely fallen upon deaf ears in Ottawa. While sympathetic to SSHRC’s inability to fund more worthwhile research proposals, the Liberal administration has consistently approved uniform, across-the-board funding increases. As a result, SSHRC represents more than 18,000 or 54% of the 33,865 full-time faculty at Canadian universities (circa 2001) but receives just 12% of total granting council funding.

The SSHRC community received a major boost in late 2002 when Dr Martha Piper, president of the Univ of British Columbia, delivered the 2002 Killam Lecture. In her address, Piper advocated a major boost to SSHRC’s funding as well as a restructuring of the council to maximize its contribution to the federal innovation strategy (R$, February 18/03). The lecture reignited the push for change and helped to counteract the widespread demoralization that had become entrenched within the disciplines funded by SSHRC.

“Martha Piper’s speech triggered this process and helped us start the process of thinking what SSHRC ought to be doing. And the transformation of Medical Research Council (MRC) to CIHR was a watershed moment,” says Sylvain. “We have emerging directions from our consultations (but) there’s no way to do it systematically because there is currently no structural capacity.”

SSHRC officials often point to the emergence of CIHR from the old MRC as an example of what can be achieved if it receives government buy-in. But SSHRC’s transformation is sensitive to the unique characteristics of the more than 30 disciplines it represents, hence the extensive consultation leading up to a new strategy.

“We don’t have the body parts and the diseases to structure our community like CIHR. We want to keep our core programs and start embedding new values in how we support the funding of research,” says Sylvain. “We can’t organize in institutes but we can cluster our research. We’re searching for a model to do this.”

To facilitate that search, SSHRC has launched a competition for 20 Strategic Research Clusters Design Grants. The new program will fund 20 small research teams to develop cluster models for consideration. Next February, the cluster research teams will gather in Ottawa to develop a fluid cluster model that can be implemented to enact the transformation.

“We hope the Budget will give us the resources to fund these clusters. We can launch the transformation as soon as the Budget comes down,” says Sylvain. “There’s an emerging confidence among the research community and a new attitude towards the dissemination of knowledge. We’re trying to understand our world so that SSHRC can position itself between the scholarly and non-scholarly worlds.”

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