Anderson, an expert on how the brain produces positive and negative emotions, began his daily ritual because he was studying the mental health benefits of meditation and wanted to test them firsthand. He is one of a growing number of researchers at U of T who are investigating the biological, psychological and circumstantial causes of happiness.

Historically, psychology has probed the dark corners of the human mind. Psychologists have focused on ways to cure, or at least curb, mental illness. It’s only in the past 10 years that researchers have been trying to identify the factors that contribute to happiness and a satisfying life – a study that has come to be known as “positive psychology.”

*****

Anderson’s early-morning meditation sessions didn’t induce Zen-like bliss: a construction project was going full tilt outside his office window. “It wasn’t like an idyllic setting with a babbling brook,” he says with a laugh. “I heard jackhammers and saws. So I just said, ‘I’m going to find peacefulness in the din.’”

While practising mindfulness, people learn how to find calm in a difficult world. Being mindful means paying attention to moment-by-moment experiences. It means observing physical sensations and the mind’s thoughts and feelings, both positive and negative, without suppressing them or letting oneself be engulfed by them. A mindfulness response to anger would be “This is anger, and it will pass” rather than “I am really angry.”

Students of mindfulness begin by focusing on their breathing. Inevitably, the mind wanders. The challenge, says Anderson, is to keep bringing your attention back to your breath as a means of anchoring yourself in the present moment. Mindfulness instructors suggest meditating for 20 to 45 minutes every day. These sessions are the foundation of the whole practice, but the objective is to be mindful throughout all of life.

“Rather than labelling your daily experiences as good or bad,” says Anderson, “you just experience them for what they are.” When you wake up in the morning feeling down, for example, you monitor the dark thoughts and any related bodily symptoms such as heaviness or tension while getting on with your day. You simply note the sadness. You don’t ruminate on how you could possibly feel like this when the sun is out, who is to blame, whether it’s ruining your life and so on. “Mindfulness is a childlike sensibility. It’s more sensory,” he says. It’s what Buddhists call the “beginner’s mind.”

People who master this skill are less prone to get upset when unpleasant feelings arise. Everyday mindfulness has helped Anderson, a Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience who came to U of T from Stanford University in 2003, handle the pressures of being a new professor. “When I’m working on something, I feel guilty because I know it’s taking me away from working on something else. But I’m able to have those thoughts now without the anxious feelings that would normally accompany them,” he says. “I feel more composed.” Meditation, he adds, is like fitness for the brain. “It’s like training any other muscle in your body. You’re developing your brain to cope better with the world.”

New research has found that mindfulness can help people who suffer from depression. Professor Zindel Segal, the Morgan Firestone Chair in Psychotherapy at U of T and Mount Sinai Hospital, combines the principles of mindfulness with cognitive behavioural therapy, a form of psychotherapy that helps people see the connection between their thoughts and feelings. In people who have been depressed before, even mild sadness can trigger an excessive amount of negative thinking, which can, in turn, cause a recurrence of full-blown depression.

Professor Segal has discovered that mindfulness can keep people out of that harmful loop by teaching them to be aware of temporary unhappiness without being swallowed up by it. They learn that sad feelings are a part of life and usually transient, provided they don’t dwell on them. In a study published in 2000 involving individuals who had recovered from several bouts of depression, Segal found that those who completed mindfulness-based cognitive therapy relapsed in the following year only half as often as those who did not receive the therapy. A subsequent study in the U.K. replicated these findings, and researchers concluded that mindfulness therapy is most effective in preventing the recurrence of depression in patients who have had three or more previous episodes.

Why does mindfulness meditation work? Neuroscientists from several North American universities have been studying Buddhist monks – the acknowledged world champions of meditation – to see how their brains differ from the average person’s. Segal and other researchers at U of T, meanwhile, are using advanced medical imaging to examine how mindfulness and psychotherapy affect the brains of ordinary people struggling with depression.

Along with Dr. Helen Mayberg, who is now at Emory University in Atlanta, but is still an adjunct professor of psychiatry at U of T, Segal led a groundbreaking study in 2002 that compared the brains of people who had recovered from depression using cognitive behavioural therapy with those who had used a popular antidepressant. The patients who got well with the drug showed changes in the lower, more primal, part of the brain known as the limbic system, while those who received therapy demonstrated changes in the upper areas of the brain connected with higher thought. Both areas are implicated in depression. The hopeful message from this research, says Segal, is that there are different routes to mental health. Drugs are not the only solution; we can also feel better by altering how we think.

Segal, who is also head of the Cognitive Behavioural Therapy Clinic at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, will test this theory further later this year. He and Anderson are collaborating on a research project to investigate how the brains of people who have recovered from depression respond to sad stimuli – clips from movies such as Terms of Endearment, for example – before and after mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. Segal expects the mindfulness training to enable the group to watch the clips without becoming sad themselves. “You can change the chemical environment of your brain with drugs,” says Segal, “and you can do it with mindfulness, and by learning how to pay attention in the midst of upsetting emotions.”

Evidence of the healing power of mental training is exciting for everyone interested in happiness, says Anderson, and not just for those who want to prevent depression. “This empowers us as individuals to understand and regulate our own emotions,” says Anderson. “That’s part of what’s exciting about it – we’re looking at untapped human potential.”

*****

As promising as mindfulness meditation is, our happiness is not entirely within our control. Genetics plays a part, too. In 1996, University of Minnesota researcher David Lykken released the results of a study in which he had examined the role of genes in determining one’s satisfaction with life. Lykken collected data on about 4,000 sets of twins born in Minnesota between 1936 and 1955, compared the results from identical and fraternal twins, and came to the conclusion that about half of one’s happiness is determined genetically. The other half depends on life circumstances and what Lykken calls “life’s slings and arrows.”

Our inborn temperament explains the general stability of our well-being over time. A famous 1978 study by researchers from Northwestern University in Chicago found that lottery winners reported feelings of intense joy following their win, while paraplegic and quadriplegic accident victims experienced despair. Within a few months, though, people in each group reported feeling about the same as they had prior to the life-changing event, leading experts to conclude that we all have a happiness set point. Our mood rises and falls, and serious mental illness can shift us lower, but over the long term our average happiness hovers around the same spot. “Someone who has a cheerful disposition today is probably going to be cheerful 10 years from now,” says Professor Ulrich Schimmack, who spent two years working in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign lab of Edward Diener – a pioneer in the study of happiness and the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Happiness Studies – before joining the psychology department at the University of Toronto at Mississauga.

In almost any situation, Schimmack says, our personality strongly influences our happiness. We all know someone who is wealthy, good-looking and successful yet also downright glum. “If we feel bummed out or that our life is meaningless, it’s hard for us to ignore those feelings and say, ‘Hey, my life is great,’ even if in most ways it is.”

Schimmack’s research has refined scientists’ understanding of the link between specific personality traits and well-being. A study published last year illustrated that, of all the traits, a predisposition to sadness – the tendency to have a lot of blue days – has the strongest negative impact on life satisfaction. Cheerfulness has the greatest positive effect. Shocking? No, but it’s the first time these intuitive truths have been proven scientifically. Schimmack also found that, contrary to what we might expect, sociability plays only a minor role in increasing our sense of fulfilment, and anxiety doesn’t diminish it. “A lack of meaning is more detrimental to life satisfaction than stress and worries,” he says.

Since we can’t trade in our gloomy genes, this may all sound grim. Yet in the realm of happiness, personality is not destiny. We have the capacity to enhance our well-being by striving for things that will make our lives more satisfying, says Schimmack. The problem is that we generally don’t know what will make us happy or unhappy. Joy is rarely as intense or as long-lasting as we imagine it will be, and the same is true for despair. This leads us to make poor choices in our quest to be happy. So Schimmack’s ultimate goal is to identify, through scientific testing, the personal and social factors that truly do contribute to our sense of well-being.

What do people say when they’re asked what makes them happy? Family and friends tend to rank high, as do religion, career and health. But studies have yielded conflicting results, particularly about how much marriage and faith contribute to happiness. Although a 2000 study by Diener of more than 59,000 people in 42 countries concluded that there is a positive correlation between marriage and life satisfaction across cultures, more recent studies have challenged this idea. In 2003, Richard Lucas of Michigan State University published research showing that people report being happier only at the beginning of a marriage; after five years they tend to return to their previous level of happiness. As for religion, studies have demonstrated a link between religiosity and happiness, though researchers say the social-support and community aspects of attending religious services are probably more important than belief in a higher being.

