Letter: Urban dreaming

By Jay Hind

Editor, the Gauntlet


[“The U of C is going downtown,” Sarelle Azuelos, Sept. 25, Gauntlet] So the provincial Conservatives are going to reward their incompetent “board of governor” appointees with even more money to build a second campus to spread their incompetence even further? Another of the main reasons that this overcrowded university usually ranks last in Maclean’s, is that they have a monopoly in this city of over 1 million and students have no choice.


Why not just build a second and third university instead, to give Calgary students a local choice of schools, creating some competition, encouraging this school to improve and making room for countless Calgarians who are prevented from studying? Winnipeg, Manitoba (pop. 650,000), and Spokane, Washington (pop. 250,000) each support four degree-granting universities in their cities, while the mighty oil-rich Calgary, Alberta (pop. 1,070,000), prefers to remain “stupid to the last drop” by denying tens of thousands of qualified Albertans a chance to study at a decent school of their choice within this province and city.