John McLaughlin, who has been president of the University of New Brunswick since 2002, recently announced he will retire in late 2009. Last year, he found the university caught up in controversy when the province's Commission on Post-Secondary Education suggested that the St. John campus be merged with New Brunswick Community College to create a polytechnic.

University of New Brunswick president John McLaughlin.

University of New Brunswick president John McLaughlin.

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Interviewed by Jessica Werb

UNB made headlines in January when students protested the province's recommendation of a merger. What's the situation now?

No question there was quite an uproar and a very spirited public debate that took much of the fall, and…there was strong support for the campuses of UNB holding together. By November the premier [Shawn Graham] intervened and said fair enough, he'd been listening. The proposed model that's come out of all of this is no new universities, no new polytechnics, no separation of the UNB campuses, but a model where hopefully the universities and the college system will work much more closely. And that's where we're at.

What does that new system look like?

It's closer integration, designating centres of expertise [and] sharing resources. …It means seamless transfer credits between all the partners, and it means access to first-year and second-year courses from all over the province—so the universities would offer first- and second-year courses in partnership with the colleges around the province and through a lot more smart technology. It's about shared facilities, looking in the future at having the colleges co-located with the universities to share labs and libraries and everything like that.

Do you have any concerns about that diluting the university experience?

No, I don't. I think the way it's playing out, there's still a very strong independence to the four public universities, and it's acknowledged that we each have our own values and traditions and history, and that will be respected.

You have noted that there was a larger-than-anticipated decrease in enrolment across the region last year. How is that affecting the university?

We've been doing reasonably well, but no question that there is a decline. The percentage of the 18- to 24-year-old cohort coming out of high school is decreasing. And on top of that, in the last few years, there's been a lot of kids leaving the region to go work in the West, and so those are all concerns. They're somewhat mitigated, though, by some other trends. UNB historically has had a fairly large international enrolment and that's held up pretty well.

In 2009, you'll be starting medical education in St. John in partnership with Dalhousie University. How does that work?

It's the full medical degree. It will be within a UNB St. John health sciences environment, so the overall responsibility for health sciences will be UNB, but it will be a Dalhousie University medical degree. The first class will come in 2010. Everybody's excited about it. It's a very positive initiative.

What other new initiatives are in the works?

The place is thriving. We've just broken ground on the new $50 million Richard J. Currie Centre in Fredericton, a huge athletic and wellness centre. It will be the signature university building in the province for the next two decades. We've got our new Brigadier Milton F. Gregg Centre for the Study of War and Society, which is a big, big deal. The Canadian Rivers Institute is really thriving now. It's becoming an absolute world-class centre for river ecology and marine studies. And our Institute of Biomedical Engineering is doing some major research in prosthetics for the U.S. Department of Defense in partnership with Johns Hopkins University.

When you look toward the next five years, what do you see for the university?

I'm going to say something that you'll think is terribly ambitious for a place that's way down in the woods of New Brunswick. I think, believe it or not, that UNB has the possibility of being the top public university in Canada. I seriously do. It's not about size, obviously, and it clearly isn't about money. UNB is the oldest public university in the country, probably in the continent, and more often than not we have failed to live up to our full potential out there. But right now we're on the edge of not just providing a top-rate education for our students, but playing a role in changing our society.

You're leaving in 2009 even though you signed on for another five-year term in 2007. How come?

When I went through the review process I did tell them that I wouldn't be staying for the full five-year term, but I wanted to go through the PSE review and I wanted to get medical education in St. John and I wanted to get the launch of the new Currie Centre in Fredericton. The timing's right. And I just became a grandfather, so there's all kinds of good reasons.