THE PUBLIC RIGHTLY LOOKS TO US TO DEMONSTRATE the impact of the research conducted at U of T. The general view is that this is best expressed through examples of the spin-off companies, royalties, patents, licenses, revenue, inventions, equity holdings, products and jobs that emanate from our research and scholarly activities.
These are important indicators of the contributions of our research, and the University of Toronto is proud of its growing record of accomplishment in transferring knowledge and technology to create security, economic, social and cultural benefits.

Still, this type of evidence of research impact is only one part of the story. Our research also makes a powerful difference to the world in other important ways, but these may be less self-evident. One example came with the horrible events of Sept. 11.

Since that terrible day, university scholars around the world have played an important role in providing much-needed understanding, analysis and strategic advice. As political scientist Janice Stein points out in this issue, "People can get information easily enough, but the university can provide analysis that helps them understand the information." To a large extent, the analysis that has been offered regularly through the media has been from university scholars who have spent their lives studying subjects – such as history, sociology, and psychology – that can’t be quantified in terms of direct economic impact or new spin-off companies, but that make a resounding impact on society in their own right.

This kind of impact was exemplified most recently in a conference presented by U of T’s Faculty of Law which addressed the potential impact of Bill C-36 on diverse areas of Canadian life, including criminal procedure, immigration, privacy issues, law enforcement and charitable giving. Proceedings were published in book form by U of T Press only a week after the conference in order to inform MPs, Senators and the general public about this very timely issue.

In this issue of Edge, we touch on the vast breadth of research and scholarly impact. The cover story is devoted to a small number of the hundreds of faculty involved in environmental research. Canada Research Chair and Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council grant awardee Rosemary Sullivan offers her thoughts on the convergence of disciplines. The multifaceted impact of women’s studies and cinema studies scholar Kay Armatage and Nobel laureate John Polanyi are profiled, and the "In the Works" and "Next Generation" pages describe contributions of a range of disciplines, from criminology to pharmacy to linguistics. And we look at how the bilingual CD-ROM version of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography/Dictionnaire biographique du Canada is helping students learn history in an entirely new way.

In the end, the best evidence of how our research and scholarship shape society at large is the quality and impact of our graduates who, with the benefits of learning in a research-enriched teaching environment, take the knowledge and problem-solving skills attained here and apply them, directly and indirectly, everywhere in our ever-changing world.

P.S. We have fine-tuned our coverage of research at U of T. This page, "Up Front," will now feature an essay on scholarship by a different U of T faculty member in each issue. A new section – "Zoom" – brings you a wealth of information from throughout our research community. We have also expanded the "In the Works" department to include four stories in each issue.

I VISITED TORONTO ISLAND RECENTLY TO VIEW an installation by a young artist, Diana Lynn Thompson. She had hung strings of leaves from the ceiling of her small studio — over a thousand golden brown cottonwood leaves inscribed with the names of the island’s inhabitants, both the living and the dead. I walked through the winding path of hanging leaves and felt I was inside the canopy of the tree itself. Thompson called her installation Only Connect. She was quoting from E.M. Forster’s The Longest Journey: "Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon."

Now that the new millennium has begun, I ask myself: what have we failed to connect? Man and nature; art and technology; science and ethics?

A short time ago we spoke so blithely of apocalypse, never expecting to find ourselves in a changed world. It is a world that requires we rethink many things. We had thought ourselves safe. We were focused on a vision of science conquering the aging process; of the endless renewal of the human body through organ transplants;
of human cloning; and so on and so on. As a New Yorker cartoon recently suggested, suddenly these matters seem infused with nostalgia. Now we must confront new realities such as our lack of preparedness for germ warfare or the vulnerability of our own technologies in the face of saboteurs. Now we know the dark side of globalization. Our technologies do not insulate us from the fragility of life.

I think with pride of the university as an institution that forms young minds. The free play of ideas is one of the greatest achievements of Western culture. But have we, too, forgotten something? It is fair to say that the 20th century was the century of specialization. The brilliant 19th-century generalist was left behind as knowledge became increasingly esoteric within the separate disciplines. It is fair to speak of a schism between the physical/life sciences and the humanities and social sciences, both within the university and in society at large. When did we conclude that the disciplines were mutually exclusive? The humanist came to distrust the scientist; the scientist condescended to the humanist. Both devoted themselves to their own private languages.

We need a new convergence. It was not lost on anyone that the symbols of Western technology were the object of terrorist fear and hatred on Sept. 11. Have we used our technologies thoughtlessly in the pursuit of pure research? Have humanists abdicated responsibility as we allowed language to be perverted so that weapons of mass destruction cause only "collateral damage?"

I see great promise in my students. They want to reshape an integrated world. In one of my undergraduate seminars a few weeks ago, Ajay Mehra, a student who is majoring in mathematics while reading physics for pleasure, wrote a wonderful paper on a poet named Gwendolyn MacEwen. MacEwen used the concept of the imaginary number to explore her conviction that the universe within is as large as the cosmos without. Iteration, relativity, the uncertainty principle – all these concepts were at play in her work. Ajay was suggesting that science and art are not alienated disciplines. The mathematician and the poet both know that anything you can imagine can exist, imaginatively.

My hope for education in this century is that we will see the re-convergence of the sciences and the humanities, that our mutual dependencies will be explored in increasingly exacting dialogues. Our technologies must be informed by ethics, the humanities by a pragmatic engagement with the world. We need a new vision. The world’s survival may well depend upon it.

Rosemary Sullivan is a Canada Research Chair. She won the 1995 Governor General’s Award for Nonfiction for Shadow Maker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen.