Via the Financial Post:

Last week, David Naylor, the president of the University of Toronto, made a speech to Empire Club of Canada members about what he describes as educational zombies — government and industry calls for more job-specific education at universities and more research aligned with industry needs.

Dr Steven Bruhm at Western, who shared this on Facebook (publicly), makes a comment worth quoting at length:

"I think that every university president in Canada should be called upon to start making these kinds of high-profile speeches, speeches that disabuse their readers of the kind of anti-intellectual crap by which the media and the bureaucrat represent the university (and especially the role of Arts and Humanities in the university). Every university president should show her/his colours by speaking FOR what the university does, rather than ignoring what the university does or, worse yet, quietly apologizing for what it does. And every university president should be playing a more active and direct role in telling university students why they are doing something important and productive, especially when what they are doing does not immediately promise a six-figure income at the end of it. As it stands now, we who are professors in the Arts and Humanities are constantly blamed for our own demise, constantly enjoined to fix it by being something else, constantly told to do more with less, and to be happy about that. If Naylor is chauvinistic about U of T, he is chauvinistic in a way that can spread out to other campuses and to other presidents. Would that that might happen."