Don't researchers at the larger universities get a substantially higher amount of funding anyway? I'm no stats person, but that pie graph was very pretty.
Any school with a med school is going to have a huge funding advantage over the Nipissings simply because of CIHR. Even in SSHRC fields, though, there is an advantage of being at a larger research focused school in that it opens up opportunities for researchers to flourish. In my experience with the SSHRC SRG committee, this is something that the committees are cognizant of and try to adjust for, so that applicants from St FX, for example, aren't penalized for a lack of graduate supervision and such. This new proposal is a real slap in the face to the merit-based culture that the Tri-Councils have worked so hard to create.
It may have been true in that legendary academic past that the best and most deserving researchers in any subject were almost all to be found at the big name schools.
Anyone who has taken a good look around in the last few decades knows that that is no longer the case.
Very true. I think that if we charted research growth over, say, the past half century one would conclude that schools like Waterloo, York and Calgary deserved more funding than Montreal. If I recall the Maclean's research rankings from last year correctly (and I probably don't...) Calgary rivaled UdeM, despite the fact that UdeM is much older.
