UNB faculty members protest honorary degree for N.B. premier

About 100 University of New Brunswick faculty members are protesting a decision to grant Premier Shawn Graham an honorary degree, in objection to the province's controversial 2007 report to reform post-secondary education.

Robert Whitney, a history professor at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John, said roughly 100 current and retired faculty and staff members have signed a letter of objection to granting Graham an honorary degree and have sent it to David Stevenson, chair of the university's board of governors.

Whitney said the decision is up to the board of governors, but from his perspective, the honour would be misdirected.

"The premier and his government sponsored a report which was clearly intended to restrict the access of higher education to many people in New Brunswick," he said.

"For us, it just doesn't seem to make sense that you would grant an honorary degree to someone who promoted policies that wanted to restrict people's access to university education."

Whitney said academic freedom gives professors and students the right and duty to express their views, especially when they feel something is wrong.

Greg Marquis, the acting chair of the history and politics department at UNBSJ, said a sense of insecurity remains after the 2007 controversy.

"We feel that the wounds have not been healed with UNB Saint John yet," Marquis said.

"Some of us feel — again, I'm speaking from my own point of view on this — that in Fredericton they often lose sight of what our issues are in Saint John: the future of the place, the governance issue, our funding, the pressure to put applied programs in Saint John and not in Fredericton."

Graham said in St. Stephen on Tuesday that he would accept the honorary doctor of laws degree at the spring convocation in Fredericton.

Graham said the criticism comes with political life.

"I respect the fact today that there are some university professors who have different points of view," Graham said.

Graham told reporters that "change is sometimes difficult for people to accept," but his controversial reforms are geared toward enhancing accessibility.

Graham has a physical education degree from the University of New Brunswick and an education degree from St. Thomas University. When Graham was elected in 1998 during a byelection, he was working on his master's degree in business administration at UNB.

UNB looking to future

Robert MacKinnon, the vice-president of UNBSJ, said the controversy is behind the campus. And he pointed to improvements to the institution in recent months.

"We are looking to the future," MacKinnon said.

"The premier announced in January 2008 that [the] Saint John campus was remaining part of UNB and later that spring we signed an agreement with Dalhouse [University in Halifax] and with the province to bring the delivery of Dalhousie's medical education program to Saint John."

MacKinnon said it's been a longtime tradition to grant honourary degrees to sitting premiers.

At the centre of the controversy is the recommendation of an independent report written for the New Brunswick government that called for the transformation of three satellite campuses in Saint John, Edmundston and Shippagan into polytechnic institutes.

Faced with mounting criticism from around the province over the proposal, the Graham government backed away from the controversial report in 2007 and punted the recommendations to a committee of university presidents and community college principals.

After that second process, the idea of polytechnics was scrapped.

Questions tradition of honourary degrees for premiers

Marquis said people on UNB's Saint John campus are all too aware that governments control university funding. So, he said, the university should consider ending its practice of granting honourary degrees to sitting premiers.

"If you look at other universities such as McGill [in Montrea], such as Windsor [in Ontario], they have a standing policy that no standing or serving politician gets an honourary degree," Marquis said.

"Now after they've retired, after they've moved on, that's a different thing."