In an experiment involving mostly female university students, Schimmack showed that feeling satisfied in areas of our lives that we personally value can strongly contribute to happiness. “Progress toward a goal in a life domain that you care about is more important than the goal itself,” says Schimmack, adding that unattainable ambitions can lead to discontent. Setting career goals that don’t match up with your talents and abilities, for example, is a sure way to unhappiness.

Researchers know that people also look to the balance of pleasant and unpleasant experiences over their lifetime when they judge their life satisfaction. But traumatic events don’t have to derail our quest for happiness, says Professor Kate McLean, also in UTM’s psychology department. She studies how people make sense of their suffering by creating their own life stories, and has found that the way we tell the tale of an upsetting experience, whether it’s a divorce or a failed exam, influences our quality of life. “The more people acknowledge the negativity of the event and find some sort of resolution,” she says, “the better off they are in terms of well-being.” Rather than glossing over something and repressing it, we should find meaning in it, integrate it into our identity and move on.

When it comes to pleasant experiences, and particularly the pleasant physical experiences in our lives, many people would agree that activities such as playing sports, dancing, eating good food and having sex bring them happiness. But according to Schimmack’s research, physical fulfilment doesn’t have a lasting influence on our sense of well-being, though it can definitely brighten our day.

The same is true of money. Although wealth gives us the opportunity to pursue these pleasant physical experiences more often, it’s not the key to happiness that many expect. On survey after survey, rich people report being happier than poor people, but the difference for those who can afford life’s necessities is negligible. In other words, the extremely affluent are generally no happier than the modestly well off. “It’s possible that people don’t evaluate their total life satisfaction based on their income or material possessions,” says Schimmack, “though they clearly enjoy their new cars and boats on a day-to-day basis.” Perhaps the saying should be changed to “Money can’t buy long-term happiness.”

There is a twist, though. The happiness we derive from our own wealth depends on the wealth of those around us. A Harvard University study showed that most people would be happier to receive $50,000 if everyone else got $25,000, than to get $100,000 if everyone else got $200,000. It seems we are willing to settle for less, as long as we’re faring better than those around us. Studies have also shown that we quickly grow accustomed to any increase in wealth. Scientists call it the hedonic treadmill: before long we’re wondering when the next increase is coming and looking around to see who’s doing better. Since there will always be someone one rung up the ladder, it can be a vicious, misery-making cycle.

As a society, we are about as happy as we were 30 years ago, but we’re certainly becoming more preoccupied with happiness – witness the flourishing of the self-help industry. In general, says Schimmack, societies that do not have to worry about poverty worry about happiness. “Once you don’t have basic needs to fulfil, people move from survival values to what’s called well-being values. Those values are ‘I want to feel good all the time,’ ‘I want to have fun’ and ‘I don’t want to do the things that aren’t fun anymore.’ We’ve become more hedonistic in our choices and in the way we evaluate what is good and bad in our lives.”

This may explain why the majority of researchers exploring the science of happiness are from Western nations. While they are no doubt fuelled by scientific curiosity, they may also be energized by society’s passionate interest in their findings. “People are always asking, ‘Am I happy?’ ” says Schimmack. “It seems to be on everyone’s mind.”

Megan Easton is a freelance writer in Toronto. She wrote about young alumni in the Summer 2004 issue.

Aristotle offered the most complete articulation of the ancients’ views about well-being. He said happiness could be achieved only through virtuous conduct and rigorous thought. Professor Thomas Hurka, who takes a similar view, says the good life consists of things that are valuable and worth pursuing in themselves – self-understanding, achievement and moral virtue, among others – even if they don’t always make you feel happy in the sense of feeling pleasure. “Sometimes genuine self-understanding is painful,” says Hurka, the Henry N.R. Jackman Distinguished Professor in Philosophical Studies.

Early Christian scholars incorporated this notion of suffering for happiness into their doctrines. St. Augustine, a theologian who lived in the fourth century, argued that original sin precluded perfect happiness in this life, but the devout would get their due in the afterlife. Reformation theorists pondered whether earthly pleasures might even be a sign of God’s grace, a reward for good behaviour in advance of the real thing in heaven.

A radical break came in the 17th century when the English philosopher John Locke suggested that feeling good was intrinsically good because God wanted his creatures to be happy. The right action was therefore the one that resulted in the most pleasant feelings. Utilitarianism, a philosophy that flourished in the 18th century, extended this theory to public life. It asserted that government should judge its policies on which ones produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. The 19th-century English philosopher John Stuart Mill offered a refined version of utilitarianism in which he distinguished between “higher” and “lower” pleasures. In his view, cerebral satisfaction should rank higher than purely physical delight, which any animal could experience.

The idea that happiness is about feeling good rather than “doing good” has modern defenders. Wayne Sumner, a U of T philosophy professor and proponent of utilitarianism, says happiness has both an immediate, emotional component (you feel fulfilled in your life) and a more long-term, cognitive component (you judge that your whole life is going well). For Sumner, this kind of happiness is the most important part of the good life.

On a scale from 1 to 7, indicate how strongly you agree or disagree with the following statements, with 7 being strong agreement.

1. In most ways my life is close to my ideal.
2. The conditions of my life are excellent.

3. I am satisfied with my life.

4. So far I have gotten the important things I want in life.

5. If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing.

Total score: 31 to 35: you are extremely satisfied with your life; 26 to 30: satisfied; 21 to 25: slightly satisfied; 20: neutral point; 15 to 19: slightly dissatisfied; 10 to 14: dissatisfied; 5 to 9: extremely dissatisfied

What I didn’t know about her is that she’d prefer I didn’t.

Which is why the other day, to see where we stood, we took a “life-orientation test” I saw in a book called Learn To Be an Optimist. The test measures attitude and outlook. The questions were surprisingly easy, at least for me. (1. In uncertain times, I usually expect the best. Ha! 7. I hardly ever expect things to go my way. You can say that again!) I finished the test long before my wife. My score – three out of a possible 24 points; “extreme pessimism” on the test scale – was also easy to tally. My wife, who rated a 16, looked worried. “But I’m happy,” I said. “Really. Extremely.” To which she replied, “Compared to what?”

Good question. Woody Allen once said that life is either miserable or horrible, and you should consider yourself lucky if, most of the time, you are merely miserable. By that standard, I explained, who’s luckier than us? I also pointed out that since studies routinely demonstrate that there’s no happier creature on the face of the Earth than a married man – happier than married women, anyway – it’s safe to assume my score, low as it was, was probably higher than it had been before we met.

Somehow, none of this reassured her. As she double-checked the test results, I could guess what she was thinking – perhaps because it was what she was thinking more and more often: there’s room here for improvement.

Another thing I recently learned about my wife is that she’s addicted to HGTV. Home & Garden Television provides viewers with a wealth of home-decorating solutions and do-it-yourself good intentions. No amount of clutter is untameable, and no slob (i.e. husband) too irredeemable. The premise of the channel, which features redesign and makeover programs 24/7, is that by improving your surroundings you will invariably improve your outlook, your attitude and your potential for happiness.

I complain to my wife about HGTV, but, frankly, I enjoy it. I like the perky hosts and their earnest handyman sidekicks talking about “wallpaper making a comeback.” Or saying things like, “Eggshell is the new black.” Only now, when my wife and I are watching Debbie Travis’ Facelift or Rooms That Rock, I’ll notice she’s eyeing me the way she used to eye our gloomy living room decor. Her focus has shifted from our home’s interior to mine.

In an episode of The Simpsons, Marge shares some advice on the opposite sex with her daughter, who has become infatuated with a pint-sized thug. “Most women will tell you you’re a fool to think you can change a man,” she says to Lisa, “but those women are quitters.” My wife’s no quitter.

And it doesn’t help that there’s now scientific evidence to support her decision to make me her new renovation project. Martin Seligman, the author of Authentic Happiness and a former president of the American Psychological Association, studied optimism for 25 years and concluded that “optimistic people got depressed at half the rate of pessimistic people,” and that they also “had better, feistier immune systems, and probably lived longer than pessimistic people.” They also tend to be better students, salespeople, athletes, parents and, it goes without saying, husbands.

