By B. Self and H. Peters

Submitted to:

Abstract

What happens when an educational institution is not in one of Canada’s major urban and southern centres, and in fact is not even in one of the less well-known but still somewhat major northern centres? This is a tongue-in-cheek look at education from the perspective of a hypothetical satellite campus of a northern post-secondary institution, of which there are several in Canada. Any similarities to real events, colleges, universities or people are very possible, but entirely coincidental.(1)

The Northern University/College of the Margins and Backcountry (NUMB, also known as the Northern University/College of the Misled and Banished) is one (or more than one) of Canada’s most northern post-secondary institutions. Education anywhere in the north has many peculiarities, but there are more oddities if it is located in one of the even more northern and remote satellite regions of the NUMB.

When one is not in a major centre, that is anywhere other than one of Canada's major cities, obtaining or providing post secondary education becomes a much different picture than what is typically expected. The rest of this truism is that that the smaller and less mainstream the community is, the more different it becomes. As egocentric humans we are usually capable of looking “up” the supposed gradient toward the “more desirable” urban centre or educational institute, but rarely do we look down at the less fortunate below us in the hierarchy. Thus those at senior Canadian institutions look enviously at prestigious Ivy League and hoary British universities with nary a thought of those northern institutions. Those at newer or more northern locales look up to the southerners. They thank their lucky stars that they are at the main campus in the “big” northern city, while refusing to travel to teach, never mind live, in the regional sites. Meanwhile, those of us at regional satellite campuses look up to anyone, and have no one to look down upon, except perhaps for the lowly distance courses.

There are still some distance students who believe that they will get the same face-to-face education as students at a main campus. However, distance education is a concept whose time has arrived with a vengeance. Administrators and college/university bean counters love the idea, especially when they can foist off a web CT course on unsuspecting far away undergrads. "Of course it'll be fine. In fact web CT is even better than being in a class in person. Why, you can even do the course in your pyjamas, in the comfort of your home at your own speed." The institution loves it because they don't have to spend a nickel on new infra structure or heat or light. Best of all the sap of a professor who creates the web CT course is potentially stuck with several hundred students for the salary of one measly course.
Web CT does potentially work well for students even if it is not quite as easy as advertised. The relatively sterile classrooms and lecture halls provide an environment that has little to distract the student from the dry lecture on the statistical significance of the length of time fruit flies spend looking for an overripe banana on which to lay their eggs. Not so the home environment. There are many things that are more interesting than reading from a fuzzy computer screen, such as Junior needing changing, not to mention that the wife will soon be home from work and wants to know what’s on for dinner, and besides Oprah is showing the third part of that series on losing that spare tire.

Even when Web CT really does work, there are occasional "hardware " problems associated with it for a regional student or instructor. These typically include the problem of not being on a high-speed internet connection and so having access to only part of the course information, and only at certain times, although no one ever knows exactly when. Other issues include having to try to work around Myrna, the neighbour when she picks up her end of the party line and tries to call Leroy at the pulp mill. Or when the diesel generator starts to slow down because too many people turned on too many lights in your local little regional community. The voltage drops and the computer screen gets those funny looking squiggles. Assuming of course that the latest windstorm hasn’t knocked out the power for the usual four days.
To be fair to the administration of NUMB, offering face-to-face courses and programs in the regions are often marginally economical or even frank money losers. No 300-seat lecture halls here; even counting the welders there aren't 300 students in the whole place. Tenure doesn’t mean much when others are constantly alluding to not knowing what on earth will happen to your career if even one student dropped out of your program. It’s a bit of a rude awakening, hearing for the first time as a regional instructor that our careers depend on our success in marketing our astronomy courses and convincing anyone and everyone in town to sign up. It can get a little worrisome when one of the cohort of nine students turns up pregnant shortly after one of her fellow students announced that he would have to drop out of the program because his wife was being transferred to Ft. St. Frozen. In the regions, instructors facing the crucial low number cut-off have been known to borrow students or even enrol a family pet, provided, of course, that the pet has an acceptably human sounding name. This is much easier now, thanks to the spate of original organic names given to children and pets, most of which come from the high number of back to the land, draft dodgers of the 60's who moved north. (Who would have ever guessed that there would be three students named Orca in the same English 101 in Tinytown?)

