A degree of faith

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Manitobans fund private religious schools and universities, but teachers who don’t adhere to doctrine may not have a prayer.

IS Canadian Mennonite University a public or a private school?

Should a university that restricts the hiring of faculty according to religious beliefs be receiving the same level of scarce public operating money as public colleges and universities?

None of the major players in post-secondary education agrees on those questions.

CMU is now under investigation by the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), the national professors' union, for restricting hiring on the basis of religious beliefs, and could face a form of censure.

The CAUT is demanding governments put all their funding into public institutions and not give a penny to private universities, the same demand the Manitoba Teachers' Society makes about K-12 private schools.

The Selinger government provides more than $50 million a year in operating grants to private schools in Manitoba, from kindergarten to university.

But there's barely been a peep out of the NDP about private schools since taking office in 1999. The Doer government thought briefly about rescinding annual money the Tories gave to Bible colleges almost on their government deathbed at the end of the 1990s, but appears to have concluded taking government money away from private schools would not be worth the grief.

Just as the NDP ignores home-schoolers, the government ignores private schools and concentrates all of its for-public-consumption attention on public schools.

"We consciously do not use the term public or private," said CMU president Gerald Gerbrandt.

When CMU applied for and was accepted into the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC) in 2009, CMU stated that it is a combination of private and public -- a federation of three private colleges, but public in that "we very much see ourselves as serving the province of Manitoba," said Gerbrandt.

Students are accepted "regardless of religion or ethical code."

"We have tried from day one to be very clear that we welcome anyone to study," Gerbrandt said.

But...

And it's a big "but."

The university's provincial charter "clearly gave us the mandate to be more restrictive" in hiring faculty at the Shaftesbury campus, Gerbrandt said. "People who are clearly Christian, that is clearly the expectation."

That doesn't sit well at all with CAUT, which recently placed Trinity Western University in B.C. on a new list of schools where the union says faith or ideology takes precedence over academic freedom. CAUT is now investigating CMU and Crandall University -- formerly Atlantic Baptist University -- in Atlantic Canada.

"The whole point of a university is to be a place where people can engage in an active search for truth," said CAUT executive director Jim Turk.

Turk said that Trinity Western's own calendar proclaims it is "a disciple-making academic community... obeying the authority of scripture... scripture is the ultimate authority of truth."

Turk said CAUT would have the same concerns if a university limited professors to avowed Marxists or to any other faith or ideology that based hiring on "I already know the answer to everything."

"They don't respect the fundamental concept of academic freedom," Turk said.

When CAUT places schools on a list, he said, "all we're saying is this institution imposes a faith test; it's how they recruit students."

CMU vice-president academic Earl Davey said all academics value the work that CAUT does in protecting academic freedom. He has no objection to being on a list that says that an institution follows a faith that it already publicly proclaims, said Davey.

"CMU is consciously and intentionally an Anabaptist institution -- we declare that," Davey said.

But Davey said CMU's professors value academic freedom as deeply as any academic in Canada. Every academic brings his or her own intellectual, social and personal beliefs to academia, regardless of the institution, Davey said.

Gerbrandt said that while CMU welcomes anyone as a student, professors must have a clearly Christian commitment to work at the Shaftesbury campus.

Professors have strong academic freedom to pursue research wherever it takes them, he said.

But it's a different story at Menno Simons College, which is a part of the CMU federation located on the University of Winnipeg campus.

At Menno Simons, "(Professors) are not required to have a Christian commitment," Gerbrandt said.

MSC students are governed by U of W policies: "Our program there is fully part of the University of Winnipeg -- it is a complicated reality."

University of Manitoba's senate had stormy debates last year over joint programs with CMU, with some professors arguing that profs at CMU do not enjoy the same academic freedom as those at U of M.

The department of advanced education says unequivocally that CMU is a private institution, a government official said, though CMU's founding deal with the former Conservative government in the late 1990s gives CMU some of the benefits of a public university.

But CAUT says CMU and other private schools should not get a penny of public money. "There really should be no public money that goes to private universities," said Turk.

That's the same position that the Manitoba Teachers' Society has taken for many years, said president Pat Isaak: "Our policy is that private schools should not be receiving any public funding," she said.

Public education officials flat out refuse to stir the pot, even though they'd love to have the cash that goes to private schools.

Public universities shy away from telling the province publicly what they think about scarce money going to private schools, and the Manitoba School Boards Association also has nothing to say on that subject and does not have a policy, said president Hugh Coburn.

Every dollar to a private university is one less dollar for the public system, Turk said.

"Canada really has no need for private institutions. They should not be receiving public money," Turk said.

"The only reason CMU is getting public money is the Conservatives -- it was a crass political move."

nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca

Tories set level

The former Conservative government set the level of private post-secondary operating grants in the late 1990s.

Under an agreement with that Filmon government, CMU receives the same percentage increase in annual operating grants as do other colleges and universities such as University of Manitoba and University of Winnipeg.

In 2007-2008, the most recent year for which a detailed government financial report is available, provincial taxpayers paid $46.7 million to the operation of private kindergarten to Grade 12 schools -- or just slightly less than half of the costs of operating those schools.

The private schools receive half the per-student amount of money that the public school division in which they are located spends per student, or about $4,500 to $5,000 per private-school child.

That last Tory government had planned to increase private school operating grants each year as a percentage of public school spending, but the Doer government froze the level of grants at 50 per cent when the NDP took office in 1999.

Some high-enrolment private schools receive millions of public dollars, but because they have high tuition fees and other sources of money, the percentage of public support is relatively low. St. John's-Ravenscourt draws 19.2 per cent of its operating budget from the province, and Balmoral Hall School 16.4 per cent.

Some less-affluent private schools with smaller or no tuition get the majority of their funding from the provincial government. In a few cases, the province basically covers all the bills: Alhijra Islamic School got 96.2 per cent of its budget from provincial taxpayers, Green Acres 90 per cent, Holy Cross 94.1 per cent, Pine Creek 96.5 per cent.

Some large private schools provide at least as many resources as the public schools. Some private schools pay teachers a stipend rather than a salary and lack the resource teachers and some other features of the public system.

Public schools spent $9,401 per student in 2007-2008, the private schools $8,419.

But that spending varied far more widely than in public schools.

Balmoral Hall spent $20,366 per student, The Laureate (formerly Laureate Academy) spent $19,486 per child, and SJR $18,594.

Odanah School spent $3,999 per student -- it is a Hutterite private school near Minnedosa. Another private Hutterite school, Wingham School in Elm Creek, spent $4,049 per child, for 20 students in kindergarten to Grade 12. Pine Creek in Austin, a K-12 school with 12 students, spent $4,181.

Among large Winnipeg faith-based private schools, Calvin Christian spent $6,617, Springs Christian Academy $7,804, and Linden Christian $6,850.

Grants

to private

colleges,

universities

The provincial government

contributes more

than $50 million a year

in operating grants to

private schools from

kindergarten through

university.

Government operating

grants to private colleges

and universities in

2009-10:

. Canadian Mennonite

University --

$3,180,300

. Providence College

and Seminary --

$1,242,000

. William and Catherine

Booth College --

$369,000

. Steinbach Bible College

-- $230,000

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition March 6, 2010 H1