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YOUR SOCIETY | FELLOWS

FEATURED FELLOW: MERIC GERTLER

Meric Gertler has been president of
the University of Toronto since 2013.

niversity of Toronto president only deriving fantastic experience, they’re organization. We have about a billion dol-
UMeric Gertler is a world leader in helping improve our communities and lars’ worth of capital projects underway.
urban theory, focusing on the geography working with our partners. As we build new buildings or renovate old
of innovation, creativity and culture in historic properties, we’re thinking a lot
city centres as economic drivers. Besides On the challenge of student commutes more systematically about how that can
authoring, editing and co-editing several Collectively, Toronto’s four universities improve the quality of the built environ-
influential books and dozens of academic (U of T, York, Ryerson and OCAD ment and the experience of Torontonians.
publications, he has been an advisor to University) have about 180,000 students We also recruit about half our faculty and
North American and European govern- enrolled, the vast majority of whom com- a quarter of our students from around the
ments, to the European Union and the mute to and from their campuses. And we world, so the more we do to make this city
Organisation for Economic Co-operation knew, anecdotally, that they’ve been itself a draw, the more we help ourselves.
and Development, in Paris. Here, he dis- spending a lot of time commuting, which
cusses leveraging U of T’s urban location means less time for studies and otherwise On the flip side: international experience
and reimagining education in that light. engaging with life, on or off campus. I think that the more Canadians who can
So I “enticed” the other universities’ travel and engage with the rest of the
On the benefits of the urban location presidents to collaborate with us to help world directly, the better. And U of T isn’t
As an urban geographer, it seemed obvi- tackle this. We jointly commissioned, doing too badly in that regard: we reckon
ous that one of U of T’s greatest assets was funded and implemented the first-ever that 15 to 16 per cent of our undergradu-
that it has three major campuses in the study of daily travel patterns of university ates will have some kind of international
middle of one of the world’s most dynamic students in the GTA. We now have a fan- experience while they’re here. But we
and diverse metropolitan regions. There tastic database that we’ve shared with the would love to double or triple that. We are
are all kinds of opportunities on our City, Toronto Transportation Commission leveraging our global connections, deep-
doorstep, real-life problems that not just and MetroLinks to help inform planning. ening partnerships with other great uni- LISA SAKULENSKY/UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
our faculty but also our students, in pro- versities around the world to facilitate
grams such as architecture, geography, On the university’s part in the wider city more international, experiential opportu-
urban studies or civil engineering, can You can think of U of T, both figura- nities for our students.
and do work on. In the process, they’re not tively and literally, as a city-building —Interview by Nick Walker

78 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2018