So it’s no wonder that upbeat is in and that self-esteem couldn’t be more highly esteemed. Feeling good about the world and yourself is its own reward, of course, but it’s also as trendy these days as pilates and SUVs. “Happiness is the new black,” my wife announced the other day.

According to Seligman, himself a recently reformed grouch, the goal for psychologists and psychiatrists has changed. They used to worry mainly about making miserable people less miserable; now they concentrate on making happy people happier. “My aim is that psychology and maybe psychiatry will increase the tonnage of happiness in the world,” Seligman said in a recent interview. He and others in the field called positive psychology are hard at work creating “interventions that reliably change pessimists into optimists.”

In other words, as my wife also announced recently, “Resistance is futile.” For some people, the Dalai Lama or Donald Trump, let’s say, happiness comes naturally; others, like me, have to have tons of it thrust upon them. Still, I’m not complaining anymore. In fact I’m counting my blessings – along with learning to enjoy yoga, an exercise highly recommended in Learn to Be an Optimist. I know I’m lucky to have a family I love and a wife who cares about me enough to try to make me into a brand new person. But am I forgetting something? Yes, of course, access, round the clock, to HGTV.

Joel Yanofsky is a Montreal writer and the author of Mordecai & Me: An Appreciation of a Kind.

Over the next five years, Canada’s largest university intends to improve the experience of its 50,000 undergraduate students – both inside and outside of the classroom. Students will take more seminar classes, have increased opportunities to work on research projects with their professors and enjoy better prospects of studying abroad. With a click of a computer mouse, they’ll be able to register and pay for courses, obtain course materials – even book a tennis court – online. They’ll be offered more chances to participate in athletic, co-curricular and community activities, which, in turn, will help them foster a closer affinity to their school.

To develop scholarship in emerging fields, U of T plans to expand its expertise in interdisciplinary subjects such as ethics, public policy, culture and immigration. It will make community involvement – both locally and nationally – central to its mission. And it will continue to strive toward equity and diversity in all of its activities.

“The Stepping Up academic plan has been an enormous undertaking,” says Professor Vivek Goel, vice-president and provost. “What has emerged represents a culture shift for the university. With Stepping Up, we have developed a plan that will result in a renewed spirit at U of T with a strong emphasis on enhancing the student experience.”

As you’ll find in the following article, which discusses each of the five major goals of the university’s Stepping Up plan, undergraduates are already getting a taste of U of T’s future.

Goal 1: Every student will have the opportunity for an outstanding and unique experience at the 
University of Toronto
On a bitterly cold morning, students arrive early for Professor John Browne’s first-year seminar course on J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy trilogy The Lord of the Rings. Half-a-dozen former students are here, too. They have returned to challenge the frosh in a game of Tolkien Trivial Pursuit that Browne has devised to ease students back after Christmas holidays.

Browne, the white-bearded former principal of Innis College, is as visibly delighted to see his alumni as they are to see him. They tease him mercilessly about his “evil laugh” when his questions stump the students.


The alumni triumph, but that’s hardly the point. After class, everyone lingers to talk; indeed, Browne has to shoo them from the seminar room at Woodsworth College so he can prepare for his next class. Clearly, Browne’s small seminar – enrolment is capped at 24 – achieves important goals: it inspires students’ passion for learning, boosts confidence and fosters a sense of community. (Browne and some of his former students still meet two or three times a year for lunch.)

Large lecture halls filled with hundreds of first-year students are still the norm at U of T – something that’s unlikely to change without a significant infusion of new provincial funding. But the university recognizes the need to give a greater number of first-year students at least one intimate, superbly taught first-year class, such as Browne’s.

Good teachers need the support of their school, and Browne is a prime example of how someone, with training and ample prep time, can create a transforming classroom experience. After teaching graduate courses and serving in administration for 26 years, Browne asked to return to the classroom – specifically to teach first-year students. Then he took a six-month administrative sabbatical, to plan his Tolkien course. “Most of these students speak e [as in electronic] as a native language,” says Browne. “I wanted to live in the context they’re living in, to lower the barriers between us.”

Browne started preparing at U of T’s Resource Centre for Academic Technology, “taking every course available,” he jokes. With his improved computer skills, he developed a comprehensive Web site for his course that runs to hundreds of pages. It not only informs and guides, but connects students – to him and each other. Browne posts notices and answers questions via e-mail. Students do group work on online bulletin boards and continue class conversations through instant messaging. “The course runs 24-7,” says Browne. “It’s intense.”

The Stepping Up plan aims to develop and celebrate exemplary teachers such as Browne, who recently received a Faculty of Arts & Science Outstanding Teaching Award. “We want to ensure that every student who comes to U of T has a great academic experience,” says Provost Vivek Goel. “And we want professors to have the resources they need to develop and make the most of their teaching skills.”

Three years ago, U of T created the Office of Teaching Advancement (OTA) to improve the overall quality of teaching at U of T and celebrate examples of excellence. This year the office offered 36 seminars to about 1,200 participants, and next year it plans to expand its offerings. U of T is also creating an Academy of Teaching to honour outstanding teachers with a designation similar to the title of University Professor. Teaching ability is already a major consideration in both tenure and annual salary reviews, yet it’s often harder to assess than research accomplishments. OTA helps professors build teaching portfolios (a record of accomplishments, including the creation of new courses or revitalization of old ones). The office also advocates for policy changes to support teaching, such as sabbaticals to allow professors to prepare new courses. “How do we recognize, celebrate and reward professors who spend a lot of time and imagination on creative teaching?” asks Ken Bartlett, the director of OTA, whose office is looking into ways of acknowledging great teachers. “We’re trying to galvanize more colleagues to discuss teaching the way they discuss research.”

Learning also happens outside the classroom, and U of T is stepping up efforts to draw students more fully into co-curricular activities. “University is not just about imparting information,” says Professor David Farrar, deputy provost and vice-provost, students. “It’s about engaging students. And that’s challenging, with so many of our students living off campus.”

Last year, U of T participated for the first time in the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), an independent North American survey administered by the Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research, to find out where it’s succeeding and where it’s falling short in involving students in the classroom and co-curricular activities. While U of T students indicated satisfaction with the level of academic challenge, they rated the school poorly on creating opportunities for student-faculty interaction and on offering a supportive campus environment. Though the university has more than 300 student clubs and the largest varsity and intramural sports program in Canada, 60 per cent of commuter students spend zero hours a week in co-curricular activities, and 80 per cent of all U of T students commute. Results from other universities indicate that students who participate in out-of-classroom activities tend to fare better academically and report greater personal satisfaction with their overall university experience.

To foster a greater sense of community among students, the Faculty of Arts & Science will launch a pilot program this fall called First-Year Learning Communities (FLCs, or “flicks”) for 240 commuter students in the life sciences. Inspired by a program at the University of Texas at Austin, these not-for-credit and voluntary seminars will put students who attend the same college and take the same section of math, biology and chemistry together in social-study groups of two dozen. “They may have large classes but with these communities you will know 23 people in three of your classes,” says Deanne Fisher, program co-ordinator with the Office of Student Affairs.

Facilitated by a trained senior student under the guidance of a staff adviser and a faculty member, FLC groups will learn research and time-management skills, form self-directed study groups, become better acquainted with academic life, and develop a social network as they explore the academic and cultural resources available to them, in both the university and the city. “It will bring the university to the students,” says Fisher.

Goel recognizes that, given its size, the University of Toronto will never be able to offer its students the personal, intimate experiences of a small, primarily undergraduate university. But because of its size, U of T can offer undergraduate students a wide range of classes taught by leading researchers. It can offer students the chance to learn abroad at any of more than a hundred universities around the world. It can offer courses, programs and extracurricular activities not available anywhere else. And with the right combination of faculty, programs, services and technology it can provide students with a university experience unlike any other in Canada. All this, notes Goel, “in the most diverse city in the world.”

