ATHABASCA – If you’re old enough to remember, the passionate arguments we’ve been hearing about the future of Athabasca University in Athabasca will ring quite familiar, with very similar arguments emerging when Athabasca was chosen as the home of the distinguished distance learning university.
The conversation of will they or won’t they surrounding the idea of Athabasca University’s staff going near-virtual has ramped up in recent months as the university, the provincial government and regional advocates struggle to find common ground.
While this specific dilemma may be a new one, it is not the first time AU staff have found themselves in a tug-of-war to decide if they will work in or near the Town of Athabasca.
When AU was first founded in 1970, it was located in Edmonton, the same city where its first open, distance course was built and where most of its staff were located at the time. By the mid-1970s, the Alberta government was implementing a series of decentralization plans in which institutions in major city centres were moved to smaller municipalities with the hopes of growing those rural areas larger, rather than bringing more individuals into urban centres.
AU was not immune to these plans and, by 1978, towns across the province were advocating to have the university relocated to their town. Sharing a name with the institution made for an easy fit.
“I started as a tutor on the First of September in 1974,” said long-time AU professor Dr. Robert Holmberg in an interview last week.
Dr. Holmberg was the fourth full-time academic to work with Athabasca University.
“It was a question of whether I wanted to commute between Edmonton and Athabasca because I'd been living in Edmonton for 10 years at the time,” he explained.
For many, the idea of moving to a small town from a major urban centre was not all that appealing, especially considering the idea came from the government rather than the university itself.
“It was not the university's decision; it was a government decision. The government decided to move a number of fairly small organizations to small towns scattered around the province,” Dr. Holmberg said. “The university indicated to the government that it was not a good idea for various reasons, but then one morning, AU president Sam Smith was informed by the Minister of Advanced Education that in the afternoon, it was going to be announced the university was was going to move its headquarters to the Town of Athabasca.
Smith said, 'This was without consultation', and he resigned, the head of the Governing Council resigned soon after, and a few others quit as well.”
Similarly, the university and the government are expressing almost identical viewpoints to those brought up over 40 years ago. Articles in the Edmonton Journal and Athabasca Echo had headlines at the time that could easily be mistaken for articles in recent issues, with some saying, “Athabasca U move viewed as ‘politics’,” and others vocalizing that, “Small towns do have a good side.”
The discussion surrounding the move filled the papers with articles, columns, and letters to the editor, bringing viewpoints from across the spectrum.
Some individuals had questions regarding the accessibility of the town in the winter months, others wished to reassure those in the city that moving to a small town would not remove their choices in lifestyle.
“The idea was big cities were growing too fast and rural places were losing people yet still requiring services and they wanted to curtail that. My biggest problem is that they should have decided on a centre or two and then moved several organizations to the same place,” Dr. Holmberg said.
He feels that if multiple organizations had been moved, the large issue of spousal employment could have been much more easily addressed. Due to the poor reception that followed the announcement of AU move to Athabasca, a large portion of the original support staff was lost.
“One of the big factors was we lost about 80 per cent of our support staff,” Dr. Holmberg explained. “We had a developmental plan of how we were going to proceed, that developmental plan went out the window because we lost a minimum two to three years of just figuring out how to do the move.”
Despite the reaction from AU staff, the move was well received in Athabasca and lead to many future influential figures moving to the town and becoming active within the community.
“One benefit that most people don't think about is that when the university moved here, it wasn’t just paying for rent, groceries and gasoline and getting a haircut that contributed to the town, there was the volunteer work that any new people coming in tend to do. Where would the Athabasca Historical Society be without the university. Science Outreach Athabasca wouldn't exist without the university,” Dr. Holmberg said.
Many of those who first came to Athabasca because of the university still reside in the town today, make and continue to make their own significant contributions.
“My dad was the first president in Athabasca. They had other presidents, but I don't believe any of them lived in Athabasca. That [move] was shortly after the main building was built,” said long-time local educator Sean Morrison, who is now principal at the Athabasca Centre for Alternative and Virtual Education after decades at Edwin Parr Composite School.
Morrison moved to Athabasca with his family for his father’s position when he was 15 years old. The family took up residence in the president’s house in Athabasca. For the Morrison family, the relocation came as welcome news.
“For us, we got a nice, new home and everything else, it was exciting. My mom also worked for the university a little bit as a tutor, so it was good. My parents were super excited, it was obviously a promotional thing for my dad. So that's always exciting,” Morrison explained in an interview.
Since then, his family has made Athabasca their home, the town bringing with it immense opportunities in sports when Morrison was in high school and gave him a comfortable place to eventually raise his own kids.
“People may forget this, it's funny, you could even say this about the new high school. There were people that did not want that new high school up where it is but try to move it now and people will probably lose their minds. When the university was going to be built here, there were people against it. People forget that. When Al-Pac was being built, there were people against that. Try and remove those things now and people would be up in arms far more than anybody battled against having them here,” Morrison said.
Of course, the town and surrounding region benefitted greatly from the arrival of AU.
“The expertise that these people have is not available to places like Athabasca very often because it's a small community. They don't have the diversity without the university, and diversity helps,” Dr. Holmberg said.
“There's a number of academics still living here who are retired and they're all involved in the community,” said former Athabasca mayor Colleen Powell, who happens to be one of them.
In the decades-long discussion about the future of the university in Athabasca, Dr. Holmberg had some parting words of advice.
“The world's largest single-line kraft mill was not a good idea, it was a bad polluter. It stalled the process for a couple of years and finally, approval was given, and the pulp mill was a whole pile better. It is one of the world's cleanest, rather than the dirtiest. The university was a critic, remember that critics can be positive and negative,” he said.
