A doctor of psychology, Harvey Weingarten was appointed president of the University of Calgary in 2001. During Alberta's economic boom, he has overseen a massive capital expansion program on campus that includes a new digital library, a faculty of veterinary medicine and a child development centre.

University of Calgary president Harvey Weingarten

University of Calgary president Harvey Weingarten

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Interviewed by Jessica Werb

The university just opened its new Faculty of Veterinary Medicine and its new School of Public Policy Studies. There are also plans to establish a Global Centre for Securing Cyberspace. Why the sudden push for expansion?

It's very simple. We are expanding in areas of high student demand and high societal demand. There hasn't been a new veterinary medicine school opened in Canada in the last 20-plus years. There's a huge demand for veterinarians, and we received hundreds of applications for the 30 spots for the first class this September.

And if you talk to anyone in this country about public policy, we need to step up the quality and the discourse around significant policy issues in Canada. …You hear the federal government and all of our provincial governments talking about the incredible turnover in the civil service and how worried they are that we need young people to go into the civil service. So our response is to develop a serious high-quality school of policy studies that is not just there to do research and to write papers and disseminate them among your friends, but to actually do the kind of research the country needs.

You are introducing a four-year graduation guarantee. Can you explain how this works?

Starting with students who are now entering in the core arts and science faculties, we say to them: If you live up to your obligations, which are to take a full course load and stuff like that, we will assure you that you can finish in four years. We will make sure the courses are available to you. …If they're not available we'll make substitutions for you. And if you don't finish in four years, we will pay for you to finish.

Students give us time at an interesting part of their lives and we want them to finish as quickly as they can. First, because it's important for them to finish and go out and do what they do, take their credential and make their contribution, if you will, to the real world. It's also important because the faster students finish, the more students we can take, because we're not meeting the demand for university spots in Calgary and Alberta.

The university recently received a $25-million donation for the Harley Hotchkiss Brain Institute. Are private donations playing an increasing role in universities? Are government dollars dropping off?

It's not that government dollars drop off, quite to the contrary. What happens is governments give you what they're going to give you, and you can sustain a certain range and diversity and quality of programming based on that. But if you want to take it to the next quality level, increasingly that's being done on philanthropic funds.

The university recently made the decision to stop credit-card tuition payments, a move condemned by students. Why?

About half the universities in Canada take credit cards and half don't. We were giving the credit card companies slightly more than $1 million a year in fees because students were paying their tuition with credit cards, and we thought that rather than give this money to the bankers, we'd put it to a better use. So we took that $1 million and we put it right into student financial aid. We've also ramped up our arrangements with banks in terms of direct payments, and we have arrangements for international students. We also have a very reasonable late-payment system.

You write a blog for the university. How did that come about?

Part of our job is to communicate to others about what we do, how we make decisions, what we think about the things that influence us, what the job is like. Lord knows I'm not sure that when I took this job I even understood what I was getting into. I'll tell you what's amazed me: people really do read this thing. Every time I post something I get people who respond.

What is the biggest challenge facing universities in Canada?

It's critical that universities think about how they operate, how they relate to students, how they relate to communities, how they relate to the public. We have to be contemporary, relevant and useful. I shouldn't leave this without saying something about funding. If you look at funding in Canadian public universities relative to public universities in the United States, we are really underfunded. The average gap is about $5,000 per student per year. That's huge. Imagine what a university could do if it had another $5,000 for every student to spend every year.