Bruce Mitchell, Sc’68, DSc'20, is helping Queen’s, one of Canada’s leading research universities, bolster research capacity and volume to make groundbreaking discoveries that will deepen our knowledge of people, the planet, and universe.

The business leader and philanthropist is making a transformative gift of $30 million to his alma mater with the goal of increasing research intensity and supporting graduate student recruitment.

"The Queen’s community is grateful for Bruce’s generosity and his commitment to research," says Principal and Vice-Chancellor Patrick Deane. "This generous gift provides us with the resources to help achieve our bold research goals in part, through the support of top researchers. With these additional funds, we are realizing our aspirations to become a world leader bringing scholars and innovators together to make improvements across our many fields of study."

The gift will dramatically improve and expand research and its real-world impact at Queen’s in many ways:

• Nine existing faculty members will receive funds to ignite their research programs and teams
• Nine new faculty members will be hired to support research intensity in strategic research areas
• Queen’s will recruit 54 postdoctoral fellows
• Queen’s will increase the size of its graduate student body and enhance the university’s competitiveness in attracting a diverse global pool of graduate scholars, through financial support for an estimated 79 grad students

"The best way to invest in research is to invest in people and create the optimal conditions for them to thrive," says Vice-Principal (Research) Nancy Ross, Artsci'90, MA'92. "This gift allows us to focus on attracting and retaining the best faculty and graduate students. We hope to recruit rising stars and nurture them, setting up research environments where researchers are supported and able to progress."

The gift will further bolster research at Queen’s. The university is already home to 35 Canada Research Chairs, 99 Royal Society of Canada members, and a Nobel Laureate – Professor Emeritus Arthur B. McDonald, co-recipient of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics.

"Research and innovation are powerful forces for positive change, and researchers play a critical role in shaping human knowledge," says Mitchell, the Chief Executive Officer of Permian Industries. "My hope is that this investment in increasing Queen’s research intensity and graduate student enrolment will lead to discoveries that will benefit the world."

This is not Mitchell’s first significant gift to the university. He was the lead donor in the revitalization of the old Physical Education Centre (PEC), which was named Mitchell Hall in his honour. That transformational investment also supported the creation of the Ingenuity Labs Research Institute within Mitchell Hall as well as the installation of five engineering professorships across three departments.

This op-ed was originally published in the Times Higher Education supplement in 2021.

As a member of the international group tasked with updating the Magna Charta Universitatum – the declaration of university freedoms and principles that was first signed in Bologna in 1988 – I am struck by the extent to which the intervening three decades have altered the global consensus about the nature and function of universities. Where the original document spoke eloquently to the fundamental values of the academy, the new Magna Charta Universitatum 2020 reaffirms those values but also expands upon their social function and utility. I would summarise the shift this way: we have moved from an understanding of universities as defined primarily by their ability to transcend historical contingency to a more complicated view, which asserts that timeless principles such as academic freedom and institutional autonomy are the platform from which the academy must engage with history.

If the situation in Europe and around the world in 1988 made it important to speak up for the freedoms without which teaching and research would be impoverished, by 2020 it had become equally important to speak of the responsibilities incumbent on institutions by virtue of the privileges accorded to them. The reality of rapid climate change has brought urgency and authority to this new view of universities, as have parallel trends in the social, cultural, and political climate, and “education for sustainable development” has emerged as the increasingly dominant model for global higher education – one which fuses the concerns of environment, society, and economy.  

Recent columns in Times Higher Education have admirably described the diverse ways in which the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have been intrinsic to this reorientation of the global academy: as a rallying point for students and staff, as an accountability framework, and as a global language for political action, for example. Here at Queen’s University, the SDGs have been an important frame for our current planning process, and in all of those ways have influenced the manner in which we understand and wish to articulate our mission.

At one point in the process, an influential and valued friend of the university expressed some irritation to me about the way in which the SDGs had come to dominate and disrupt the university’s normally untroubled and inwardly-focused dialogue with itself about mission and values. “And in any case,” came the throwaway dismissal, “there’s nothing original or new about aligning with the SDGs.” Of course, that is true in 2021, but is it relevant? If a university is able to maximise its global impact, does the inherent originality or novelty of its planning parameters matter? In such exchanges – still occurring, I’m certain, on campuses everywhere – we can see that the changing consensus about which I wrote at the start is not yet complete.

It seems to me, in fact, that much of the value of the SDGs as an organising framework for universities resides in their not being proprietary or “original” to one institution, or to an exclusive group of institutions. It has often been pointed out that they now provide a shared language which helps universities in diverse geographical, political, and socio-economic locations understand and build upon the commonality of their work in both teaching and research. Adoption of the SDGs, however variously that is done from institution to institution, is turning the “global academy” from a rhetorical to a real construct, and I can’t imagine why it would be in the interests of any university to hold itself aloof from that transformation. Having watched our planning process unfold at Queen’s over the last two years, I can confirm that what the SDGs do at the global level, they do also at the level of the individual institution, providing a common language that provokes and sustains dialogue – not only between disciplines, but between the academic and non-academic parts of the operation.

I want to end by commenting on the excitement generated when siloes are broken open and when people and units understand how they are united with others in a common purpose and in service to the greater good. To cultivate that understanding has been the primary objective of planning at Queen’s for the last two years, and preparing our first submission to the Impact Rankings has been an intrinsic part of that process of learning and self-discovery. Naturally, we are delighted and excited by where we find ourselves in the rankings, but we are energised in a more profound way by the knowledge of what synergies and collaborations exist or appear possible both within our university and in the global academy.

The first 16 SDGs point to the areas in which we want to have impact. The 17^th tells us what the whole project is really all about: acting in community for the communal good.