Goal 2: Link all academic programs to strong research experiences
Silvester Komlodi was concerned about travelling to war-torn Kosovo during the summer of 2003 as part of a third-year research course in international relations. But six months of pre-trip planning – to establish key contacts in Kosovo and arrange interviews – assured him that “things were safe on the ground.” Still, a question lingered. As an undergrad, could he pull off his research mission – to study the media as a source of democratization in a post-conflict society? “My Dad always said, ‘When you’re thrown into deep water, you learn to swim,’” says Komlodi. “People are able to do work that they didn’t realize they could.”

Komlodi, now an MA student in U of T’s Centre for Russian and East European Studies, interviewed leading players in the media and met high-level business and political figures, including Ramush Haradinaj, now prime minister of Kosovo. The intense two-week trip, which he took with two other students and faculty adviser Robert Austin, inspired the research he’s doing in graduate school. “To have taken this kind of trip as an undergraduate and to have worked this closely with a professor was unbelievable,” says Komlodi.

Offering undergraduates such extraordinary research opportunities is a key plank in the Stepping Up plan. Currently only about 10 per cent of undergrads enjoy a significant research experience, such as paid summer fellowship, internship in a lab or a research course for credit. By 2010, Provost Vivek Goel hopes that number will have tripled to 30 per cent or to every undergraduate who wants a research experience.

Meeting the huge demand for such opportunities means increasing the number of faculty who work closely with students – and that, acknowledges John Challis, vice-president, research, and associate provost, “greatly depends on a significant increase in provincial funding for universities.”

Since the second- and third-year research courses were first offered in 1995, they have been enormously popular. Last year, 2,000 students competed for 240 places in 100 second-year research projects. The third-year course, which the Canadian Bureau for International Education acknowledged with an Outstanding Program Award, is even more difficult to get into, as only four or five projects are available each year. Anecdotal evidence suggests that research experiences fuel academic ambition. A survey of U of T’s life-science students doing paid summer research internships indicated that three out of four continue on to graduate school or second-entry programs, such as medical school.

Challis says that U of T is focusing on building “a research road map” for undergraduates – one that starts before students even reach university. In a pilot program that the university hopes to launch this spring, a select group of about 40 high school graduates who received a first offer of admission to U of T will be awarded a summer research internship. While working closely with a professor on a research project, they will live in residence and receive an honorarium. The pilot, if it secures additional resources, will be expanded and, undoubtedly, will help attract top students to the university.

Challis says that conducting studies and learning in a research-charged environment transforms a passive university experience into an active one. “It will turn students on to thinking about the university as a place where you’re not just fed information, but stimulated to think. It will turn some on to doing research [in graduate school]. But primarily, we’re trying to develop inquisitive minds – to not just accept a set of facts, but to ask why and how.”

U of T’s roster of internationally recognized faculty and its sheer size offer extraordinary opportunities for undergraduates to get a taste of research, both inside and outside the classroom, says Ken Bartlett, director of the Office of Teaching Advancement. “Research and teaching can’t be separated. When a Nobel Prize winner publishes a book or gives a lecture, she is teaching. It’s the same person engaged in two aspects of something. We tell professors, ‘If you want to bring vitality into the classroom, talk about your own research. Show the enthusiasm that drove you to choose this curious life, to make such enormous sacrifices.’”

Fourth-year student Monica Granados credits her undergraduate research opportunities with changing the course of her life. Initially bound for medical school, she’s now excited about pursuing graduate work in evolutionary ecology at U of T, thanks to a study of a mastodon-bone bed in upstate New York during second year and a six-week assignment for Professor Hélène Cyr in third year. Granados still volunteers in Cyr’s lab, as do many of Cyr’s research protegés.

“When you go into a new field, you don’t know if you’re capable, but Professor Cyr has given me confidence that I can excel in this field,” says Granados.

Goal 3: Bring faculty and students from diverse disciplines together to meet scholarly challenges
In an interconnected world, what are our obligations to distant others? How should we respond to the AIDS crisis in Africa, the genocide in Darfur and environmental disasters such as the tsunami in South Asia? 
Given advances in biotechnology, cloning and genetic engineering, what does it mean to be human?
Does the wave of scandals rocking business and government in the West signal that our culture of affluence has reached a limit?

“These questions can’t be answered from within the context of any single disciplinary approach,” says Melissa Williams, an associate professor of political science and the co-ordinator of U of T’s proposed Centre for Ethics. “Ethics is one of those areas where the need for interdisciplinary study is self-evident.”
The ethics centre will bring together scholars from across the university, including those from the Faculty of Arts & Science, the Rotman School of Management and the Joint Centre for Bioethics. It will also collaborate with similar centres cropping up at other North American universities, including Princeton, Harvard and the University of Montreal. This new interest in ethics, says Williams, indicates “a growing consciousness of interconnectedness.”

To make sense of the change, students and scholars need to collaborate across disciplinary borders. “In small homogeneous societies, there’s a code to follow,” explains Williams. “Now there’s a plurality of human goals, cultures and religions, which creates a conflict of values. To live an ethical life, one must seek to understand a problem from a variety of perspectives.”

Over the past two decades, interdisciplinary study at U of T has expanded rapidly – notably at the Munk Centre for International Studies and the many programs at the affiliated teaching hospitals and research institutions. Few have appraised the change more closely than U of T’s interim president Frank Iacobucci, who has served as a justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. “The real stretching of the world of knowledge is at the frontiers of disciplines and at the intersection of disciplines,” he says. “Many questions I’ve dealt with as a judge are really crying out for help from various disciplines – whether it’s assisted suicide or the patenting of life forms. They call for input from science, humanities and social sciences.”

Finding ways to support and encourage interdisciplinary study in all activities of the university is a theme that runs through Stepping Up. To ensure that departments are flexible and responsive to new challenges, U of T will encourage more interdisciplinary research and cross-appointments. As well, the Academic Initiative Fund – money that has been reallocated from the operating budget – will provide seed money to create a number of new interdisciplinary centres. Some areas that may vie for these funds include Diaspora and Transnational Studies, the Environment, and the Creative and Performing Arts. The Faculty of Information Studies (FIS) is proposing a centre to consider how information technology will change the university over the next 50 years. Such centres enable the university to structure itself in new ways to address new problems, says Brian Cantwell Smith, the dean of FIS.

Addressing new problems will be a key priority for the Centre for Ethics, says Williams. To be housed at Trinity College, the centre will enhance Trinity’s undergraduate program in ethics, society and law; encourage collaborative research in ethics; help develop the ethics curriculum in other faculties; and host visiting scholars, lecture series and conferences. The centre will also draw on its Toronto location to develop strength in comparative ethics. “There’s no greater laboratory [than Toronto],” says Williams. “There are lots of community leaders and scholars to deepen our understanding of diverse traditions.”

Goal 4: Scholarship and academic programs will be relevant to, and have an impact on, the broader community, through outreach and engagement in the process of public policy
Every year, U of T students, faculty and staff volunteer in their local communities. In 2003, a survey by the Office of Student Affairs found that about 10,000 students on the St. George campus alone were involved in community work – everything from tutoring at-risk children in public schools to coaching sports at civic centres. Our faculty, meanwhile, advise policy-makers in all three levels of government and appear regularly in national media to share their expertise.

Still, U of T wants to make community outreach even more central to its mission. The Stepping Up plan urges faculty, staff and students to seek out opportunities to share their knowledge with the public and to collaborate on solving community problems. It’s all part of being a leading public university, says Provost Vivek Goel. “People will recognize a great university for the contribution it makes to the arts, the community, public policy and public health,” he says.

By 2010, U of T expects to have established several new centres to co-ordinate its community outreach efforts: the School of Public Policy and Governance, to facilitate the work of academics who contribute to public policy; the Centre for Community Partnerships, to co-ordinate the efforts of students involved in community service; and the Centre for Urban Schooling, to bring together scholars and students from diverse disciplines to study and offer solutions to the problems faced by Toronto’s schools.

The latter two centres will work specifically to help revitalize Toronto. “The thinking behind the Centre for Community Partnerships is that the Greater Toronto Area has been adversely affected over the last 10 or 15 years by cutbacks at the municipal and provincial levels,” says Susan Addario, director of the Office of Student Affairs, which is launching the centre. “Our goal is to harness the energy of our students, staff and faculty and to deploy that energy across the GTA in more of a planned way.”

