Abstract

Assessment of private funding for university research reveals that the various sources of statistical data on which such evaluation is too often based are contradictory, and that a great deal of ambiguity exists as to what to include under the subject itself e.g. whether funding from Crown corporations is private or public. Statistics for private funding make no distinction between private corporate funding and funding from Crown corporations; however, statistics for corporate funding consider them separately. Data for Québec show that the drop in corporate funding is not attributable to the private sector - whose expenditures have remained virtually unchanged from 1980 to 1985 - but rather to the public and parapublic sectors, whose financial assistance fell by nearly 50% over the same period in comparison to overall corporate funding. Moreover, it was noted that the corporate funding structure mirrors the linguistic division of higher education. French-language universities are more dependent on funding from Crown corporations than are their English-language counterparts. The closeness of university-corporation ties, as measured by performance indicator, is to a great extent conditioned by linguistic differences.