Creation of Mennonite "University" Misguided

     The Conservative government's decision to create an
independent Mennonite University (9 January 1998) is regressive
and can only have a negative impact on higher education in the
province.  The proposal has numerous shortcomings.
     1.  A free-standing religous institution does not serve well
the truly educational interests of the Mennonite community. 
Mennonite students will be exposed to a narrow, possibly
doctrinaire perspective, as opposed to the broadening outlook
central to traditional universities.
     Students will interact primarily and perhaps even
exclusively with other Mennonite students and faculty, resulting
in a lack of worldly perspective.  Natural Sciences were not even
mentioned as areas for program development, leaving a huge gap in
their education.
     2.  Government funds should be used very cautiously when
supporting religion-based education.  Minister of Education
McIntosh's claim that "the province will not be funding any of
the faith-based courses" is naive at best and deceitful at worst. 
Governments cannot easily control the use of funds once allocated
to institutions (e.g., governments cannot monitor library
purchases or appointments).
     Moreover, most of the areas mentioned for study are already
faith-based (e.g., religion, conflict resolution).  Governments
and taxpayers will subsidize much of the private contributions
and tuition fees that will undoubtedly flow to an independent
Mennonite University, and that will be used for faith-based
courses.
     3.  The province has chosen to increase funding of what were
private religious institutions by about 1000% (from $250,000 to
$2,640,000) following years of cutbacks to Manitoba's public
universities.  On the books, Manitoba will seem to have increased
its funding of Universities by millions of dollars, but without
any improvement in the dire situation of its public institutions. 
The impact will even be negative if, as predicted, hundreds of
students shift to the new institution along with the tuition
money on which inadequately-funded universities are increasingly
dependent.
     Provincial money could have been better spent to redress
some of the numerous financial difficulties of universities in
the province: buildings are falling apart; the lack of graduate
programs and associated financial support forces hundreds of
Manitobans, irrespective of religious background, to leave the
province every year and many will never return; the Province of
Manitoba has a history of paltry support for university research,
and so on.
     4.  To my knowledge, neither the Conservative Government nor
the Council on Post-Secondary Education (COPSE) held wide public
meetings on this important initiative.  Nor was even the
educational community widely consulted.  Such consultations
should have preceded any decision to fragment Manitoba's already
small university population into narrow, religious groupings. 
That such fragmentation might continue seems possible, inasmuch
as many cultural and religous groups could now reasonably expect
similar treatment as the province's Mennonites.
     Although I sympathize with the Mennonite community's desire
to "hold onto its values and traditions," as Art DeFehr phrased
it in the article, segregated, religious-based universities are
not an appropriate means to achieve this end.  Such a divisive
and misguided change to the university system demonstrates once
again the inadequacy of the government's structures for managing
higher education, and the apparent willingness of government and
COPSE to put political considerations ahead of reasoned and
principled judgment in making decisions about this valuable
resource.

Jim Clark
Winnipeg