CMU shutters downtown Menno Simons College site

MENNO Simons College is moving out of its longtime home at 520 Portage Ave. and downsizing programming in response to a shift and overall drop in registrations.

On Monday afternoon, faculty members gathered at their downtown headquarters — a mid-rise building with a facade of white tiles at the intersection of Portage and St. Mary avenues — to bid farewell to the campus as they know it.

“We will always lead with the word ‘students’ because student enrolment is at the heart of it,” said Cheryl Pauls, president of Canadian Mennonite University, which owns and operates the “college.”

“Financial pressures accrue when student enrolment drops.”

Contrary to its label, Menno Simons is more accurately described as a CMU department, dedicated to interdisciplinary education that explores conflict, poverty and inequality.

Its namesake is an influential Anabaptist leader, Menno Simons (1496-1561), known for his strong sense of community and rejection of violence in problem solving.

Today, CMU runs the satellite site in collaboration with the University of Winnipeg.

U of W students who are not part of its two core programs often take a Menno Simons course as an elective.

As of June 30, no more students will be admitted into the site’s special international development streams or four-year conflict resolution degree. There will only be a condensed version of the latter (a three-year option), when all current candidates graduate with pre-planned minors and majors.

Pauls said the majority of courses will be offered online throughout the “transition” and when it’s complete.

CMU owns 39 per cent of the corner building that currently houses Menno Simons. Its leaders have yet to decide whether it will lease or sell the units that have served as downtown classrooms and faculty offices in recent years.

Despite the sweeping operational changes, CMU administration confirmed it is retaining all instructors. Faculty members will primarily work out of its main Shaftesbury Boulevard campus, and teach the peace-building master’s program and related subjects.

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Jonathan Dueck, vice-president academic and academic dean, said his employer is responding to trends that came out of the COVID-19 pandemic — including a sizable drop in downtown admissions that accelerated an existing decline and growing demand for e-learning.

U of W has adjusted its required courses in a way that no longer drives demand for Menno Simons’s specialty offerings, Dueck said, adding “international development” is an increasingly outdated concept.

The campus in the city’s core has about 180 full-time equivalent students. It was more than double that size in its prime.

Menno Simons offered its first credit courses in 1989. It has not been a standalone institution since the mid-1990s, when the then-autonomous academy, along with Canadian Mennonite Bible College and Concord College, formed modern-day CMU.

Larissa Chubenko, who graduated from U of W and Menno Simons in 2017, was saddened to learn about the changes she said are “going to come at a great cost to the city.”

The campus sets students up for practicums at community-serving organizations and empowers graduates to serve marginalized residents and advocate for systemic change, said the alumna of the international development stream.

Chubenko, who became a teacher, said her alma mater shaped her philosophy of education and equipped her with a holistic understanding of socioeconomic inequities, different worldviews and knowledge systems.

Menno Simons’s physical presence will soon be limited to the U of W’s Riddell Hall basement — the home of the neighbouring institution’s students union — and infrequent in-person courses in U of W facilities.

U of W did not comment Monday, with a spokesperson citing a busy convocation season.

Maggie Macintosh, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Winnipeg Free Press