UNB Saint John IS Saint John’s University

[The following article by Elizabeth W. McGahan was published in the most recent edition of The New Freeman, the organ of the Diocese of Saint John]

For the past several months, since the release of the Post Secondary Education Commission’s Report recommending the closure of UNB Saint John, our city has received attention locally and even nationally. In December the Toronto Globe and Mail (Dec 27/07) reminded its cross-Canada audience of Saint John’s national image as a backward, company dominated town by claiming that Saint John “… should, in reality, be called Irvingville.” Old images die hard and news that the government is threatening to close the University of New Brunswick Saint John only reinforces this denigrating picture of our city as a smoke stack filled, poverty-ridden, and possibly soon to be university-deprived backwater.

The education pioneers of fifty years ago who lobbied the province for a university because they saw their city as “injured” in the absence of an institution of higher learning would recoil at the idea that UNB Saint John is slated for elimination, to be replaced by a technical trades/applied education school.

In the 1960s government and citizens grasped the nature of aspirations and accommodation within a civil society, by recognizing that education was the route to social and economic development. In 1964 UNB Saint John began offering a two year program. A year earlier the Saint John Institute of Technology (now known as NBCC-Saint John) initiated courses to serve the “technical and trade needs of the industrial complex of Saint John…[due to] …the general lack of training programs in industry…”

Today few would deny the premise that a trained and educated citizenry advances Saint John, and that UNB Saint John as a “talent magnet” confirms the city’s commitment to developing a creative class from within the area while welcoming students and faculty from abroad to be a part of its currently growing knowledge-based community. Overseas students attending UNB Saint John enrich the university experience of local area students and contribute to the city’s cosmopolitan ambiance. Closing UNB Saint John would rupture the city’s economic progress by eroding the city’s attractiveness to immigrants who equate Canadian cities with access to solid universities.

Prior to the founding of UNB Saint John, most Saint John families had no experience of a university. When the university moved to Tucker Park in 1969 a period of transformation began to occur within many families. People who had never dreamed of going to university now had a concrete focal point upon which to imagine that they or their children might one day attend a university in their own city, similar to the people of Moncton and Fredericton. For many non-university families the visible existence of UNB Saint John demystified the idea of a university and made it an attainable goal, especially for the more economically challenged within the city.

Gradually UNB Saint John became Saint John’s university, an avenue of opportunity for those from Greater Saint John who must hold down part time jobs during the academic year and summer to pay for their education and living expenses. By the mid 1980s UNB Saint John’s registrar observed increased enrollment of single parent mothers reflecting the city’s position on Canada’s poverty index and highlighting the university’s role in elevating a significant sector of its population through education towards the goal of self-reliance.

As a local, urban-based institution UNB Saint John offered programs to meet the demands within the city as well as to introduce the beginnings of a wider university curriculum in the Liberal Arts, General Sciences, Business, Engineering, and Nursing. Today more than 54% of its enrollments are found in the Liberal Arts, subjects that are essential to “an enlightened democratic society” that in itself is “essential to a competitive economy.”

Currently an energy hub is being planned for Saint John. Some believe that preparing our youth and other workers for this new development should be done by closing UNB Saint John. Others suggest gutting the Liberal Arts faculty and disciplines such as English, History, Psychology and Philosophy that are essential to prepare for careers in education, law and a number of health-related professions. These recommended scenarios would create classroom space for a skills-based training centre for those students whose only access to post secondary education, if they could not afford to attend a university outside the city, would be the proposed technical training/applied education route.

These suggestions, reinforced in the PSE Report, mock the recognition of aspirations and accommodation that occurred in the 1960s when the precursor to the community college was created to serve local industry and the university was created to prepare the city’s youth for the emerging professions. Training workers for the energy hub should be accomplished through enhancing the community college and the relevant faculties at the university, and not by dismantling and destroying UNB Saint John and its core programs.

Closing UNB Saint John would force the streaming of economically disadvantaged youth into industries associated with Saint John’s latest boom, at present, the energy hub. Readers of the New Freeman recognize that such cruel social engineering subverts the basic teaching and understanding of Catholic social justice.

Last September some in government expressed surprise when Saint John’s citizens protested against the proposed closure of UNB Saint John. Clearly these elected representatives had not been paying attention to ground level developments in their own city. They failed to realize UNB Saint John’s essential role as part of the city’s urban infrastructure with graduates working in the teaching, medical, legal and commercial confraternities within the city. They failed to realize that like a successful partnership, or marriage, the city and UNB Saint John had coalesced through local student enrollments and faculty research on matters focused on their city.

Through their public, poignant outcry Saint Johners admonished their government for daring to crush their hopes and ignore their accomplishments, for betraying their children’s and their city’s aspirations by suggesting that the city be returned to its under-educated, backwater status. That is why thousands demonstrated when the government initially made its appalling recommendation that UNB Saint John be closed.

The citizens of Saint John were expressing a previously unspoken community recognition that UNB Saint John held a promise for their children and that they as graduates and parents of future graduates had developed a quiet pride in their university, UNB Saint John.

By their protest Saint Johners proclaimed that the intangible values of a community are made concrete through those institutions that accommodate the legitimate aspirations of its citizens.

After forty years UNB Saint John has become a visible repository of Saint John’s intangible values…and its people are demanding that UNB Saint John remains in Saint John.