The centre will dramatically increase both the number and kinds of community service opportunities available to students and will link their volunteer service with their academic pursuits, possibly for credit. Students will be trained to lead projects, resolve conflicts and work in multicultural settings. A current project has a team of 80 U of T students tutoring Grade 9 pupils. Another project will see students providing intensive English-language training to preschoolers who are new to Canada.

“By 2010, we want to have a community-based learning opportunity available for every student who wants to include it as part of his or her university experience,” says Addario. “The centre is about looking for ways of translating what U of T is doing inside its walls into meaningful community work. But it’s also about providing students with good citizenship skills. We want our students to take leadership roles in the workplace and in their communities.”

The new Centre for Urban Schooling, based at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, will bring together scholars and students to study and propose creative solutions to the “overwhelming problems” facing some urban schools, says academic director Kathleen Gallagher.
Gallagher, who holds a Canada Research Chair in Urban School Research in Pedagogy and Policy, spent three years studying urban classrooms in New York City and Toronto. She sees a disturbing trend: “When I first undertook this research, issues of security were not on my radar. My experiences in New York schools introduced me to heavy surveillance, ID checks, metal detectors and locked bathrooms as a matter of course. The kids experience more intense scrutiny daily than I’ve undergone at any airport. It was Orwellian. Most disturbing, they now see these routines as a normal part of school.”

Gallagher thinks there’s another way to run city schools while addressing safety concerns. “I hope the research and work of the centre can inform school policy and practices at schools in Toronto before we end up too far down a road that is not the right one to take.”

The proposed School of Public Policy and Governance will tap into the university’s current strengths in public policy – particularly in health, law and education – and develop new expertise in ethics, science and technology. “Toronto is a world crossroads, easily accessible from any continent, and with a diverse population that makes U of T an ideal setting for the school,” says Goel.

Goal 5: Achieve equity and diversity in all activities to ensure that we reflect our 
local and global community
Something interesting is afoot at the University of Toronto at Mississauga (UTM). Though the number of students of Caribbean heritage is small, Caribbean Connections is one of UTM’s most popular clubs. At semi-formals, Latin dance is all the rage. When cricket was introduced last year, it caught on like wildfire.

The buzz here is not just about tolerance; there’s a genuine curiosity among students to learn about the broad spectrum of cultures present on campus. The Erindale Filipino Student Association, for instance, boasts on its Web site that it is “quite possibly the most diverse cultural club” at UTM.

What’s happening at UTM reflects a broader trend at U of T. According to the Office of Student Affairs, some 60 different ethnic, cultural and religious backgrounds are represented at U of T; half of all undergraduates identify themselves as a visible minority. No surprise, then, that Stepping Up calls for U of T to “serve as a model of diversity for the global community.”

While excellence remains the primary measure by which faculty appointments and student admissions are judged, U of T wants to ensure that all of its programs and activities reflect the diversity of the entire Toronto community and that every group is given equal access to opportunities on campus. It’s a ground-up effort with specific goals: to recruit more aboriginal and African-Caribbean undergraduates, to create a more diverse pool of PhD candidates, and to hire new staff and faculty to better represent Toronto’s diversity. As a public university, U of T has a responsibility to be accessible to all members of the community. But there are academic reasons to pursue diversity and equity too, says Angela Hildyard, U of T’s vice-president, human resources and equity. “The presence on campus of people with so many different perspectives enables the university to enrich its research and curriculum,” she says.

U of T is also striving to become more accessible and supportive of people with physical disabilities. While it’s costly and difficult to retrofit older buildings on the St. George campus, an elevator was recently installed at Hart House and several other buildings are slated for renovations over the next few years.

To help achieve the university’s objectives, Hildyard is establishing an Equity Advisory Board to examine common issues, draw on research at the university and develop a collective strategy. Hildyard says her office will also conduct an employment equity survey of faculty and staff, and develop measures to ensure that the university reaches its goals. “Our objective,” she says, “is to have a faculty, staff and student body that is fully representative of Canada’s diversity.”

Margaret Webb is a Toronto writer.

The 23-year-old engineering student returned home last year with some thoughts about what U of T could learn from Australia’s post-secondary educational system. “Unlike U of T’s engineering department, they do not rank their students at the end of each year, nor do they place averages on transcripts. There is much to be said of this system.”

A critical understanding of different educational systems and an appreciation of different cultures is exactly what students should be bringing back from exchanges, says Pekka Sinervo, dean of the Faculty of Arts & Science. “All of us recognize that the world and universities are becoming increasingly global in their perspective. An international exchange prepares students for what they will encounter in business and life – working internationally and with people from different cultures.”

Last year, about 300 students – most in their third year – studied abroad, with the help of U of T’s International Student Exchange Office, which has forged partnerships with 124 universities in 38 countries on five continents.

Stepping Up emphasizes the need to increase opportunities for undergraduates interested in studying abroad. The faculties of physical and health education, law and engineering are all boosting the number of exchanges they offer, but Arts & Science has set the most aggressive target. The dean says he wants 10 per cent of students (about 2,200 undergrads) to have acquired some international experience by the time they graduate – more than double the current total. “This is an opportunity students shouldn’t miss,” says Sinervo. “This is not a U of T phenomenon. Europe sets goals of 30 to 40 per cent.”

As for Kevin, his trip to Sydney whetted his appetite to see more of the world. He plans to do an exchange – either in France or back in Australia – while taking an MBA at the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management. And then? “I want to find a job that makes a positive difference,” he says.

That bright new future will arrive for U of T students considerably sooner than 2010. The university is developing a campus-wide student Web portal, a comprehensive online student-services centre based on systems currently being used at the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management and the University of Toronto at Scarborough. The portal will launch modestly in the next year or so, but eventually students will be able to use the service to obtain academic counselling, apply for and pay for courses, and have course information, readings and digitized textbooks delivered right to their computer. The portal will also enable the university to tailor information to each student’s needs and interests. Once the portal “knows” that a student is enrolled at University College and is taking Canadian Studies, for example, it will deliver information of particular interest to that student, such as a notice of UC orientation activities and an announcement of an upcoming lecture. In turn, students can use the portal to build their own unique university community – they can find and join student clubs or athletic teams, build study groups, and do online group projects.

The primary objectives of the portal are to give students better access to university information and services and to make it easier for them to connect with professors, other students and student clubs. “U of T is a community of hundreds of little communities,” says David Farrar, deputy provost and vice-provost, students. “This system will help each student find and connect with his or her own unique community.”

U of T has already developed a portal to make university libraries more accessible. Administered by U of T for the entire province, the Ontario Scholars Portal enables students and faculty from across Ontario to find any of the 30 million books in Ontario’s university libraries or seven million articles from the nearly 5,000 journals available electronically. By way of an online search, students can have a journal article sent to their desktop or request a book through an interlibrary loan.

Since 2002, the Ontario Scholars Portal has delivered more than nine million articles to 400,000 users. It has revolutionized both the temporal and spatial use of libraries – with students “using” the libraries from home, often after “closing.” The portal has also enabled smaller universities to plug into U of T Libraries – the fourth-largest university library system in North America – and has put U of T on the leading edge of the delivery of digital information.

U of T wants to extend the reach of the portal by scanning and delivering books in electronic form, archiving important scholarly and government Web pages, and delivering other forms of information, such as maps and digitized fine art images, right into the lecture hall if need be. “In the age of Google, people want to be able to search everything and find what they need quickly and easily,” explains Carole Moore, the chief librarian of University of Toronto Libraries. “We are making it possible for students to access licensed and freely available material through a single search, in a way that integrates seamlessly with their academic work. That’s our goal.”

To create its annual ranking of Canadian universities, Maclean’s uses more than 20 measures such as class size, operating budget, scholarships and library holdings to come up with an overall score for each school.

The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), on the other hand, asks students directly about their university experience to determine how engaged they are with their undergraduate education. Research has shown that students who are highly engaged in their studies and active on campus fare better academically and enjoy a better learning experience than those who are not.

Developed at Indiana University in 1999, NSSE is used annually at more than 400 universities in the United States. U of T participated in the survey for the first time in 2004, along with seven other Canadian research universities.

While U of T students reported a high level of academic challenge, they gave the university lower marks on student-faculty interaction and support services. “A decade of underfunding has taken its toll,” says David Farrar, deputy provost and vice-provost, students. “We need to improve our efforts to enrich the educational experience, both in the classroom and outside, and to help students develop supportive relationships.”

