Barts Gozo Medical School and the Jordanian College – only for what Joseph calls ‘the elite’

Daphne Caruana Galizia Thursday, 21 May 2015, 14:00 Last update: about 10 years ago

One of the more amusing episodes of this sorry government campaign to serve the personal interests of its Jordanian associate was the ‘member of the public’ who cropped up before this newspaper’s microphone in Marsascala. The project is fantastic, he said, and he can’t understand why so many people are objecting to it when it will pour great riches upon us. “It will be good for Malta,” he said, “and there’s also the fact that my children might come in need of it eventually.”

His children might come in need of it, will they? Well, then it’s too bad that he won’t be able to afford the fees, and even if he can afford them, why bother? There’s a perfectly serviceable real university just down the road and up the hill where you pay no fees and better still, get paid to go there.

One of the many things that have not been made clear at all – deliberately fudged, I would say – by the government in its promotion of somebody else’s private college business is that it is private. You have to pay to go there. And it won’t be peanuts or token fees, either, or even what your average Maltese person considers hugely expensive (like fees at independent schools, for example), but international-standard fees of several thousand euros every year, so that by the time you’ve completed your four-year course, your parents’ outlay has been something like €50,000, and that’s just for tuition fees.

Yet the government is deceitfully allowing the belief to grow, promoting it even, that this is going to be a university just like Malta’s public university: a full campus, where you pick and choose among the full panoply of courses, don’t pay a cent, and get a stipend. The prime minister is hard at it, with his talk of breaking the University of Malta’s monopoly. But even if it were correct to speak in terms of monopolies where universities are concerned, the fact remains that a fee-paying private business college is not the same thing as a public university.

Only what the prime minister has taken to calling ‘the elite’ (cue a soundtrack of ‘Back in the USSR’) will be able to afford the fees for just one of their children, and they won’t bother paying them when that same son or daughter (and all siblings) can go for free to a much better university called the University of Malta. Maltese people whose parents can pay those fees will not be choosing to go to some Jordanian business college of Zonqor Point but will head off to Britain.

The prime minister played the same trick when he announced that Barts will be setting up a medical school in Gozo. He filled the minds of the gullible with visions of their sons and daughters studying at Barts if they can’t get in to the Malta Medical School. I have to hand it to him: he is quite good at playing on the Maltese belief that everything education-related and somehow connected to the government in Malta is free. I sat there and laughed quietly to myself: Barts Medical School, for free? People will believe anything.

Now Arnold Cassola, who heads Alternattiva Demokratika, has taken the initiative (once more) that the Opposition and we journalists should have taken had we bothered or even thought of it. He wrote to Barts and asked them what exactly their plans are in terms of places and fees.

They replied immediately. Public affairs communications are taken seriously by serious universities in developed democracies. Sadeen Education Investment Ltd’s refusal to communicate with the public or the press tells you just where it stands on the matter of seriousness and public accountability, and makes it perfectly obvious that Hani Hasan Naji Al Salah is not accustomed to operating in a democratic environment or dealing with the free press.

Barts (more correctly, Queen Mary University) told the AD chief that applications for its Gozo medical school are now open, and that tuition fees alone are €35,000. The first intake will be in September next year, and the courses will be taught in the two islands. The five-year programmes are Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery, with the same entry requirements and core curriculum as for the London school.

So, not many ‘tfal tal-haddiem’ will be going to that medical school, I would say, unless the prime minister wishes to set up a scholarship to fund one student with the money he gets from leasing his own car to his own government (€7,000 a year).