Divorce between UQAM and Quebec

A strong trend was confirmed last week without raising too many waves. While last year the Bureau de coopération interuniversitaire reported an 8% drop in enrollment at the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM), this year we are talking about a drop of 4.6%. This trend has been observed for almost a decade now.

These statistics are disturbing in themselves, but they are all the more so when we know that enrollments at Concordia University follow the opposite curve. It’s been a few years that UQAM has been downgraded by Concordia in terms of registrations.

UQAM tries to temper concerns by explaining that because of the labor shortage, many students prefer to work now rather than undertake a long course of university studies. That’s probably partly true, but it’s a bit short.

The administrators of UQAM probably cannot say so, but one would have to be in bad faith not to see in this drop in registrations a symptom of the anglicization of the greater metropolitan area.

We must also take the full measure of what this decommissioning of UQAM represents, because this university has a very special status in the Quebec landscape.

UQAM is the only French university in downtown Montreal, it is recognized for its communication, arts and humanities programs and is in this sense a fundamental institution in the development of culture here.

Also, and this is not nothing, UQAM symbolically represents the entire network of the University of Quebec (UQ) which is one of the most important legacies of the Quiet Revolution.

Before the creation of the Université du Québec network, there were only three French-language universities. The political leaders of the time sought with this network to educate the French speakers who were significantly behind the English speakers. In the 1960s, only 4% of Francophones attended university, while it was 11% among Anglophones.

The overall aspiration behind this network was therefore that a French Quebec is a Quebec where you can study and create in French in order to eventually have a role to play in your society. UQAM is the university of the time when Quebec finally decided to take its destiny into its own hands.

It is therefore no exaggeration to say that UQAM is the university for the democratization of education.

This idea is often expressed by saying that UQAM is “the people’s university”. This cliché was true, and there was nothing contemptuous about it, on the contrary.

What about this historic mission today? Student associations offer a sad answer.

For example, in March 2022, the Student Association for Advanced Studies in Sociology at UQAM voted by majority for a proposal that “opposes the imposition of Bill 101 on colleges”.

The figures are unequivocal, the English CEGEP leads most of the time to the English university. Student associations like this therefore actively campaign for the Anglicization of the Quebec university network. McGill and Concordia should be happy about that.

Obviously, these student associations pay little attention to the drop in enrollment in their establishment. Do they understand that the fewer students there will be at UQAM, the more limited the budget will be, the less interesting the course offer will be and therefore the less tempting it will be to study at this university? It cannot be said that these associations have a sense of their interests.

All in all, UQAM today seems to be in the process of a divorce from Quebecers. If it is true that Quebecers are turning away from UQAM as evidenced by the decline in enrollment, it seems just as true that UQAM is turning away from Quebecers. And that’s bad news for everyone.