U of T e-mailed the NSSE survey last fall to about 4,400 first- and fourth-year students from all three campuses and in all first-entry faculties. Almost 60 per cent of the 2,400 respondents were women; 73 per cent lived off campus; and 55 per cent of first-year respondents identified as visible minorities.

The university plans to administer the survey every two years to measure the success of the Stepping Up academic plan, particularly with respect to student experience. The survey will also enable the university to compare its performance against peer institutions in Canada and the U.S. “NSSE is the standard U.S. experts in the field have developed to get at the heart of the student experience,” says Farrar. “And that’s exactly where we want to go.”

When Heti’s hot cider is ready and I’ve filled my mug with coffee, we find a place to sit, and I put a digital recorder on the table between us. I want to begin by asking Heti about the inspiration for her new book, but the miniature device catches her attention, and I soon find myself telling her about a creative project I’m involved in: recording voice messages from people on the street and posting the messages online. Her voice rises as the questions pour out. “Are people able to be free enough with themselves?” she wonders. “Do you use their full names?” “What are you calling the project?”

You expect writers – especially those who write fiction – to show an interest in people, but I sense that Heti, 28, makes a habit of investigating subjects until she’s covered every conceivable angle. She seems to want to know everything, and would be just as happy not to talk about herself at all.

*****

You can find out a lot about Sheila Heti (BA 2002 Trinity) without asking her, thanks to a literary career that went public in 2000 when McSweeney’s, a hip U.S. literary journal founded by American writer Dave Eggers, published five of her short stories. Heti was 23 at the time, and studying art history and philosophy at Trinity College. Her first book, The Middle Stories, was published the following year.

Looking back now, Heti says the spate of sudden attention was a little bewildering – and made her the target of some ill-mannered jealousy, mostly from the press. She felt many of the reviews of The Middle Stories focused on the buzz around the book and gave hardly any thought to the content. “It struck me as suffering from, if not jealousy, at least some kind of preoccupation with whatever degree of success they seemed to think I was having.”

The Canadian literary community is extremely small, and many writers work for years without signing a publishing contract. So when someone new comes along and seems to achieve success too quickly, certain questions arise: about talent, about staying power, about owing one’s success to someone else. Heti knows she has McSweeney’s to thank for getting her noticed, and, indirectly, for her first book, but she became clearly tired of being asked about it. “I’m so lucky that it happened,” she told an interviewer a few years ago. “But it’s also like constantly being asked about your sister.”

Before Heti was a published writer, and before NOW magazine readers voted her “best emerging author” for three of the past four years, she had little idea what she wanted to do with her life. After graduating from North Toronto High School, she thought it would be fun to write plays, so she enrolled at the National Theatre School in Montreal. During her first year, a stage adaptation she’d written of Faust was cancelled by her teachers. “They thought it was going to ruin my career,” she says. The teachers never gave her any specific feedback, but Faust’s love interest in her version was only 12 years old. “I think it left many of them feeling nauseated.” Heti dropped out after that and moved back to Toronto, where she took a job in the editorial department at Shift magazine. Although she found the work enjoyable, she says the triviality of the assignments eventually wore her down. For one article, she recalls having to interview people who were obsessed with the heroine of The Little Mermaid. “She’s a cartoon character!” Heti exclaims. “I felt like I had to study something real.” So she went back to school.

At the University of Toronto, Heti spent a full semester studying Ulysses with Professor Jennifer Levine, who says Heti was fascinated by the idea of literature within literature. “Sheila was reading not to prove a preordained model in her head, but to think about the world.” Levine enjoyed The Middle Stories and thinks Heti’s writing echoes elements of Joyce. “Underlying their verbal games there is a powerful sympathetic imagination,” Levine says. “Everyone is interesting. No one is boring.”

*****

One day a few years ago, Heti was waiting for a friend at a downtown Toronto lounge, and randomly pulled a book – an old leather-bound volume – from one of the shelves. She began reading and was intrigued by the unique-ness of the writer’s voice. “So I stole it,” she says.

The book, published in 1864, was The Life of William Hickling Prescott, a biography by George Ticknor of his friend and fellow Harvard scholar William Prescott. It was Ticknor’s voice – the style of his writing – that provided Heti with the inspiration for her new book and its central character. She explains that Ticknor wrote in an exceedingly reverent and formal style, leaving the reader to imagine what was going on between the lines. “I didn’t want to write a historical novel. I was doing an impersonation,” she says. “I wanted to know Ticknor through his voice – not through the details or narrative of his life.”

The action in Heti’s psychologically dense 108-page novel takes place over one night as Ticknor reluctantly makes his way to a party at Prescott’s. As he walks along the cobbled streets of Boston, Ticknor wrestles with difficult personal questions: What does his friendship mean to Prescott? Why has he failed to become a great writer? Will he be missed should he forgo the party altogether?

In life, George Ticknor was a respected and influential professor of belles-lettres. Heti’s Ticknor, however, is a paranoid, anxiety-ridden, failing writer who’s jealous of his best friend Prescott, who is extroverted, often published and well loved – much like Heti’s own public persona. I ask Heti whether there is also a Ticknor side to her personality, a hidden, anxious element that sometimes comes into conflict with her Prescott self. “I think that’s a legitimate thing to say,” she responds, but leaves it at that. Heti has never been the kind of author who likes to tell her readers what to think.

Ticknor is ostensibly set in mid-19th century Boston, but Heti deliberately drops clues to suggest otherwise. Streetcars rumble through the city, Ticknor wears rubber earplugs to block out noise from a neighbour’s party, and he feels guilty about smoking – a decidedly modern-day phenomenon. Although the anachronisms are subtle, they’re enough to make a careful reader realize that the story takes place somewhere other than in historical reality. “It doesn’t take place in the history of America, but in the history of an attitude or a feeling,” Heti explains.

Ticknor may not be historical fiction, but Heti used her subject as a starting point – literally. In writing the book, Heti often began by typing directly from the real Ticknor’s own prose, using the beginnings of his sentences as fuel, and continuing on her own from there. Heti used a similar creative technique in writing The Middle Stories, where she would begin sentences without knowing how they would end. It’s how she talks, too. She starts down one path, stops, then starts again on another. If you listen long enough, you can see how her ideas come into existence.

*****

Is everyone interesting? Heti seems to believe it. In The Middle Stories, her characters were often generically identified – the plumber, the middleman, the poet – but she infuses their lives with fantastical events. Similarly, in Ticknor, Heti delves into the mind of a man who thinks he is worthless, but in showing him attention, proves he’s not. Heti tested the notion in real life by creating a venue for “average” people to speak publicly about the things they really care about. That venue is Trampoline Hall, a monthly lecture series held in a variety of Toronto bars, which Heti founded three years ago with her friend Misha Glouberman.

The people Heti asks to speak at Trampoline Hall are not really “experts” and often have never spoken in public. The lectures are not designed to inform or educate, though Heti hopes they do communicate something “truthful.” And so Trampoline Hall audiences have listened to impassioned speeches about the number 32, why gossip is worse than pork, and how fantasy sports leagues allow men to be intimate without being personal. Heti would be the first to admit that the lectures are sometimes rough around the edges, but she says they are never boring.

For Heti, who arranged the speakers each month but has now handed responsibility for the whole enterprise to Glouberman, the series took on a social dimension. “I fall in love with people all the time,” she says, “and Trampoline Hall was a way of doing something with them rather than just going out for coffee.” In his memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers describes a lattice – a figurative snowshoe – whose criss-crossing fibres are made up of the individual connections among people. The lattice gains strength every time two people connect, and if the network grows large enough, it can support anything. Trampoline Hall was Sheila Heti’s lattice.

Now that her involvement with Trampoline Hall has ended, it’s possible that the William Prescott phase of Heti’s life is coming to a close, and the era of Ticknor – the reclusive writer – is beginning. “I’m quitting everything,” she says. “I don’t want anything that was in my life while I was writing this book to be in my life anymore.” She says all her cultural activities from the last four years – Trampoline Hall; her impassioned articles about art in the public sphere; the biweekly cocktail parties that she and her husband, Globe and Mail music columnist Carl Wilson, held at their home in Toronto – share some indefinable quality that she wants to be done with now. She’s even leaving the city, at least for a while, and she doesn’t want to say where she’s going next. She wants to disappear. “I don’t want to know anybody,” she says.

