Quote:
Originally Posted by DevelopmentAndy
It is exactly this kind of thinking that has held NB back for generations. NB is small. There should be no Mount A, there should be no UNBSJ, Ud M maybe because they consolidated the French institutions there. SJ being a manufacturing centre really is not relevant. At one time UNB and Fredericton had a large engineering cluster for their size and were well known and respected and attracted talent. This is already in decline, distributing it all over the small province is just going to create a larger number of 3rd rate programs.
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Your viewpoint is doctrinaire and shortsighted.
Again, Fredericton as a city just doesn't have the resources to support certain university programs, especially in medicine or the health sciences. Medical schools have to be co-located with tertiary care medical centres. In NB, this includes SJRH, TMH and the GDH. These are located in Moncton and Saint John. The Chalmers just doesn't cut it. Tertiary level programs like cardiac surgery, interventional cardiology, subspecialty neurology, neurosurgery, neurointerventional radiology, traumatology, vascular surgery, thoracic surgery, hepatobiliary surgery, general interventional radiology, maternal fetal medicine, perinatology, neonatal intensive care, and both medical oncology and radiation oncology all exist in Saint John and Moncton, but, not in Fredericton. A medical school simply cannot exist in Fredericton. For this reason alone, if you are planning on having NB based medical training, it has to be offered in SJ and Moncton.
But, perhaps your intention is to farm out medical training to other provinces. Maybe it would be cheaper!!! This is how things worked 20 years ago. We could just go back to buying medical school seats in Halifax, St. John's and Sherbrooke. We could also go back to sending our critically ill patients to neighbouring provinces for treatment. Is this what you want? Shit, we still outsource certain programs to neighbouring provinces as is. Programs such as pharmacy and dentistry. Why not medicine too???
You seem concerned that by having multiple campuses of UNB that we would somehow be watering down the quality of university education in the province. It should be remembered that universities have two functions - teaching and research. I agree that, in general terms, research should be concentrated in research universities. This could be UNBF. This is where postgraduate (masters, doctoral, post doctoral) training could be concentrated. This makes sense. Teaching however is less research intensive. It can be comfortably and effectively performed in smaller teaching campuses.
I went to UPEI in the 1970s. It was a wholey undergraduate teaching university at the time. I enjoyed my experience there. I received an effective science based education and was able to learn research techniques and how to write scientific papers. I was not prevented from getting into med school, and doing a specialty fellowship because I went to a primarily undergraduate university for my BSc. I was able to live and study at home for my first four years of university, and, as such, was able to save tens of thousands of dollars over having to do my BSc out of province before getting into medical school. I am from modest origins, and, the ability to save for med school while living at home for my first degree made a huge and palpable difference to me, and, may have helped influence my decision to go to med school in the first place. If, after all, I was already $50-60,000 in debt even before going to med school, I might have had real concerns about the affordability of all this.
If you believe in equity in educational opportunity, you would be in favour of having a distributed provincial university system in the province of NB.
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