There’s something brewing in New Brunswick, and it’s not a pot of King Cole tea! I had originally planned to complete my two-part series about CAUT’s international reach, and particularly our role at Education International’s world congress in Berlin last July, in this month’s column, but that topic is being overshadowed by recommendations of a recent commission on post-secondary education in New Brunswick and will have to wait until December.

Since its Sept. 14 release, the report commissioned by the provincial government, and loftily titled “Advantage New Brunswick: A Province Reaches to Fulfill its Destiny,” has sparked a storm of controversy and angry protests. The Liberal government of Premier Shawn Graham has so far publicly supported the report’s main recommendations, which if implemented would have dire consequences for universities in the province, but the daily newspapers are filled with letters from readers overwhelmingly in opposition to the proposals.

On Sept. 17 I joined more than a thousand students, alumni and community members who marched in protest through Saint John to the offices of New Brunswick’s Ministry of Education, and two days later I participated in a roundtable discussion on the topic organized by my faculty association in Moncton.

So what’s all the fuss about? I won’t go into all the details of the report’s 34 policy recommendations, but this month and next month I look over four of the major issues involved.

One of the big concerns the two commissioners, Rick Miner and Jacques Lécuyer, had at the outset was the lower post-secondary education participation rates in New Brunswick, compared to the Canadian average. But if you look at the figures closely, you’ll find that the university participation rate in New Brunswick is actually higher than the national average and the participation rate for community colleges is lower. So the solution would appear fairly obvious: fix the problem at the college level!

New Brunswick’s community colleges are nearly unique in Canada for their narrow trades-oriented focus. Change needs to happen through new program creation, revamping existing offerings and introducing academic courses, in order to make the offerings more attractive. And optional initiation to trades courses should be reintroduced in the high school curriculum, from which it was eliminated five years ago. Yes, there is a shortage of skilled tradespeople in the province, but the education offered should be broader in scope, as in most other provinces, and students should have the possibility of transferring to universities afterwards should they so desire.

Is this what the report is recommending? Absolutely not! It’s calling for UNB’s Saint John
campus, along with the Université de Moncton’s Shippagan and Edmundston campuses, to be merged with area community colleges and converted into polytechnic institutes, thus effectively
dismantling the two largest universities in the province. Mount Allison University in Sackville
and St. Thomas University in Fredericton are spared this fate.

What would these new polytechnics look like? According to the report, these new hybrids would offer much narrower applied courses, would be more in tune with the needs of the area and could offer some university programs, including at the master’s and PhD levels.

In public declarations, the commissioners touted the models of MIT, CalTech, Renssaeler Polytechnic Institute in New York state and École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland, adding that the trend in Canada and elsewhere is toward the creation of such institutions. New Brunswick would, if the report’s suggestions were implemented, be at the vanguard of Canada’s provinces . . .

Let’s dispel a few myths. MIT, Caltech, Renssaeler and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne are all universities, not hybrid institutions amounting to expanded community colleges. Also cited as an example is École Polytechnique de Montréal, the autonomous engineering school of the Université de Montréal. These institutions are also all situated in much larger metropolitan areas.

What’s not clear in the report is how the proposed polytechnics would be better situated to conduct applied research than the existing university campuses. New Brunswick is already last among Canadian provinces in per capita funding for post-secondary education and near the bottom for matching research funding. Current core operations need upgrading before the province can really compete nationally. Despite the substantial underfunding, New Brunswick universities are already competing successfully on the national and international stages, but the dearth of funding definitely needs to be addressed.

The commissioners boast that polytechnics are the wave of the future. Converting existing universities into this type of institution is completely unheard of! In the rest of Canada and internationally, the overwhelming trend has been in the opposite direction — community colleges becoming polytechnics or university colleges, and later on acquiring university status. Downgrading university campuses to polytechnics would be a step backward for New Brunswick, constricting instead of enhancing student access to a comprehensive quality education and undermining the province’s research capacity.

This whole process could set the province’s universities back more than 40 years! We must let Premier Graham know this is not the way to prosperity and self-sufficiency for our province. We need to build on our existing and proven post-secondary institutions, fund them at a much better rate, and give them the means to do even bigger and better things for the young people of this province and for the population of New Brunswick as a whole. Let’s go forward, not backward!

Next time: the report’s proposals on funding, governance, tuition fees and student financial assistance. Stay tuned!