Premier Campbell’s university-making magic wand

With the proposed label “regional university,” Plant distinguished between small, undergraduate education-focused schools and research-intensive school such as UBC and UVic. The label was intended to more accurately describe degree-granting schools that serve specific regions but don’t have the same academic culture as the big research-intensive universities.

As soon as the report came out, Capilano College in North Vancouver (which, like Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design, never had the university-college designation) began aggressively lobbying to be included as a regional university. Despite the fact that the college is not engaged in research, the campaign argued that it already granted undergraduate degrees and services a specific region with its Sechelt and Squamish satellite campuses. They kicked off a wide-reaching Capilano U advertising campaign that apparently worked.

This was definitely not by Plant’s design. His recommendation for Capilano College (and other B.C. colleges that had been bestowed with degree-granting status) was that it be stripped of its right to grant degrees entirely. “I get that Cap College reaches way up — its region goes up to Pemberton — but the core audience of Cap College is the North Shore of Vancouver, which is within very easy reach of UBC and SFU. I don’t think it’s the right place to create a regional university today,” Plant told the Georgia Straight last August.

Another factor that sets Capilano College apart from the other university-colleges is that it offers only four undergraduate degrees — in music, music therapy, tourism management, and business administration — none of which are academic. Moreover, none of these four programs are offered at the Sechelt and Squamish campuses.

But it’s not only the announcement of Capilano University that is raising questions about the “devaluing” of the university designation. Rhodri Windsor-Liscombe, of UBC’s department of art history, is critical of Emily Carr Institute’s university status. He told the Georgia Straight, “I think it’s more about politics than it is about academic or educational value.…I think, in a sense, there’s a mistaken idea that to call everything universities is (a) going to make them universities, and (b) is actually going to serve the purposes of the institutions themselves and their students. And I don’t think it will.”

Windsor-Liscombe is bang on when he says that calling a school a university doesn’t make it one. The announcements bring to mind the last time Premier Campbell used his magic higher education wand: when he gave some colleges degree-granting status.

Capilano College became the poster child of the difficulties of degree-granting colleges when a number of newspaper articles in 2006 reported that, in some cases, its undergraduate degrees were not recognized by universities outside of B.C. The most widely reported case was that of David Cryderman who was rejected as a candidate for teacher training at the University of Toronto, Lakehead University, the University of Ottawa, the University of Western Ontario and Nipissing University, shortly before graduating from Capilano College in North Vancouver with a bachelor’s degree in music. He was told that to be considered for entrance into teachers’ college, he first needed a degree from a university. He thought he had earned the real thing.