The Government of the Northwest Territories published a Foundational Review of Aurora College, which is causing something of a stir north of 60.  Recent times have not been good for the college.  In early 2017, there was pressure from the Government to cut Social Work and Teacher Education programs (a decision later rescinded); soon afterwards the Government eliminated the college’s entire Board of Directors and replaced it with a single administrator before the review (one suspects there are a lot of stories here, but NWT media aren’t exactly forthcoming with detailed examinations of dirty laundry on these kinds of stories).  After having done this, the Government commissioned a Foundational Review, which was conducted by the accounting firm MNP (nb: I bid on this project and lost.  Feel free to discount my views on this subject if you like).

There are basically three big recommendations stemming from the Foundational Review.  The first – which actually takes up most of the report – is that Aurora College is in desperate need of better management and governance.  This shouldn’t come as an enormous surprise to the government, since this was largely why they wanted the review in the first place.  Recently, enrolments have been falling quite dramatically, and presumably management needs to take some blame for that.  However, the fact that many of the same recommendations appear to have been made in a 2013 review and appear not to have been implemented (or implemented only partially) suggests these recommendations might not be as transformative as one might hope.

The second big recommendation – one that is causing a lot of huffing and puffing in the Territory – is the call to move Aurora’s HQ (and some of its programming) from Fort Smith to Yellowknife. Currently, Aurora has three campuses – a “main” campus of 300 students in Fort Smith, which mostly provides trades training, a campus in Yellowknife of about 200 students that is more focussed on university-level training (mostly done in conjunction with the University of Saskatchewan and the University of Regina) and white-collar college programs, and a third tiny campus in Inuvik.

As near as I can tell, the main reason for this is to put the college management closer to the Government so the Government isn’t wondering what in the heck the college is doing all the time.  That’s not a terrible reason to move things, I suppose, but given how central the college is to Forth Smith‘s economy, residents there might be forgiven for thinking it’s a bit thin as a rationale.  Not that this is the only possible rationale: the better reason for such a move is that it’s kind of weird to have the main campus so far from the Territory’s main population centre.  Forth Smith has about 2,500 inhabitants; Yellowknife has around 20,000.  Imagine if Manitoba switched the University of Brandon and the University of Manitoba, or if Newfoundland decided to put Memorial University in Gander; that’s more or less what the NWT has done by trying to centralize operations in Fort Smith.  Shifting more programming to Yellowknife is likely to be a good idea, albeit undoubtedly one that will need to be undertaken with care.

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The third recommendation is the one that is creating the biggest waves (at least outside Fort Smith) but also the one that is the most puzzling: the call to turn Aurora into a “polytechnic university”.  Now, I’ve read the report twice and I have literally no idea what is meant by this phrase.  From what I can glean from the NWT media, the recommendation seems to have been largely interpreted as “our own university!  Cool!”.

Now, as I’ve said before with respect to the concept of universities in Nunavut and (particularly) Yukon: whoa Nellie.  Achieving de facto university status in Canada (i.e. being accepted by Universities Canada as a member) requires 500 students studying at the bachelor’s level, and the territories’ thin population and low levels of educational preparation make that a really challenging target to meet.  And it’s not like university programs are unavailable in NWT right now, or that Aurora College doesn’t host them; It’s just that they are delivered by Saskatchewan (teacher education) and Regina (social work).  If the proposal is that these need to be developed and delivered by a (new, untested, with no track record) local institution, that’s quite a radical and bold decision – especially given that these programs were on the verge of being shut down less than two years ago (apparently) due to lack of demand.

As for the “polytechnic” part – to the extent it seems to mean anything, it seems to mean a commitment to applied research.  But such a move requires local industry with a receptor capacity and a desire to work with an institution which is just starting out in this field.  I don’t think there’s any question about the former: the territories’ biggest employers are all technically-competent billion-dollar resource extraction companies.  The question is: what is it we think De Beers could learn from applied research done at Aurora College?  If you have trouble answering that question, you see the flaw in the polytechnic argument (the Review never cites demand for such services).

Missing entirely from the review – and disappointingly so, I think – is any real discussion about how to provide education outside of the main centres.  As I noted back here, one of the hugest, least-discussed problems in the whole country is working out how to provide post-secondary education opportunities to people outside major population centres at an affordable cost (so little-discussed, in fact, that the Federation of Canadian Municipalities put out an entire vision statement on the future of rural Canada and didn’t mention education once, which is totally bananas).  This review would have been a great opportunity to provide some deeper thinking about how to ensure Aurora serves communities like Hay River and Behchoko and Fort Simpson as well as Yellowknife and Fort Smith.  Unfortunately, for some reason, that opportunity was passed up.

Long story short: the report is useful on management and governance, and Aurora will be better for it (assuming the advice is implemented).  The recommendation about moving the HQ is probably the right one.  But the “polytechnic university” concept still needs a lot of work, and so too does the issue of distance provision in the Territory.