Where to weed at Memorial University

When I joined Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador (MUN) enrollment was about 10,000.

Bruce Templeton in his letter May 15 understandably queries the justification for an expansion of the enrollment since then to more than double that number, with many graduates leaving with huge debts, and unable to get employment. However, as Templeton points out, at least some are then able to enroll at the Marine Institute (MI) to get a technical qualification leading to well-paid jobs. Perhaps the maturity gained through the years of university can be beneficial but a large debt is a serious issue, one I never faced in my undergrad time in the U.K.

I was recruited in 1968 by Angus Bruneau for the new engineering degree program, which added undergraduates to MUN’S enrollment. Perhaps some of those would otherwise have gone to the MI, or what is now College of the North Atlantic, but most who graduated did so with little debt and reasonable prospects of employment as professional engineers, thanks, too, to paid co-op work terms, also introduced in some other faculties, notably the business school.

There must be many reasons for problems at MUN.

I don’t claim to be able to identify or rank them all.

Its predecessor, Memorial College, was built around a teacher training program, (later the faculty of education) due to the then long-standing need for teachers across the province. The content and quality of that program then — development hampered not least by a denominational system — may be at the root of many issues continuing to the present day in MUN.

When our family came to St. John’s, local preschools were primitive and other come from aways had just started the Children’s Centre (CC), run by parents, modeled on the best ideas then current in the U.K. — and adding year by year to its curriculum.

We stayed with the CC for several years before transferring our children to the regular school system.

We got to know a science teacher trained in the UK, who became a lecturer in the faculty of education. She was very critical of science teaching in many schools here. For instance, some entrants to the faculty did not know that you had to take a lab mercury thermometer out of its protective cardboard tube before you place it in water in a beaker over a Bunsen burner.

Was the instruction in the arts and science departments problematic then? My wife greatly enjoyed an English course taught by the stimulating playwright, Michael Cook, who was a sessional, but noticed that most arts faculty were only available in their offices a couple of hours a week for the kind of contact that can make a huge difference to young students.

I won’t claim that there wasn’t reason to be critical, then or now, of any other branch of the university.

Now the pressure to “publish or perish” affects all disciplines and likely leaves little time for faculty to focus on — and develop — teaching skills.

I also remember that while a junior prof at MUN I soon got to know many faculty and senior administrators across the university, from the presidents Lord Stephen Taylor, Moses Morgan and their successors.

Now the plethora of administrators below the president, each with associates, assistants and secretaries, surely constitutes an expensive pyramid at the top of which are neither teachers nor researchers — a ripe target for weeding.