Real estate firesale at Memorial

Today, Memorial University of Newfoundland announced that it will be selling its Signal Hill Campus in St. John’s and Harlow Campus in England among other properties. I can’t say that I am surprised given a Board of Regents headed by a real estate developer, but I am profoundly sad.

I did not have personal experience with Harlow Campus. All I can tell you is that I met faculty and students whose lives were changed because of Harlow Campus and the experiences it allowed them to have. The Signal Hill Campus is a different story.

I worked at the Harris Centre as the manager of knowledge mobilization for over 14 years. Despite its somewhat ridiculous title, my job was quite concrete - I provided supports to communities around the province and Memorial researchers who wanted to work together on local issues. Together with our colleagues at the Office of Public Engagement, just half a floor below in the Signal Hill Campus, we also connected Memorial faculty, staff and students to national and international networks. The projects we brokered and supported between us changed how we approach rural drinking water in the province, made a huge difference in the lives of cancer patients and provided insights on everything from how mobile work impacts our communities to hidden folklore gems to how social enterprises can provide an important economic and cultural lifeline to rural and remote communities. We did all that with hundreds of thousands of dollars in external funding we developed, maintained, administered and awarded through an independent, competitive process to hundreds of faculty and students. We created one of the first podcasts ran out of an academic institution in Canada connecting rural communities and rural researchers across the country. And we expanded Memorial’s reach through networks of scholars across the world.

In the middle of the pandemic, we organized a Global Small Islands Webinar, a marathon, 24-hour session of online presentations, workshops and keynotes covering every time zone. It felt like we were a little bright star in a huge constellation of creative, passionate colleagues and students whose imagination and drive could tackle any problem and find solutions to any puzzle no matter how complex.

We built a reputation for creating public engagement and knowledge mobilization programs and colleagues from around the world would came to visit and figure out what is that makes this place so special. They would have given anything for the sense of connection Newfoundlanders and Labradorians had to Memorial University - their university.

We told an elaborate story about the special obligation to the people of the province the university had to fulfill and about our complex history and a long tradition of community engagement. It turned out that the key ingredient was leadership. And it changed.

Being laid off by unqualified, incompetent and unimaginative people was a badge of honour. True to form, they couldn’t even do that efficiently and so by the time they finally did it, I already cleaned my desk of 15 years of detritus and what was left did not even fill half of a small box. A year later, what was just annoyance turned into dismay when the university closed the Harris Centre and the Office of Public Engagement. I felt that Memorial has lost its mooring lines to the core of what made it special - the province and the people it was supposed to serve. But this happened before and I thought that, eventually, it would find its way back to those shores. The sale of its assets to cover the current deficit will make that much, much more difficult. You can sell a building only once. But those assets, when put to imaginative use, could provide generations of students and researchers with experiences and opportunities that would make all of us better off. For quite some time, Memorial has been devoid of such imaginative leadership. That has other consequences, too.

Over the last couple of years, my daughters both chose to attend a university in a place they felt would provide life-changing experiences. Memorial was never a serious consideration for either of them. And I understand that. I made the same decision more than 30 years ago when I came to Canada. I, too, wanted life-changing experiences I knew I could not, at the time, have at home. With this latest diminishing of Memorial University, it will not be a surprise if the next cohort of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians decides to look somewhere else, somewhere more connected and more exciting when they make decisions about their education.

Today, it feels that Memorial’s star in that constellation of publicly engaged universities we used to belong to has dimmed and maybe gone out for good. That is profoundly sad because it was anything but inevitable. I only hope that the spark of that idea of “the special obligation” remains stashed away somewhere at Memorial, and maybe there will be another generation one day that will again fan the flames of publicly engaged, community anchored research that slowly changes the world.