Included on the agenda of the government meeting, the text which was to confirm this decision was not approved, but postponed indefinitely, due to the opposition of its majority partners.
As soon as the minister was released in the press, several voices were raised within the PS and Ecolo to denounce a decision deemed non-concerted. These comments logically foreshadowed some difficulties for Ms. Glatigny this Thursday at a government meeting where her text passed first reading. Currently only organizing the bachelor’s cycle in medicine, UMons wanted to be able to also organize the master’s cycle in this sector in the future, in addition to ULB, UCLouvain and ULiège.
UNamur, also endowed with the only bachelor’s degree in medicine, asked to be able to organize the master’s degree in general medicine.
The rector of UMons counterattacks and defends the creation of a master’s degree in medicine: “The words of Minister Glatigny are lies”
Minister Glatigny, however, opposes these two requests for new “authorizations”. For her, the opening of these two new master’s degrees in medicine cannot be justified when the number of doctors is limited here.
It also fears the increase in costs that these two new authorizations would generate. The budgetary situation of the FWB is indeed very degraded. Moreover, higher education operates in a closed envelope, the money given to some often having to be taken from others.
Wrathful, the rector of UMons, Philippe Dubois, had described Ms. Glatigny’s decision as a “stab in the back of the Hainuyers”, while the region suffered from a shortage of doctors, he had denounced.
The president of the PS, Paul Magnette, also went there with his comment, discreetly stinging his Mons counterpart Georges-Louis Bouchez.
“The MR cannot stigmatize and denigrate Hainaut as soon as it can and at the same time, use all its political levers to slow down its growth by blocking its university development”, thus released the Carolo at the start of the week on Twitter.
These tensions within the FWB government around the UMons master’s project in medicine come after months of arm wrestling over the complicated appointment of Bernard De Vos’s successor as the new general delegate for the rights of the child ( DGED).