Expanding Minds: York University to extend into York Region

NRU
April 2, 2014
By Sarah Ratchford

York University is looking to expand into York Region and the competition is well underway among the region’s nine municipalities, with Vaughan, Aurora and East Gwillimbury confirming their interest in hosting the new campus.

Municipalities hoping to attract the satellite campus are in the process of putting together proposals, which will be presented to the university April 17. However, York University spokesperson Janice Walls said it’s too early to say when the university will make a decision.

Vaughan interim city manager Barbara Cribbett says she thinks Vaughan has all of the necessary components to be a good host city for a new campus.

“The City of Vaughan has a strong and diverse economic base, and it’s pretty vibrant for a university campus. Our new official plan identified education as a priority growth sector.”

For his part, Aurora mayor Geoffrey Dawe says, “it would be more newsworthy if Aurora wasn’t considering [submitting] a proposal.”

And East Gwillimbury mayor Virginia Hackson says her town is the perfect place for a university campus, because there is plentiful space and the town can grow around the university.

Regardless of the successful municipality, York University will need to ensure its campus growth plan lines up with the province’s major capacity expansion policy framework. That framework stipulates that any university wishing to expand its campus must accommodate enrolment of
more than 1,000 full-time students in the short term, with the potential for growth up to 5,000 to 10,000 over the next 20 years.

New campuses also must be larger than 6,500 square metres (70,000 feet) and designated primarily for academic purposes.

Walls said she was unable to provide more specific details as to the university’s vision for the campus.

Vaughan council directed Cribbett to establish a staff working group to prepare the proposal for York University. It also directed staff to approach one or more key landowners in the city to identify potential partnership arrangements.

While Cribbett couldn’t provide concrete information about potential locations, she did hint that the Vaughan Metropolitan Centre could be a good home to a new campus.

She says there’s “a number of sites” under consideration. These have to go through “intensive analysis” to ensure they meet the university’s principles, which include transit accessibility, being a catalyst for private sector development and delivering professionally-oriented programs to support York Region.

Some of those programs, Walls said, will be technology-focused, but specific details on programming will be forthcoming at a later date.

“The new campus will support the development of York Region and will be an incubator for new ideas and extend York University’s outreach and engagement with local communities,” Walls said in an email to NRU. “It will also advance technology enhanced learning and experiential education opportunities for our students.”

Aurora general committee had an in-camera meeting Tuesday to discuss its proposal, but Dawe would not provide specifics as to a proposed location. Hackson was similarly tight-lipped about locations in East Gwillimbury’s proposal when she spoke to NRU, but commented that the town will
give the university several options.

Initially, council considered partnering with Newmarket to host the campus, but Hackson said East Gwillimbury can support a campus on its own. Council directed staff at a meeting last month to put together a proposal.

“For us, the growth is just starting,” she tells NRU. By 2031, the town of 25,000 is expected to grow to 100,000. For now, she says, East Gwillimbury’s strength is its space.

“Basically, the town is going to transform into a connected urban area.”

Hackson says the intent is to make sure the town, which expressed its desire to have a post-secondary institution since 1989, can build with a university in mind, as opposed to trying to fi t a university into an already-built area. She doesn’t think transit accessibility will be an issue for those who study and work on campus, because “as we start to grow, so will public transit.” In a letter to York Region chair Bill Fisch, York University president Mamdouh Shoukri wrote that an expansion of the university to York Region is a natural fit.

“York University is, in many ways, already ‘York Region’s university,’ having a strong presence that is evident across the region,” Nearly 50,000 York alumni live in York Region, and a third of the university’s workforce, or about 1,900 staff and faculty, live in the region, and 8 per cent of the region’s youth are currently enrolled at the university.