“In the interior…people don’t think of education beyond grade 12. The questions they ask at the end of the day are ‘How many trees did you cut today?’ or ‘How were things down in the mine?’’
That’s what then-minister of advanced education Stan Hagen said in the Globe and Mail in 1989, when asked about the possibility of a university in northern BC.
But almost 25 years after its founding in June 1990, UNBC in Prince George is going strong with more than 4,000 current students. This year it is second in its category in the Maclean’s university rankings. It consistently attracts research funding and even has its own medical school, which specializes in training doctors to practice in the rural north.
Bruce Strachan, who was a member of the legislative assembly at the time of the founding and who became minister of advanced education, presented the petition to found the university to the provincial government.
“I just happened to be the right cabinet minister in the right place at the right time,” says Strachan. “It was a community effort.”
That community included 16,000 residents of northern BC, who each paid five dollars to sign the petition and become founders.
Even with that community support, Strachan says there were many skeptics.
“The ministry didn’t think we could have any interest. But it turned out there were a lot of really first-class academics who wanted to come here,” says Strachan.
Strachan says the university has heavily influenced the intellectual life of Prince George. “You get 450 academics in a town, that will change it,” he says. “We’ve seen a real gentrification in the city.”
Rob Budde, a professor in the English department for the past 14 years, says that the university built on an arts culture that was already there and is now stronger than ever. He says the university has been a home for writers who are uniquely northern.
“The university has contributed a lot to creating a kind of counterculture,” says Budde. “There’s almost a freedom to write up here, whereas in places like Vancouver you’re almost told how to write a certain way.”
Not all UNBC’s programs have been without struggle. Andrea Fredeen was one of the first students in the joint Bachelor of Fine Arts program that was shared with the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. She is also one of its last graduates, since it is no longer accepting new students.
Fredeen’s program consisted of creative writing courses offered by UNBC and visual arts instruction from Emily Carr, but as time went on Fredeen says it was harder and harder to get the face-to-face instruction needed for studio art.
Eventually, the partnership with Emily Carr ended when that school got university accreditation itself.
“I have no regrets at all and I think the degree had so much potential,” says Fredeen, who is now doing a master’s in creative writing at UNBC. “I think it just got lost in the growing pains of a young university.”
Fredeen says she hopes the program will be resurrected one day. “UNBC just has to figure out a way to do it on their own,” she says.
Another challenge UNBC faces in the coming years is enrollment. Although numbers have not declined, Bruce Strachan says enrollment is stagnant right now.
“The north’s economy is doing really well, and a healthy economy has an inverse relationship to post-secondary education,” Strachan says, adding that when young people can get jobs right away they don’t necessarily think of going back to school.
When Strachan considers the next 25 years, he says he has no idea what they will bring. “When you go back and think about what we didn’t know at the beginning,” he says, “I couldn’t even speculate.”
Documents obtained:
UNBC History
“Founding the University of Northern British Columbia”