TMU president Mohamed Lachemi.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
Toronto Metropolitan University’s new medical school officially opens its Brampton campus Wednesday. The school is trumpeting the opening as the first new medical school in the Greater Toronto Area in more than a century. It will be located about an hour’s drive northwest of the downtown Toronto campus in the former Brampton Civic Centre, which has been renovated to include classrooms, labs, offices and student spaces for the incoming class of 94 MD students.
TMU president Mohamed Lachemi spoke to The Globe and Mail about the significance of the school’s opening and other issues affecting the university sector.
What does it mean for TMU to be opening a new medical school?
It’s a historic milestone for our university. It’s a journey that started almost 10 years ago with a call from former premier Bill Davis, who wanted to talk to me about doing things in Brampton.
He reminded me that he had been a minister of education. And he said, I know how your university has been impactful in the Downtown East and I want to work together to bring that level of energy and economic impact to Brampton. It started with that conversation and this week we’re opening a medical school. He became a mentor to me, helped me a lot to navigate Brampton politics.
Brampton is a fast growing city. What role do you see TMU playing in the city’s growth? How do you think that might change the university’s identity as it expands beyond downtown Toronto?
Brampton is one of the fastest growing cities in the country. It has a lot of youth, a lot of talent. And for us, bringing a campus there will definitely give opportunities for youth to be retained in Brampton, but also to bring talented people to the city. We have the medical school but we’ve also established a national centre of cyber security that has been running for the past five or six years. We’ve also brought to Brampton our innovation ecosystem, so the Brampton Venture Zone is run by TMU. We are opening two integrated health clinics to support us in providing health care services. So it’s a win-win situation.
In the last few years TMU has opened a law school and now a medical school. How will this change TMU?
As you know, we are a young university. We became a university in 1993 when we had 11,000 students. We are now close to 50,000 students. The growth has been phenomenal. In 1993 we had about 60 undergraduate programs. Our research agenda was non-existent. Today we have over 130 undergraduate and graduate programs. Having professional schools will definitely help us in terms of growing our ranking and reputation among top Canadian universities. It will also boost the impact that we have on our communities.
When the first class of TMU med students was being selected, Premier Doug Ford suggested he wanted to be sure that students were being selected on merit. I think the school had said that three quarters of students would come from equity deserving communities. How did you have that conversation with the Premier and assure him that students were being chosen on merit?
Any conversation we had from the beginning with government or with members of the communities around us was always focused on the type of medical school that we wanted to develop. Our vision was to establish a different kind of medical school, one that is rooted in community and responsive to the needs of the people.
We have a very robust program of admission that is rooted in quality. We received over 6,400 applications, the highest number of applications to any medical school in the country, and we selected 94. The percentage of the people selected, 1.46 per cent, is the lowest in the country. It’s even lower than the percentage accepted at Harvard Medical School. When you have a process with that level of competition I’m not worried about making sure that we get, as we say in French, la crème de la crème.
There has been a lot of talk about the financial pressures on universities right now, particularly with the changes to international student rules in Canada. How is TMU coping?
We have been very prudent in our finances. We have a policy established many years ago by our board of governors, that every year we must run at zero deficit. I’m not saying that the current crisis, as you described it, is not affecting us. At TMU we kept the percentage of international students very low compared to other schools, around 10 per cent, because we have huge demand from domestic students. So the change in policy by the federal government is affecting everybody, but it’s affecting us much less than other institutions.
Is the university approaching artificial intelligence as a friend or a foe? Does it make life easier, or is it making evaluation harder?
Artificial intelligence is like a sword with two edges. AI is definitely a reality and we need to consider it in many things that we do. However AI must be under control. For the university sector, it’s a reality. We do research, we use artificial intelligence in many aspects of research and it can give us advantages in efficiency and the use of resources. But at the same time, we have to be also mindful about the danger of artificial intelligence, especially in terms of academic misconduct. We need to put some mechanisms in place to make sure that we don’t lose that control.
This interview has been edited and condensed.