B.C. universities and colleges get a little closer

Rob Fleming has nothing against community colleges. In fact, the 36-year-old NDP MLA attended Camosun College for three semesters on his way to his history degree from the University of Victoria. It was a great experience, he says, and he highly recommends it.

As the opposition critic for advanced education, however, he’s aggrieved because the two distinct institution styles are slipping into each other. At the same time as colleges are growing into universities, he says, universities are devolving into colleges.

“Our system needs differentiation between colleges and universities, because they serve different purposes,” Fleming told the Georgia Straight in a phone interview. Looking ahead in government, he believes that “we’ll be back having to overcorrect an imbalance that we’ve made that values university education over other kinds of education.”

After May 22, when the B.C. government passed Bill 34, the University Amendment Act, colleges and universities indeed moved closer together. First, four colleges and one institution were rebranded as universities (Capilano, Malaspina, Fraser Valley, Kwantlen, and Emily Carr), but without any additional funding for research or other typical university facilities, such as research libraries.

Second, Bill 34 reformed university governance: a board of governors, not alumni, will now select chancellors. Third, senates (which determine curriculum, admission policies, et cetera) at the new “teaching” universities have only four student representatives, not the traditional balance of half administration, half students. To Fleming, this all spells trouble.

“In a government that has a tendency to centralize power in the premier’s office, we’re seeing the ministry trample on the autonomy of the institutions to govern themselves,” Fleming said, noting that chancellors may now have more connection to the governing party than to the institutions themselves.

“And you simply do not want to enhance opportunities for political interference at our universities. It is not conducive to an environment of free expression and innovation and discovery.”

The minister of advanced education, Murray Coell, told Fleming in a debate in the legislature that he’d made the changes at the request of the University Presidents’ Council of B.C. and in line with the 2007 provincial consultation document Campus 2020: Thinking Ahead.

Plus, he noted, fewer than two percent of alumni typically vote in chancellor elections. Coell would not make himself available to the Straight for an interview without first vetting all questions by e-mail, which is against Straight policy.

Listening to the present debate, you’d think B.C.’s unique system of community colleges, university colleges, and universities had been around forever. In fact, it’s quite new.

Back in 1962, UBC’s fourth president, John B. Macdonald, wrote the 119-page document that laid the foundation: Higher Education in British Columbia and a Plan for the Future. At the time, UBC was the only degree-granting institution in the province.

The document described the three styles of postsecondary institutions, envisioning them as providing both a boost to B.C.’s sparse population and a response to the idea that although all citizens in the future would need skills, not all students would flourish at a university. Written during the Cold War, Macdonald’s report envisioned B.C.’s “tripartite” postsecondary system as a balm for a scary future.

“The kind of world into which we are plunging headlong will bear little resemblance to the world we now know,” Macdonald wrote. “If we are wise enough and fortunate enough to avoid global warfare and nuclear destruction, it will be because we embrace the opportunities and responsibilities of this new world. Canadians”¦will have a vital role to play.”

The former dental professor noted that “muscle-power has been replaced by the machine,” and progress depended on the intellect of B.C.’s students. “We are witnesses to the first act of a new scientific revolution,” he wrote, “and each of us is a member of the cast.”¦If we are to prosper as a nation and as individuals, we must strive to understand the meaning of the revolution as we plan for the years ahead.”

Institutional independence was a key tenet of Higher Education. Macdonald noted that without it, colleges and universities would have no reason to strive for excellence.

The flowery 1962 text bears little resemblance to the Campus 2020 report, B.C.’s more recent future-planning exercise for postsecondary. Gone is the near-lyrical prose; instead, report special adviser Geoff Plant lays out a document prepared through consultation, with no overarching plan attached to it—just 52 stand-alone recommendations.

Bill 34 came out of those recommendations, Coell has said. Campus 2020 recommended that the “teaching” universities govern themselves as Thompson Rivers University does: with an appointed chancellor and a senate with limited student representation. Coell extended the chancellor-appointing change to the four existing universities as well, in the interest of harmonization.

John Dennison, a retired UBC professor and coauthor of Canada’s Community Colleges: A Critical Analysis (UBC Press, 1986), has watched B.C.’s postsecondary system evolve for half a century.

Colleges have only been as democratic as they are now for about 15 years, he told the Straight, since the provincial NDP government instituted education councils. Realistically, he said, the province maintains substantial control over postsecondary indirectly: through providing about 60 percent of the funding.

Dennison isn’t sold on the idea that a single institution should deliver everything from adult basic education to graduate degrees, if only because the “conservative” eastern universities won’t take graduates from these institutions seriously.

In 2007, for example, a total of just 12 graduates from the five B.C. institutions that are now universities went on to master’s programs at UBC. At the University of Western Ontario—the only major central Canadian university to respond to the Straight’s request for information—no students from any of the new universities have ever been admitted. But Dennison believes credibility for the “new” system will come.

“I think it’s going to take time and there are going to be skeptics,” he said. “The way you measure the quality of an institution is the quality of its graduates and the quality of the faculty. In time, as employers hire graduates from Kwantlen and Capilano and they say, ”˜By God, they’re well-prepared,’ that’s really going to build up the respect and reputation.”

To Fleming, the question comes down to this: what problems are these changes trying to solve? The changes in university governance and the reprofiling of colleges, the MLA said, don’t deal with B.C.’s most basic postsecondary issues.

“I don’t think Gordon Campbell understands how outpaced B.C. is becoming by Ontario, Alberta, and the northern states,” he said, pointing out the 2.6-percent across-the-board cut to postsecondary that came down in March 2008 and B.C.’s small boost in research funding compared to Alberta’s.

“I think he doesn’t understand that ordinary, middle-class British Columbians are having a hard time affording postsecondary and the cost of borrowing to pursue higher education, and that, in turn, is contributing to declining enrollment.”

During the debate on Bill 34, Coell kept directing Fleming to Campus 2020 for the origin of the postsecondary changes. Compared to the Macdonald report, which was rooted in alarm, Campus 2020 is vague about what it sees as B.C.’s present—and future—challenges. Plant begins the document with a quote from Premier Gordon Campbell’s 2006 speech that launched the consultation:

“There have been seismic shifts in the demographic, knowledge and economic landscapes,” Plant quotes Campbell as saying. “Our job here is to be sure that the strengths of our universities, colleges and institutes are reinforced while we discover new innovations that will help shape the learning landscape of the future. We want a learning landscape that is as rich and diverse as this great province.”

How the reprofiling of some colleges and softening of university self-governance will contribute to that, though, Fleming is not sure.