Let's see, where to start.

When federal spending on post-secondary research was ramping up quickly year after year after year in the late 1990s and early 2000s, university administrators started to get a silly grin on their faces. After watching American and British and Nordic and Israeli and Japanese and Korean governments put money into higher education and university research -- especially the Americans, constantly, relentlessly, in every administration since Truman -- it was starting to look like Canada had its game face on. Mulroney spent decent money on research, Chrétien cut it deeply in his first deficit-killing mandate, and now Chrétien had religion on the file, and all was good.

And then it kind of slowed down, and the momentum is gone, and few in Canada ever noticed it was there in the first place, and we're left to take stock.

So start here, with Figure 2 on Page 36 of the .pdf you can find here. The book is a bunch of people discussing how to invest Alberta's oil windfall. Former University of British Columbia president Martha Piper gives her ideas, and in Figure 2 she points out -- well, something kind of amazing. In U.S. public universities and four-year colleges, faculty growth has very nearly kept pace with the increase in student enrolment in the 15 years since 1987-88. So class sizes and access to profs is pretty nearly the same for today's generation of U.S. students as it was for, er, my generation.

In Canada, student erolment has grown far more quickly than in the U.S. And faculty growth hasn't come anywhere close to keeping pace.  Like, instead of a nearly 1:1 match in growth rates, it's more like 5:1. This isn't even surprising, once you get over the surprise of seeing the data. The idea that a 20-year-old today should have about the  same access to faculty that a 20-year-old had 20 years ago seems kind of ... quaint. "Yes, [Canadian universities] now have 2,000 more faculty than we had in 1992, " Indira Samarasekera of the University of Alberta says in this speech, "but we also have 222,000 more students."

So maybe research isn't the only problem with our universities, and "accessibility" -- the ages-old student-lobby dream of lower tuition for all -- isn't the only problem. And maybe the momentum didn't go out of Canada's higher education and research effort when Canada was at the top of the game. Maybe Canada was barely getting into the game when our governments, especially the ones in Ottawa, got bored with trying.

With a federal budget coming in Ottawa it's worth considering. After all, as UBC president Stephen Toope points out here, adding one more year to the average length of schooling produces a 4- to 6-per-cent increase in GDP per capita.  So if we paid some attention to this file, it would... you know... help.

In this context the forced cheerfulness of university administrators, which most have maintained since 2002 despite rapidly diminishing returns from a succession of federal governments (and exceedingly modest efforts from most provincial governments), is increasingly inappropriate. Maybe the AUCC shouldn't call its next report on research policy Momentum, because who are we kidding, there is none.

That's why it's refreshing to find a few university presidents who are tired of pretending. How well are Canadian universities delivering the kind of education they need to deliver, Indira Samarasekera asks in the speech I link above? "Not well."

Then there is this extraordinary speech by the UofT's David Naylor.  I dearly wish Dr. Naylor would stop playing silly bugger on the matter of the Maclean's university survey issues, but he is right about  much else and he is not going to change his mind about us, so passons.

In his speech last fall to the Royal Society of Canada, Naylor shares the statistics our governments don't share. Among 17 selected OECD countries, Canada ranks 14th on some measure labelled "innovation" and 12th (lower in 2005 than in 2001) on research intensity and 14th in the filing of "triadic" patents, a measure of big ideas patented in multiple jurisdictions. Canada files patents at barely half the OECD average rate.

I had always believed Canada outpaced most countries for post-secondary education participation. Naylor tells me I'm right, but only because so many young Canadians attend community colleges. If you're looking at university enrolment, we're at 18th out of 27 OECD countries. Out of the 17 OECD countries selected for the Conference Board study, only Italy graduated fewer PhDs than Canada.  The United States outstrips us by half and doubles us in the number of Masters' degrees granted.

But the U.S. university system is awash in private money? Absolutely.  Ours should be too. But the Yankees also use government  to fund universities more generously than Canadians do, a point both liberal and conservative Canadians (ahem) refuse to acknowledge.  Since 1980, per-student goverment funding in U.S. public colleges and universities has risen by one-quarter while comparable spending in Canada fell by one-fifth. So instead of receiving $2,000 more per student than American universities, as they used to, today Canadian universities receive $5,000 per student less.

Naylor is cheeky enough to extend his comparison to the production of Nobel prize winners. A few weeks ago, months after Naylor delivered  this speech, we all saw how scared the Harper government is of Nobel prize winners. But Nobels are a fair indicator,  because they're one measure of how acceptable it is in a given country to be the best in the world at something. Naylor points out the excitement that accompanies each year's announcement of a Nobel winner with some (usually tenuous) Canadian connection. He gently points out that  Canada is usually where Nobel researchers are from. Or where they go, under generous inducement, years after they win their Nobels.  Canada "very seldom grows and keeps its own Nobel laureates," Naylor says. The last such case was in 1994. The last in the whole country. MIT has had 18 Nobel laureates since 2000.

Naylor goes on to suggest all sorts of ways to mend this state of affairs, some controversial. But first we need to acknowledge this state of affairs. Not enough Canadians are getting into universites. Not enough profs are there to greet them. Not enough ideas get out of labs into the market, and not enough of what goes on in our universities is remotely close to the best in the world.

It's a bit early to declare victory.