The New Brunswick Government is trying a second time to introduce major changes to its post-secondary education system.
Premier Shawn Graham unveiled a new
action plan in the summer, based on a report released several weeks earlier by the working group on post-secondary education — composed of four of the province’s university presidents and three community college principals.
The new plan follows the premier’s abandonment last year of the post-secondary education commission report that met with fierce, province-wide opposition led by the Federation of New Brunswick Faculty Associations and the faculty association at the University of New Brunswick.
CAUT executive director James Turk said the government is still getting it wrong.
“The action plan fails to understand that underfunding is the most serious problem facing colleges and universities in New Brunswick,” Turk told an assembly at UNB Saint John last month. “Since 1993–1994, provincial funding for colleges and universities in New Brunswick, on a full-time equivalent student basis, has fallen 17.8 per cent and currently is second lowest among the provinces despite increases over the past few years.”
The provincial government’s plan to transform post-secondary education proposes an additional $90 million over five years to implement the major recommendations. These include having community colleges offer first and second year university courses, increasing the number of graduate students by 40 per cent, adding 11,000 new spaces in the community colleges over the next five years, and increasing apprenticeship spaces by 70 per cent.
“In what world,” Turk asked, “will $90 million do all this plus allow New Brunswick’s universities and colleges to meet their existing needs, when $90 million is not even enough to cover the deferred maintenance bill of the University of New Brunswick alone?”
The plan also proposes to create another layer in the post-secondary system — institutes and consortia of applied learning and training that will have their own staff, develop their own programming and courses and offer applied degrees in some areas.
New Brunswick, Turk noted, is a small province that already has four public universities and many campuses in the community college system. “Setting up new entities with their own programs in competition with existing programs and their own degrees is both unnecessary and ill-advised,” he said.
But perhaps the most astounding part of the action plan, Turk told the assembly, is its assault on institutional autonomy. The plan identifies a new agency that will have responsibility for “overall coordination, planning and governance for the transformation of the post-secondary system.” Further it specifies that funding formulas will be changed to, among other things, “ensure public post-secondary institutions can effectively plan and manage their operations in line with provincial priorities.”
To increase government control, the plan also says “each public institution will submit a five-year strategic plan, including an annual business plan, to government. These will be supported by performance-based contracts and indicators reflecting the strategic priorities of New Brunswick’s Self-Sufficiency Action Plan.”
The plan goes a step further to specify that, beginning in 2009, the government will require each public university and community college to appear annually before an appropriate committee of the New Brunswick Legislature to address their strategic plans and speak to the effective use of public funds.
Turk called on New Brunswickers to mobilize against this latest plan, as they did for its predecessor.
“Of course universities and colleges must necessarily be accountable, but in fact they already are,” he said. “There are few more open institutions in democratic society subject to a raft of provincial laws and oversight, governed by innumerable committees, producing annual reports and holding community meetings and open board and senate meetings.
“For post-secondary education to prosper, there must be a balance between accountability and autonomy, but the accountability cannot undermine the vitally necessary autonomy of the institution.
“Universities serve the public best when scholarly work — teaching and research — has a substantial degree of autonomy to ensure the integrity of scholarship is not corrupted by politicians’ fancies, current fashions, conventional wisdom, or the Irving newspapers’ editorial preferences.”
Gilles Allain, executive director of the Federation of New Brunswick Faculty Associations, said that the federation and its members are preparing their own public awareness campaign to counter the government’s initiative and to propose a more appropriate course for post-secondary education in the province.