The text by Frédéric Lacroix published on March 21 in these pages sounds the alarm. The francophone university sector is dangerously losing ground in Montreal. Thus, in 1995, the year of the referendum, the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM) had 13,956 more students than Concordia. Twenty-seven years later, last year, Concordia had 3,494 more than UQAM. During the same period, the student clientele of UQAM fell by 9.15% and that of Concordia increased by 55.95%.
This happens when the two universities are public universities, which means that the Quebec government finances our assimilation. This, both at the university level and at the CEGEP level.
Being myself of American education, I am in no position to dissuade French-speaking and allophone students from pursuing university studies in English. That said, our increasingly rapid anglicization worries me the most.
Four great European civilizations took root in the Americas: Spanish, Portuguese, French and English. If nothing threatens the Spanish, the Portuguese and the English, ours, the French, declines dramatically.
As Zachary Richard noted recently: “In my grandparents’ time, 75% of Louisianans remained French-speaking. Today, we are only 5%. The process of assimilation does not follow a gentle slope. It’s a cliff! »
RELAUNCH
To revive the Francophone university sector in Montreal, four things seem essential.
First, the absurd idea of distinguishing between research universities and non-research universities must be discarded. A university is either a research institution or it is not a university. This is obvious.
The obsession of some to make UQAM a second-class university has more than contributed to the decline of French in the university sector of Montreal, because at the same time, far from waging war on Concordia, McGill has always actively supported.
Second, Montreal’s business sector has, over the past fifty years, strongly supported McGill, Concordia and the University of Montreal, and neglected UQAM on the grounds, mostly misleading, that it was a nest of Marxists, anti-capitalists, separatists and what else…
Third, the Quebec government has too often favored UQAM’s competitors to the latter’s detriment. He did this by not supporting UQAM in the Voyageur block project, which could have avoided the current deterioration of the neighborhood surrounding Place Émilie-Gamelin, at the very time when he was financing the construction of the Longueuil campus of the University of Sherbrooke located ten minutes by metro from UQAM. It also did so by systematically requiring that UQAM’s programs not compete with those of the Université de Montréal, when the reverse was not required.
Fourth, since UQAM is also partly responsible for its misfortunes, it has too often tolerated that differences of views, ideologies and interests prevent one or the other from being as dynamic as they could have been. to be for the greater benefit of all.
That said, UQAM remains a great university, which respects its professors, human rights and university democracy, a university which will have enabled the great adventure of the Department of Urban and Tourism Studies that I founded.
When in 1976, UQAM came to fetch me from the Institut d’urbanisme at the University of Montreal to lead the new “gathering in urban studies”, UQAM had set three conditions: the new gathering should never become a department; the existing bachelor’s degree in urban studies was never to become a bachelor’s degree in urban planning; the gathering was never to expand to graduate and postgraduate.
A year later, in 1977, the bachelor’s degree in urban studies had become the very first bachelor’s degree in urban planning in the history of Quebec. In 1981, we had become a department. In 1985, with INRS-Urbanisation and ENAP, we launched the very first master’s degree in urban management in Canadian history and, in 1990, the INRS-UQAM doctorate in urban studies was born.
I don’t know of any other Quebec university where such a turnaround would have been possible. UQAM must be revived, and the French-speaking university sector of Montreal must pull itself together!