ARCHIVED: Remarks by Jim Judd, Director of CSIS, at the University of Ottawa - CSIS and Canadian Universities

2009-01-22

I was asked to talk to you today about our relationship with universities.

Let me start by saying that CSIS is a lot like a modern university in that we are both fundamentally involved in the business of knowledge and information. I hope that such a comparison is not one that will cause you any dismay.

That said, there are obviously some differences in how we collect some of our information and build knowledge.

But, at the end of the day, there are also a lot of similarities - not least the fact that we are very voracious consumers of so called open source information (that is to say information that is publicly available to anyone).

My second basic point is that we are looking to change the nature of our interaction with the academic community in Canada (and elsewhere, I might add).

We are big fans of universities, although traditionally that has been because we hire a lot of university graduates from across the country every year.

We are ecumenical recruiters of talent, that is to say that we hire university graduates from across the spectrum of university programs – arts, sciences, languages, social sciences, engineering, law, social work, management, computer science and others – reflecting the diverse types of employment we offer in our organization.

This applies both generally and even more specifically to occupations such as intelligence officers where we have no fixed academic template that governs whom we hire for this kind of work.

Our recruiters on the campuses of Canadian universities more than fifty times a year attempt to entice bright young individuals into a career with us.

We have also established coop programs in certain disciplines – so far mostly technical, computer science and information management – but are working to expand this into other academic areas in the future.

I am pleased to say that we have been very successful in recruiting high-quality individuals from universities and colleges across Canada.

This is despite the fact that we have an onerous and lengthy recruitment vetting process – probably more so than any other employer in the federal government – and not just because of the rigorous security checks we have to conduct.

In calendar year 2007, for example, we hired 100 new intelligence officers. We had over 14,000 applicants for those jobs.

I might add that late last year our organization was identified as one of the top hundred employers in the country.

That is reflected in part by the fact that we have a very high retention rate for staff.

And that we of course offer interesting and challenging work inside and outside Canada, work that is at the core of government responsibilities.

I am sorry but I could not – as usual - resist the opportunity for a little advertising.

As I mentioned at the outset, our relationship with the academic community is changing and will continue to change in the future.

We will of course continue with our recruiting efforts on campuses across the country to ensure that we have the employees needed to discharge our mandate.

But to be frank, I think our interaction has been far too limited in the past – certainly in comparison to some of our foreign counterparts who have had a much richer and comprehensive relationship with the academic world.

Our American neighbours, for example, have long-standing relationships - going back to the Second World War - with universities there on national security-related research and development programs.

Their collaborative initiatives with universities and think tanks and others on open source analysis are also well-established and fruitful.

The personal interaction between individuals in the national security sector and the academic community is also well-established and, I think, to the mutual benefit of both communities.

And more recently our American colleagues have established a university presidents’ council on national security, currently chaired by the President of Penn State University, and involving representatives from more than thirty universities across the United States – including I might add Berkeley.

So what do we want to do with the academic community other than recruiting bright young employees and why do we want to do that?

Let me begin with the motivation for us.

It is very straightforward – we believe that universities across the country have interest and expertise in an array of issues that are of interest to us.

Global, regional and national developments from security to demography to science, and technology to energy to the environment and many more matter to us as they do to many others including in universities.

Expertise in universities can provide us with context, different perspectives and often a longer-term view of changes that might affect the national security of our own country – which is the crux of our institutional mandate.

I should hasten to add that we are not approaching this as a one street whereby we seek only to harvest the knowledge to be found on university campuses.

Instead, we are hoping for a more interactive relationship – one in which:

• we benefit from academic expertise but also share our own insights on issues and developments;
• we provide a better opportunity to understand government priorities and concerns; and
• we create forums that can provide an opportunity to bring together experts from inside and outside government – be they Canadian or foreign - to better understand an increasingly complex global environment.

We also hope that the interaction will serve to:

• challenge our own cultural biases and conventional wisdom and help us see issues and developments through different prisms;
• take the longer and sometimes broader view on these problems; and
• finally, help sharpen our own research and analytical capacities.

Truth be told, we have already launched a number of initiatives that we intend to continue with in the future as building blocks for a more expansive interaction with the university community.

For some years now we have been providing financial support – and increasingly personnel support in the form of speakers and moderators – to the annual meetings of the Canadian Association of Security and Intelligence Studies.

We have expanded our contributions on both fronts in the last several years.

We have also been involved in and supportive of a recent multilateral enterprise – the Global Futures Forum – which has drawn government, academic and other experts from more than forty countries across the world to address a range of topical issues of broad concern.

We have also launched a speakers program here at our headquarters in Ottawa which has drawn a variety of experts – from the universities, the media and other institutions – to address domestic or international issues of topical interest.

And last year we formally established an academic outreach office that has got off to a running start in reaching out to university faculties and think tanks.

That office organized the first of a series of conferences – taking place as I speak – here in Ottawa on the highly topical issue of Pakistan.

Participants in that event have come from government, academia, the media and think tanks both in Canada and from a number of foreign countries.

We are planning more of these for later this year and beyond – all on issues I suspect that are of equal interest to both governments and the academic community.

The academic outreach office is, I might add, a very novel approach for organizations such as ours anywhere in the world.

Some other initiatives that we are exploring for the future (or have already started) include:

• expanding our university coop program to other disciplines beyond information management and computer science;
• examining the opportunities for a new “academic in residence” program that might provide an alternative for members of the academic community looking for a sabbatical term; and
• exploring the opportunities for the creation of a new program – analogous to the existing Security and Defence Forum at the Department of National Defence – that might support national security-related studies in Canadian university faculties.

There may well be other initiatives that are both desirable and possible which emerge from the dialogues with universities.

We will keep an open mind on any that might arise in the future.

Let me just conclude by thanking you for your attention and interest.

I would be happy now to take any questions you might have for me.