But do not think that courses, students and programs are the extent of issues in the region; we still have to contend with many other interesting situations. On the campus of the mother ship they think that having "MOOSE CROSSING" signs, are quaint and cutesy. We in the regions also have moose on campus, but rather than being a wildlife photo op, their appearance usually results in a slightly undignified rush between faculty and students to see who can get to the rifle in the pickup truck the quickest, and end up taking the moose home to the freezer. More of a wild-dead photo op.
In the regions, instructors of the university level courses are frequently housed with the local college. This makes sense for overhead costs and is often touted as the newest innovation in education partnerships, but occasionally leads to fighting with the instructors of the welders and forestry techs for resources. We university types like to think we are indispensable and that our own discipline is what really makes the world habitable, but, to be perfectly honest about it, learning a trade may make more sense in Tinytown, northern Canada, than pursuing that graduate degree in applied cosmology or rhetoric.

Shared buildings can lead to sharing other things. Instructors and faculty often believe that their faculty agreements cover such mundane things as access to office space. But in the regions space and money are at a premium, and those pesky asterisks in faculty agreements often refer to conditions such as “when available”. With a lack of offices and money, institutions often compensate by shoehorning as many educators as possible into an office. Usually they try to have instructors share offices with others in the same discipline, but sometimes a nursing instructor will have the chance to inadvertently expand her horizons by learning just why it is that an up-hand weld is so superior to a down-hand one.

And so, when we can’t talk “shop” with our welder office-mate, we look forward to our interactions with main campus colleagues. When interacting with the folks from the main campus it is discouraging to repeatedly hear, "Where are you? Tinytown? I didn't know we had a program there. Do you actually live there?" No doubt they mean well and are really just curious, but it does make one feel not a full fledged member of the team when you strongly suspect that the reception you are getting is identical to that which will someday be given to the very first three-headed Alien that turns up on Earth. Connections with colleagues are also possible when (after our own northern research proposal was turned down) we get to meet with the big city, big university faculty up for a day to do research on the anomalies of the north.
The powers and department heads in the mother ship assure those of us in the regions that “of course you are equal”. We are just in a slightly different locations and “no we haven't forgotten you” and to prove it they will make yet another generous donation to our library from the scarce resources in the city. They seem unable to realise that even we in the regions can figure out that the set of videos they gifted us with are a tad dated. Although hairstyles and clothes can suggest a particular era, your wild guess is confirmed when your office mate, herself only months from retirement, exclaims "I was there as a student when they made these in 1973. Boy, was that a big deal! It was the first time any of us had ever seen a video camera. We'd only used 16 mm or film strips before this."

Interacting with the main campus is an important lifeline for faculty wanting to stay in the profession. Main and regional campus interactions can really only be accomplished in four ways; phone, email, snail mail or in person. The first, by telephone is quite straightforward and usually satisfactory, unless of course you are to participate in a three-hour audio conference and the polycom is not working. Your ear and arm can get awfully sore from holding the phone up for all that time, and everyone else has to listen to all the sounds at your end from knocks on doors to the emotional student in the hall. On the other hand if the polycom works, you can have the best of both worlds by pushing the mute switch and either continuing with some real work or by making unheard sarcastic comments about the dean or department head. Of course, if you were trying for tenure (and who wouldn't be), you really should check to make sure the telltale light on the mute switch hasn't burned out.

But really, the polycom is great in theory, especially for faculty who wish to remain unknown by tenure and promotion committees. No one can see you, most of the time no one can hear you, and when you have something to say you always end up insulting someone by interrupting them since rarely does anyone ever leave space for audio people to make comments. Those attending the meeting by phone are never asked for their vote when a motion is made, and in fact, rarely do the people at the real meeting even remember that there are invisible others present at distant locations. Who knows how many tech people have picked up polycoms several hours after the meeting ended only to discover that the phone line was still connected to some distant site with no one present at either end.