These days, people expect a lot from Heti, who is left with no time to do what is most important to her – write books. Along with reading and just simply thinking about things, Heti says she will have more time in her new city to indulge in her craft.

When we’ve drained our mugs and put on our coats, I walk Heti to her next appointment, which happens to be just around the corner, at the place she discovered Ticknor. As she opens the door to go in, I realize that whoever awaits her there will surely feel like the most extraordinary and exciting person in the room.

Micah Toub is a freelance writer in Toronto.

It’s a little more than a week until The Big Bad Wolf must be ready for competition. Robert Nguyen, chief programmer with the U of T Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Club (UTAIR), slouches over a keyboard, punching in lines of code to program the robot’s microcontroller to communicate with a computer mouse. A mouse works by detecting motion across a surface and translating the motion into computer code; Nguyen hopes that this mouse, re-purposed and mounted between the robot’s wheels, will help guide the robot, and the club, to victory.

The club’s mechanical team, Chris Moraes and Zoe Shainfarber, are unscrewing the undercarriage for the fourth time, hoping to find a way to make the robot move in a straight line. The no-budget wheels aren’t helping: Moraes and Shainfarber made them from electrical tape and dowelling. Out in the hallway, Sandra Mau, the club president, sits sprawled on the floor over a large piece of white cardboard. Mau’s task tonight is to translate the event’s guidelines – a set of rules and measurements so exacting they might have been written by a team of corporate lawyers – into a scale replica of the competition course, which is essentially a four-room miniature bungalow, without the roof.

This will be UTAIR’s first year at the Eastern Canadian Robot Games. The annual event, held at the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto, draws students and serious amateurs from across North America. The games range from robot sumo wrestling to “line following” (picture souped-up Tonka Trucks steering their way along impossibly twisty black lines laid out on the floor) to firefighting, the most difficult challenge. Getting around the competition course is hard enough. What’s worse, the robots have to find a burning candle placed in a corner of one of the rooms and put it out – without knocking the candle over. Competitors get extra points if their robot returns to the starting position after completing its mission. And the faster the robot performs, the more points the team scores.

It will take all of the students’ skills – and a good deal of luck – to get the robot to do what it should. Many of the club’s members are deluged with other demands. Nguyen, 22, a student in the biomedical option of engineering science, and Shainfarber, 22, in the aerospace option, are swamped with work at MDA Space Missions, the Canadian aerospace company that in January won a $154-million (US) contract to help NASA fix the Hubble Space Telescope. Both students, who have finished their third year of studies, are completing a 16-month internship at the Toronto-area company as part of their engineering degree. They have been dashing downtown from Brampton on their off-hours to work on the robot. Mau, 23, a fourth-year aerospace student, and Moraes, 21, an engineering student in the fourth year of a nanotechnology option, have both been cramming for fall mid-terms.

Nobody in the club has built a firefighting robot before. And the team hopes to make the robot without spending more than a few hundred dollars. There will be no frills such as sonar navigation systems and laser-cut components, which have become standard on the competition circuit. As the tournament creeps closer they don’t know if the robot’s navigation system will work, or if its sensors can detect a lit candle, or whether they’ll be able to make the machine move in a straight line. They’re a long way from completing a successful test run.

After screwing the undercarriage back on, Shainfarber and Moraes set the robot down on the lab floor, gingerly, as if teaching a baby how to walk. At the flip of a switch the robot spins out in a wide circle. Then it rams into a table leg and stops. Shainfarber takes the collision in stride. Asked whether the robot is going to be done on time, she replies, “That depends on what your definition of ‘done’ is.”

*****

In many ways the problems that the students have to solve are the same dilemmas that have inspired and frustrated roboticists for years. Their machine must be able to find its way around. It must be able to make decisions – when to turn, how much to turn and when to switch on its fan – and it must be able to “see,” or at the very least detect a flame.

Canada’s robotics industry is still small compared with robotics in the United States and abroad, but it has had its share of successes. Researchers at Canadian universities have developed robots to inspect coral reefs and to work as tour guides in museums. Engineering Services, a Toronto firm founded by U of T engineering professor Andrew Goldenberg, has developed robots for bomb and hazardous materials disposal, as well as for biotechnology and manufacturing applications. And in the 1970s the most famous of Canada’s robotics companies, Spar Aerospace, developed the Shuttle Remote Manipulator System, the mechanical handling device better known as the Canadarm. (Professor Goldenberg, then a recently graduated engineer at Spar, helped develop it.) In 1981, the device was sent into space aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia, and the Canadarm and its descendants have proven their worth as mobile work platforms for astronauts, for deploying and retrieving satellites, and even for potentially life-and-death shuttle repairs. Spar’s robotics division was sold in 1999 to the company that is now MDA Space Missions, where Nguyen and Shainfarber are interning.

While MDA is primarily concerned with practical applications of robot technology, several U of T professors and their students are investigating robotics at a more theoretical level. Sven Dickinson, vice-chair of the U of T computer science department, has been trying to help machines “see” for the past 20 years. Sight is a key hurdle that researchers must clear before they have any hope of developing thinking, learning, high-functioning robots, like the ones we see in Hollywood movies.

The problem is that computers have trouble identifying anything that doesn’t precisely resemble what they’ve been programmed to see. Scientists can teach computers to recognize particular objects but not categories of objects. They can teach a computer to recognize a telephone, for example, but only a phone of a certain shape and size. (A child’s Mickey Mouse phone would confuse a robot, if it hadn’t already been taught to recognize it as a phone.) Scientists are approaching this problem of computer vision in two distinct ways. Researchers such as Professor Dickinson are creating mathematical models to express the geometry of certain objects, and then transferring those models to computers equipped with video cameras. A simplified description for a human being might indicate that a human is composed of a cylindrical torso and two cylindrical legs and two cylindrical arms and a sphere for a head. Each of those parts, in turn, is broken down into sub-parts, with models to explain that a leg is composed of two moving cylinders joined at the knee. With luck, a machine seeing all these parts can determine that it must be looking at a human being. But what if the machine sees a human being from the side or from above? What if its only view is of a head sitting on a set of shoulders?

Another approach to computer vision addresses the problem by storing and matching two-dimensional images of objects, taken from all angles: a circle with a long strip underneath it, for example, could be an aerial view of a person. However, it could also be a mixing bowl on a rectangular cutting board – or a designer lamp, or the logo for the London Underground. “Building systems that can categorize objects the way humans do it, effortlessly, remains one of the great open problems in computer vision,” says Dickinson.

While Professor Dickinson wants to help robots see, Reza Emami, a senior lecturer with engineering science’s Institute for Aerospace Studies, hopes to develop intelligent controllers that allow robots to make decisions by mimicking human behaviour. Emami’s research observes how humans make decisions or perform actions and tries to distil that experience into sets of rules and systems that can help machines follow the same logic. So in the case of a real-life firefighting robot, an ordinary controller would tell a robot to rush in and spray the fire for all it’s worth. An intelligent controller, by contrast, would gauge the fire’s temperature, the wind and the source of the fire, and then sort the data to determine the best way to fight the fire.

Parham Aarabi, an assistant professor in U of T’s electrical and computer engineering department, hopes that robots will one day be able to communicate with spoken language just as easily and accurately as humans do. Aarabi, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Multi-Sensor Information Systems, directs the university’s Artificial Perception Lab. “In a typical environment where there’s going to be noise, there are also going to be obstacles – robots have to be able to find their way around,” he says. “They have to be able to understand what a person tells them, even if there’s music playing in the background.”

Aarabi and his colleagues are developing a speech-enhancement aid that significantly reduces background noise so that robots can distinguish a speaker’s words from the din. Another current project is trying to enable teams of robots to communicate by talking to each other in rudimentary English. And in another effort, Aarabi hopes to outfit search-and-rescue robots with radio equipment that can help them navigate noisy disaster sites. Like fires, for example.

