Higher education strategy in the Canadian north is tricky. Challenges include from the huge distances, the tiny populations, and the responsibility to support Indigenous populations with specific cultural, educational and scientific needs.  The fact that the North is divided into three different territories, each with its own college, fractures the system still further.  And then add on to this the fact that every college and territory also wants to hand out degrees as well, and you get a system which is stretched beyond measure and easily lured into dangerous mission creep.

There’s the obvious situation with Aurora College in the NWT, which is for some reason careening towards becoming a “polytechnic university” with no obvious definition of what that is.  Then there is Yukon College – also desperate to call itself a university (or rather a “hybrid university”) even though there is no earthly way they will ever qualify as such, and as far as I can tell are only planning on offering two degree programs.

The desire of northern territories to offer degree programs is by no means misguided.  Given the proportion of jobs in the North which are public-sector white collar like teaching and nursing, it’s actually natural.  The issue is whether it makes the slightest bit of sense for Yukon and Aurora Colleges – which were developed for an entirely different mission – should be allowing themselves to lose focus by designing and delivering programs which they don’t have a whole lot of background for.

Intriguingly, the Government of Nunavut has shown that there is a different way to go.  And that is by signing a long-term partnership agreement with Memorial University of Newfoundland.  Nunavut mused about having its own university several years ago and realized it was probably too much of a stretch.  But the desire to deliver effective university-level programs remained.  Traditionally, what northern colleges and territorial governments have done is sign one-off agreements with individual universities for specific programs (Nunavut long had a law program with U Vic, for instance, and the University of Saskatchewan does B Ed programming in the NWT).  But what Nunavut realized was that having a series of one-off agreements wasn’t very useful in terms of building long-term capacity for teaching, administration, or – crucially for the Inuit– research capacity.

So instead, what Nunavut decided to do was look for a single partner with whom they could enter a long-term relationship which could add capacity in all of these areas.  And I am pretty sure they made the right choice with Memorial, which beat out – so I hear – McGill and Regina in the final round of the competition.  Sure, McGill has a long-term interest in Arctic research, but let’s face it, a big research university is going to have trouble taking Arctic College seriously as an equal partner.  And while Regina could come to the table with solid Indigenous PSE experience with its own First Nations University partnership, a university from a landlocked province would have a tough time relating to the largely ocean-influenced culture of Nunavut.  Memorial, with its longstanding teaching and research presence in both Labrador and in Nunavut proper, was the best choice.

All around, this was the right move on Nunavut’s part.  It gets a lot of expertise and a long-term partner who can help them both in terms of instructional design and delivery and which can help create research agendas and capacities.  There’s almost no limit on what might happen over the next decade – because the deal is cast as a partnership rather than a contract for specific services, the relationship can grow organically in a lot of different ways.  Possibly, in ten years (or longer – there’s nothing to say this agreement can’t be renewed) Arctic College might be in a position to deliver some degree-level programming on its own.  And when it does, it will have a lot of experience under its belt.

The territory wins, the college wins, the people of Nunavut win.  (Memorial wins, too, but that’s of secondary importance).  Unfortunately, the Yukon is too committed to the independent university college route for this to be an option, but the NWT should probably take a glance to the east and check out the benefits of the Nunavut/Memorial model before it takes a definitive step towards some badly defined “university” status for its own college.