Email isn't so bad most of the time but it seems that there only two options for access to information from your department. The first is access to no information where you continually hear after the fact about important decisions that have been made. Usually you become aware of changes after you’ve spent hours on filling out forms that are now obsolete, and you are required to redo the information on the current form.

If you complain loudly and often that you are missing important emails from the department head, you may succeed in getting placed on the department or institution list serve. Of course, this also means that you will now get every email that any one thinks will be useful to you. It is wonderfully helpful to learn that you should be really careful when you give directions to students on how to find the department washrooms (which are 650 kilometres away) because the department secretary is annoyed when they end up in her office in a state of panic. Or when the list serve reminds you of the faculty holiday party with free food, or that computer lab A will be down for the next week and the students should be referred to any of the other three labs. Regional faculty can’t remember the last time anyone offered them free food, a party or even student access to one computer lab since that virus shut down all 5 of the student computers and they had to be shipped to the main campus for a month to be fixed. And you’d think those main campus parties would at least send out one piece of cake or a leftover beer so regional faculty could join them in spirit.

Snail mail might be a viable option but in many outlying regions the descriptor 'snail' is quite generous. There are still places that only get mail via Canada Post once a week. True, many institutions have a house mail tub or basket but when even FedEx says that they won't guarantee 24-hour delivery, the basket may not help much.

The last option, that of attending main campus meetings in person, is possible and indeed, sometimes unavoidable. It can be problematic, however, when one of the main travel options is to take your life in your hands by driving seven hours (if the road is good, many more if its not) while dodging moose, deer and logging trucks. This is always assuming that the region does in fact have road access to the rest of the world - although trying to explain to a city dweller the nuances of the late winter ice road is almost impossible. At last check most institutions don’t budget for such necessary vehicle emergency items such as first aid kits, jumper cables (not to mention training on how to use them), candles, emergency flares, and satellite phones (since cell phone service is sporadic at best in many rural areas). And it doesn't help that colleagues look askance when you do arrive in a four-wheel drive vehicle dressed like the long distance trucker you have to become, complete with coffee and food stains down the front of your shirt from having to eat your last three meals en route in order to get to the meeting on time.

You can also fly, but if like many regions the only flights connect through the large southern centre, it is quite likely to be impossible to get to the meeting in the northern “city” and back home in less than three days. Department heads who don't understand this (and few do) can't understand why you aren't as productive as the rest of the faculty. It is probably futile trying to explain that it is really, really hard to write on your laptop while sitting in the right seat of that Beaver plane on floats and helping the pilot pick out landmarks. Department heads also can't understand why your travel budget gets spent so rapidly. Every time you tell them that hotels in Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg or Toronto are expensive, they are sure that you have contrived to overnight each way so that you can get in a little extra shopping. The only shopping you actually have time to do is at the ten-dollar watch kiosk in the airport.

As can be seen by the examples above, there are many annoyances to teaching at a regional campus at NUMB, but to be fair, many of us out here are also aware of the benefits and freedoms that are also present. There is access to nearby hiking trails and fishing holes. We have the ability to be creative without the department head’s approval, or even knowledge. There is the freedom to dress in a sensible manner, as business jackets, thin leather dress shoes, skirts and nylons, are not conducive to a long life when traveling on rural, northern roads in winter. We can tell the department head on the main campus that we are checking in with the person in charge in the region and vice versa. Community members and students are also the people we interact with in the grocery stores and restaurants – there’s no room for ivory towers out here. We are able to bring educational opportunities to people who have been waiting a long time for access to post-secondary education. And most of all there is the freedom to be far, far away from the rule makers and minders on the main campus.
_____________________________________________________________________

Endnotes
1 This tongue-in-cheek article is loosely based on conversations with and observations of a number of students and professors from many northern contexts.