Lack of university 'a national shame'
But an Arctic university should be Inuit-led with the power of governance: ITK president
Michele LeTourneau
Northern News Services
Monday, April 24, 2017
NUNAVUT
Jim Nasso is not giving up on a university for Nunavut, despite an independent feasibility study that seemingly put an end to the dream.
Chief executive officer of Agnico Eagle Mines Ltd. Jim Nasso says he's not giving up on a university in Nunavut three years after pledging $5 million to a building fund. - photo courtesy of Nunavut Mining Symposium |
Three years ago at the Nunavut Mining Symposium gala, Nasso - Agnico Eagle Mines Ltd.'s chief executive officer - famously put $5 million on the table to kickstart a university building fund.
"That we don't have a university in Nunavut is a national shame and a travesty for a wealthy G-7 country," reiterated Nasso at this year's event in early April.
"We'd hoped to complement our training program with a university in Nunavut. We made an initial offer of $5 million some years ago for bricks and mortar. That offer still stands."
Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (ITK) president Natan Obed says the national Inuit organization has not given up on an Arctic university, either. And although he appreciates the mining company's pledge and acknowledges an Arctic university might yield a program of study involving research in the natural resources, as in Alberta for example, such a university must be Inuit-led.
"What we get excited about, as well, is the ability to build equality, in an academic sense, with other Canadian institutions and other Canadians," said Obed.
"There are going to have to be champions, Inuit champions that go from just defending the idea of an Inuit-led Arctic university to laying the groundwork and actually doing it. I believe there are those people out there."
For the time being, the Government of Nunavut is not championing the idea. It hired KPMG to perform a feasibility study in 2016, and Universities Canada dashed all hopes, according to the KPMG report. Nunavut just couldn't satisfy the national governing body's criteria and the only way forward, according to KPMG, was for Nunavut Arctic College to team up with southern universities in order to grant degrees as it already does in a few cases.
"If we are going to be exactly like Memorial University from day one, or exactly like McGill ... then of course we wouldn't be able to build that infrastructure and have that base of population, and all those other factors that are deemed to be a necessity," said Obed in response.
"That (teaming up) is a separate construct than the one we would do nationally. There are already existing relationships between southern institutions and Inuit regions. That's great. We can strengthen those ties. But just like Piqqusilirivvik, there is something very valuable and meaningful to an Inuit-led university."
On March 25, philosopher and author John Ralston Saul slammed the KPMG report during a seven-minute speech at a Walrus Talks event held in Iqaluit. He said it put the GN in an impossible situation.
"I believe it was a classic consultant report serving the old interests. When I look at what they proposed I cannot think of a system more likely to reinforce the wealth and the influence of the southern universities, a system in which they get to shape and, in effect, own programming developed through colleges," he said.
Obed has a vision of what an Arctic university could accomplish.
"What it would do is very similar in the academic world to what Nunavut did in the political world - basically bring the power of, in this instance, academia into our control."
Ralston Saul devoted his entire talk to ripping apart Canadian academic structures
"Canada remains the only circumpolar country without fully-fledged universities in the Arctic. All the other countries, with less money, smaller populations, less territory, except for Russia, have Northern universities."
After posing a series of questions, he answered them himself.
"Why is Canada's centre of polar bear expertise in a southern university? Why is university-based Northern expertise in Victoria, Calgary, Quebec City?" he said. "Why? The answer isn't very complicated. These centres, these departments, bring in tens of millions of dollars to southern universities every year. This structure continues the domination of southerners in Northern fields of study."
Obed estimates that in the past 20 to 30 years millions of dollars have been allocated to Arctic research.
"It's time for there to be acknowledgement of the benefit that those monies have given to southern institutions but also the obligation for reciprocation."
Another oft-repeated justification for not building a Nunavut university is that the territory needs to deal with its troubled kindergarten to Grade 12 system before it can hope to look beyond those educational years to higher education.
"It hasn't been done that way anywhere else in the world. I can tell you that's not the way Canada was built," said Ralston Saul.
"The public education system in Canada was not built that way in the 19th century. They did the public education system at the same time that they did the university system. The literacy level in Canada in the middle of the 19th century was appalling. That didn't stop them. They had no money, no education - and they built universities."