*****

The team looks as if it has been through hell. At 9:45 a.m. on Competition Sunday, just a few hours before the games begin, Nguyen, Shainfarber and Roger Mong, 21, a third-year engineering student and the team’s circuits whiz, huddle over their robot in the competition’s crowded preparation area, testing, programming and calibrating as fast as they can. They are punch-drunk, speaking in the clipped, stuttered syllables of the sleep-deprived. Shainfarber and Nguyen have not been home in days. The team has had fires of its own to extinguish.

A few days before the competition, the team discovered that their navigation system, built from the computer mouse, wasn’t going to work. They spent the next 48 hours trying to create another system out of handmade bumper pads. “We’re using touch sensors,” Nguyen explains. “To try to follow the wall.”

“It’s kind of slow,” Shainfarber adds. “You’re hitting the wall a lot. But we couldn’t possibly in a day-and-a-half put together a completely new navigation system.”
Last night the team met what should have been its final challenges, writing new algorithms for the navigation system and calibrating the robot’s infrared sensors so it could distinguish a flame from ambient light. But after spending most of the night accomplishing these tasks, this morning they discover that the competition course is lit with a bank of high-powered spotlights. The lights are so bright that their robot’s sensors can’t distinguish ambient light from flame. It thinks everything is on fire. The Big Bad Wolf’s tiny fan is huffing and puffing, but it’s blowing at nothing but air.

At 11 a.m. two entrants from Grand Rapids, Michigan, announce that they’re pulling out of the competition: like UTAIR’s robot, their robot uses infrared sensors. (The more seasoned competitors generally use ultraviolet sensors, which can be calibrated so as not to be tripped up by ambient light.) The U of T team doesn’t give up. They’ve got three tries. Maybe one will work.

Nguyen kills the infrared sensors and writes some last-minute code for the robot. Competitors can choose to have a white disk placed under the burning candle. The floor of the competition course is black. The team hopes that the sensor will be able to detect the contrast between the black floor and the white disk. If the robot stumbles onto the disk, the contrast might be just enough to trigger the fan.

The first trial begins well enough. The robot wheels out from the starting area and creeps slowly but surely along a wall. When it reaches a corner, though, it turns too far and gets stuck. Nguyen doesn’t hesitate. He picks up the robot and shuts it off before carrying it to the preparation area backstage. He has some more tweaking to do.

An hour later they try again. This time the robot rolls perfectly around the corner, bumping, then correcting its steering, bumping, correcting. It drives into the room with the candle, edging forward until it hits the white disk. The fan switches on. The Big Bad Wolf sweeps right, then left, then directly at the flame. It blows out the fire.

Team U of T does not win the competition – that honour goes to a circuit veteran from the U.S. with not one, 
but two firefighting robots. But the team does not come last, either. A couple of robots couldn’t find the 
candle at all.

The U of T students are considering a competition in Hartford, Connecticut, this spring and another in California, but they figure that to stand a chance they’ll need to make some changes to their robot. They’ll probably adapt sonar for their navigation system and some better sensors to detect the flame. “I think we’re going to have to bite the bullet and actually buy some technology,” says Shainfarber. “If we want to compete there’s no point in trying to reinvent -” She stops herself. “It’s not even reinventing the wheel; it’s like knowing that a [round] wheel exists and choosing to use square wheels instead.”

Still, the team is not discouraged. Far from it. “We showed that we could adapt to having lights that completely screwed up our whole plan – of everything,” says Shainfarber, smiling. “We really came together to get all the parts working.”

Chris Nuttall-Smith is a freelance writer in Toronto. He wrote about the U of T women’s mountain biking team in the Fall 2004 issue.

One of the highlights of coming back is to see the university starting a new phase in its growth and development. Stepping Up, the university’s academic plan, sets out a vision for the coming years and builds on our commitment to excellence, equity and outreach. It provides the guiding principles by which we will meet our commitment to our students and our community.

U of T boasts a long history of success. The academic plan – much like a corporation’s business plan – clearly articulates our goals over the next several years, and outlines a strategy for achieving them. It identifies key strengths and recommends specific steps for improvement. As the university has grown, so have our aspirations. With Stepping Up, we aim to be a leader among the world’s best public teaching and research universities in the discovery, preservation and sharing of knowledge.

Stepping Up’s first priority is to enrich the student experience both within and beyond the classroom. U of T offers a world-class academic setting. We want to build on that and provide students with more opportunities to interact with faculty by creating an enhanced learning environment, and investing more in student services. We want students to engage fully in the life of the university – to discover and learn about the academic, social, political and athletic activities that interest them – as a prelude to becoming active members of society.

U of T is Canada’s largest research university. We can offer our undergraduates the chance to work with senior faculty in cutting-edge fields. Imagine the impact on a young student of engaging in research activity with such renowned scholars as nanotechnologist Ted Sargent, Middle East expert Janice Gross Stein or Nobel Prize-winning chemist John C. Polanyi, to name just a few. Such opportunities will surely inspire many of our students to pursue their own graduate work.

Over the next five years U of T will foster more interdisciplinary teaching and research. Many of the most challenging issues facing society – the AIDS crisis, climate change, poverty – require study from a variety of perspectives. U of T’s size and affiliations with institutions around the world are tremendous strengths. They provide opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration that exist in only a few centres worldwide.

Stepping Up emphasizes U of T’s vital role as a public university. Community outreach is central to our mission, but will be given even more prominence with the establishment of a Centre for Community Partnerships. At the provincial and national level, we will seek ways to inform public policy debates. As a public university, we want to be a vibrant and significant part of our city and our community.

Our ability to transform U of T has national implications. A generation of doctors, nurses, teachers, 
engineers – professionals from every walk of life – is approaching retirement. How well we educate our students to achieve their true potential will fundamentally affect the destiny of our city, our province, our 
country and, ultimately, the world.

The changes we are making through Stepping Up will be felt by today’s U of T students. Our goal is to complete these changes by the end of the decade – and we have reason to be optimistic. There is a renewed public focus on the importance of postsecondary education, which is most welcome. A significant increase in provincial funding is urgently needed to prevent a decline in the quality of postsecondary education in Ontario and to bring the changes in Stepping Up to life. We are hopeful that the government of Ontario will heed the recommendations of the Rae Review of postsecondary education and restore funding to the province’s universities.

And, as always, the ongoing loyalty of our alumni and friends is a source of great strength.

However, the decisions we make about paper and ink affect much more than the look of our magazine. A Vancouver environmental group that advocates for forest preservation and environmentally sound printing practices started hitting that point home with magazine and book publishers a few years ago. The group, Markets Initiative, is now working with Canadian publishers, printers and mills to develop environmentally friendly papers such as those made from post-consumer waste and alternatives to wood fibre.

Since it was founded six years ago, Markets Initiative has convinced almost every major trade book publisher in Canada to print on ancient forest-friendly paper. Inspired by Canadian publishers’ successes, similar programs are now underway in several other countries, such as the U.S., U.K. and Germany.

Recently, the group began recruiting the Canadian magazine industry to its cause – and with good reason. According to statistics supplied by Markets Initiative, less than five per cent of the 110,000 tons of paper used by Canadian magazines each year has any post-consumer recycled content.

This is about to change. Last year, U of T Magazine was one of 35 Canadian magazines that pledged to boost the amount of recycled paper they use. With this issue, we have switched to a paper stock that contains 10 per cent post-consumer waste. However, our goal is to increase the amount of recycled content over time, as new papers are developed, to 50 per cent or more, resulting in annual savings of 60 tons of virgin paper, equivalent to more than 900 trees.

Magazine editors and publishers have been reluctant to switch to recycled paper because of a fear of a loss in quality. Printers are wary because of problems running the new stocks through their presses. We’re confident, though, that the development of better recycled stocks, such as the one we’re now using, will overcome these problems and that we’ll be able to offer our readers an environmentally friendlier magazine, without any reduction in quality.

Our decision is just one of many green initiatives happening at U of T. We reported in our last issue the opening of a rooftop park at the residence at 30 Charles St. W. The University of Toronto at Mississauga is powering several townhomes with non-polluting fuel cells, and in early February, just days before the Kyoto Accord on climate change came into effect, U of T officially opened a new environmental sustainability office. Headed by environmental studies professor Beth Savan, the office will provide support and advice for the development of a greenhouse gas and energy reduction strategy for the university. Watch for a feature article about Canada’s commitments under the Kyoto Accord and U of T’s environmental sustainability office in the next issue of U of T Magazine.