The Secret of Our Success

It is hard to overstate how much the world has changed since 2013, the year I was given the immense privilege of serving as president of the University of Toronto. Twelve years ago, Stephen Harper was our prime minister, and Justin Trudeau was elected leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. The president of the United States, Barack Obama, was leading negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free-trade agreement covering 40 per cent of the global economy, while Donald Trump was best known as a reality TV star. World powers reached an interim deal with Iran that raised hopes for stability in the Middle East, while war in Europe was almost unthinkable. The word “coronavirus” was a scientific term best known to us from the SARS outbreak a decade earlier.

U of T has changed too during this tumultuous time – though I am proud to say that we have only grown stronger, building on the brilliant legacy of past leaders and generations of faculty, librarians, staff, students, alumni and friends. Alongside our continuing global leadership in research and teaching across the disciplines and professions, we have emerged as a major hub of innovation and entrepreneurship, and we are recognized as the top university on the planet for sustainability. Our international engagement is deeper and more strategic. And our three campuses have fully embraced their city-building role in the dynamic urban region around us, making U of T an even more powerful engine of social mobility and progress.

These very positive developments have all been made possible by our enduring twin commitments to academic excellence and accessibility to all qualified students. The commitment to accessibility was enshrined almost three decades ago in the Governing Council’s policy on student financial support, which guarantees that no domestic student “offered admission to a program at the University of Toronto should be unable to enter or complete the program due to lack of financial means.”

We have made good on that promise. When I took office, U of T had 80,000 students and we provided $150 million in financial aid to those in need, over and above the support they received through government sources. Today, we are as accessible as ever – our student population has grown to more than 100,000 and in 2024-25 we earmarked $380 million in financial aid to ensure that the best and brightest can study at U of T, no matter their financial means. And, despite the fact that Ontario’s support for higher education continues to lag other provinces and U of T has only a fraction of the financial resources enjoyed by our global peers, we are routinely ranked among the top 10 public universities in the world, alongside Oxford, Cambridge, University of California, Berkeley and UCLA.

In fact, U of T’s commitment to “excellence at scale” increasingly distinguishes us from our global peers. I emphasized this point in my installation address and have repeated it frequently since. From my regular meetings with international university leaders, I can attest that U of T is admired around the world for our ability to deliver on this dual mandate as well as we do.

Simply put, the University of Toronto is an elite institution with respect to its academic excellence, and we are an inclusive community with respect to the social and economic diversity of our students. The reason we are able to fulfill both aspirations so successfully is that we understand them as two sides of the same coin – our ability to expand the boundaries of knowledge depends on our success in welcoming the widest range of experiences and perspectives, and our ability to attract top talent across that spectrum depends on our dedication to the highest standards of scholarship.

This alignment of our ambitions and our ideals inspires tremendous enthusiasm. It has captured the imagination of our global alumni community – student financial aid is one of the most popular choices among our donors. It is also an incredibly powerful source of momentum that enables us to “defy gravity” – to make major advances in addressing the great challenges of our time, even in the face of very strong headwinds.

Malcolm Gladwell (BA 1984 Trinity) captured this idea vividly in a CBC interview last fall. He contrasted our approach with that of the most exclusive universities in the U.S., which are grappling with a precipitous decline in popular support. He said that U of T “is the paradigmatic elite university… it’s really, really good at what it does, so it believes it has a responsibility to educate as many students as possible. In America, the elite universities distinguish themselves by how many students they turn away… which is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard of.”

We must never lose sight of how vital this is; how U of T’s twin commitments to excellence and accessibility are the secret of our success. In an era of profoundly disruptive change – political, economic and social – we have gone from strength to strength, confident in our values, cultivating our unique advantages and honing the distinctive proposition we make to the world. Now, as we prepare to celebrate the bicentennial anniversary of the founding of the University of Toronto, let us take pride in this wonderful history. And let us redouble our commitment to preserve and extend it into our third century.

A presidential album

During his two terms, Meric Gertler met with world leaders, innovators and cultural icons. He shared a few of these moments.