Good morning.  In exciting news, One Podcast to Start Your Day can now be found on all of your favourite podcast apps and includes a RSS feed. This episode, and the two previous ones, can be found here: https://anchor.fm/optsyd.

Today we have different version of One Podcast to Start Your Day.  We invited Dale Kirby to our virtual table for a one-on-one discussion of post-secondary education in Newfoundland and Labrador. Dale’s background as a Professor in the Faculty of Education at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador combined with his experience as Minister of Education and Early Childhood Development provides a unique perspective on the past, present, and future of higher education in Newfoundland.  The full transcript is here. 

Thanks to our producers Tiffany MacLennan and Sam Pufek.

Alex: Dale, What does the rest of the country need to know about colleges and universities in Newfoundland and Labrador?

Dale: The university here is much younger than universities in Upper Canada. You know, it was a two-year college called Memorial University College from 1925 to the time of Confederation and there are some books that have been written that are very unflattering about the quality education that was even delivered there. We had some vocational schools, [but] trades colleges didn’t really come into existence until around the time of Confederation. The first public college was created around the time of Confederation. We had this system of district vocational schools that were opened. Some have closed, but like many post-secondary institutions in the country, the college system has undergone a lot of consolidation and merger. So, they were district vocational schools [that] became regional colleges with multiple campuses, and then finally a province-wide provincial college consisting of all of them. In fact, the funny thing most people wouldn’t know is that for a year there, it was actually called the Provincial College, and they had a sort of a contest to decide what to name College of the North Atlantic. There was [also] one institution called the College of Fisheries that was merged, that became the Marine Institute, which later was merged into Memorial.

Alex: The Government in Newfoundland and Labrador seems to have a much larger role in post-secondary governance than in other provinces. How did that come to be and is there prospect of that changing?

Dale: Well, on paper, the university is autonomous, right? In the statute, the Memorial University Act, it says in black and white that the authority to make all these decisions, fiduciary and so on, are vested in the Board of Regions. So that it’s the board, not the government, that makes those decisions. But I would say that sometimes the paper that that’s printed on is of rather low quality, because there has been quite a bit of political influence over time. [The] affair with the government of the time interfering with the presidential search process [by veto-ing the Board’s choice in university president selection] was one of the more extreme ones that I’ve experienced.

But we had another [example] in the tuition-freeze policy, and it became much more of a provincial government policy priority instead of a university priority. [When the government at the time] were saying “…we’re going to allow the university to have more autonomy because it, you know, it should have more autonomy.” As soon as the horse had left the barn, as soon as the tuition freeze was lifted, the government announced that it… amended the University act to allow the auditor general to have more oversight and then has since basically started the Auditor General on what I would call a multi-year fishing expedition. And to quote from the press release, it says, “the auditor general is going to determine if significant investments are being managed with due regard to the economy, efficiency and effectiveness,” whatever that means.

Alex: You saw Newfoundland’s Tuition Fee Freeze Policy through from your time as a student leader to your time as Minster of Education. What has been the effect of 20 years of tuition freeze?

Yeah, I mean I was very much on the vanguard of this as a student activist with the [Canadian Federation of Students] back in the nineties. That was a period of time where tuition was increasing, and grants were replaced with loans, student debt was going up. It was a very, very different situation than today.

… After 1999, the funding [to postsecondary] from the government] was a portion [operating grant] by the provincial government [and a] separate aid to cover the [tuition] freeze for the university and the college. And there seemed to be an agreement on the freeze between institutions and government. But that all started to unravel just a few years ago when the province started cutting the university budget while still insisting on holding the freeze.

What was the impact? Obviously, students paid lower tuition fees, especially students here in Newfoundland and Labrador. We saw some spikes there… [and saw] maritime students coming here [when] Nova Scotia and New Brunswick tuition fees were going up. So, I mean that satisfied groups that are, I would say ideologically believe in this mantra that free or cheap tuition fees with no regard to the net cost of students, that that’s sort of job well done. That doesn’t account for those who are left out of that narrow model of access which bases access on this idea that tuition fees create access because that’s not true, we have to look at the overall costs.

But if you want to look at the effect of the tuition fee freeze, come to our campus and look at the crumbling infrastructure, that’s just one example. That has impact on learning, and it has the impact on the ability of faculty to conduct research, to have research output, to attract research funding. … There were more non tuition fees [for students]. It was like “Hey, we’ll freeze your tuition, but look how much more you’re going to pay in residence fees, meal plans and other service fees”. We have larger classes and fewer course choices. We have more courses being taught by short term contractual faculty. On top of that, in my own faculty, it’s been a policy for several years now since all of this started to unravel that we have to have three retirements of tenured faculty before we can advertise a new tenure track appointment. Another problem, we have less competitive staff salaries. So, we have problems recruiting staff because we can’t pay as much as other employers in the province… so, we have fewer staff to support programs [so] we end up having slower processes, reduced student services, challenges to provide services. And again, on top of that, the crumbling infrastructure. So, I don’t have a really positive story to tell you about the tuition fee freeze. When I was a young student activist back in the nineties, I really didn’t envision it ending up this way.