Royal Roads University: A Canadian University Without Tenure or Senate

One way in which Canada is a big outlier in global higher education is the lack of standardization of university forms. Most countries have national or sub-national framework legislation that apply to all institutions’ operation and governance. Not Canada. Our provinces tend to prefer creating new bespoke legislation for every new institution that comes along. On the one hand, this leads to a pretty chaotic system. On the other: well, some time you get some pretty interesting experiments.

One of the most interesting examples of this is Royal Roads University based in Greater Victoria, British Columbia. With its headquarters on the old site of an old military college, this institution, which celebrated its 30 year anniversary last year, is fundamentally unlike any other public university in the country. It does not possess a Senate and does not offer tenure in the way that term is conventionally defined in Canada. Its teaching is mostly focused on mid-career professionals, which means it is competing much more directly with community colleges and private providers for students. Its teaching has for most of its existence also had a major online component. And it receives a lot less government money per student than other institutions in British Columbia. So it’s a public institution that is forced to behave in a much more market-oriented way than almost any other institution in the country.

Today my guest is Phillip Steenkamp, who has been President of Royal Roads University since 2018. I wanted to hear how Royal Roads was faring in the current generalized funding crisis in Canada – has its unique positioning given it more advantages or more challenges compared to other institution. I also wanted to talk to him about the institution’s new foray into international education, having recently become the first Canadian institution to open a campus in Dubai since the University of Waterloo shuttered its campus there in 2012. 

All in all this was a great conversation and an insight into just how much work even the most innovative institutions need to do to stay afloat these days. And with that: over to Phillip.

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The World of Higher Education Podcast
Episode 4.16 | Royal Roads University: A Canadian University Without Tenure or Senate

Transcript

Alex Usher (AU): Philip, thanks for joining us. Can you start by telling us a little bit about Royal Roads’ history? It spent the first few decades of its existence as a military college. How did it switch from being a military college to a public university?

Philip Steenkamp: It’s an interesting history, Alex. I mean, the property itself goes back, of course, thousands of years. It was occupied and used by Indigenous peoples. It then became what was essentially an Edwardian country estate owned by James Dunsmuir, who was both Premier and Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia. In 1939, his widow sold it to the federal government, and it became a military college.

It was a military college, as you indicated, for about 50 years. Then, in the mid-1990s, the federal government decided to divest itself of military colleges across the country and concentrate training at RMC. So the question arose: what was to become of Royal Roads? There was lots of debate internally, and eventually the provincial government stepped up and it became a provincial, publicly funded university.

There’s lots of background history here. We’re the only university in British Columbia that was actually established by an NDP government. The minister at the time was Dan Miller. He was a millwright from Prince Rupert, and he wanted a very different kind of university, not a traditional university. Hence, we got our own piece of legislation: unicameral governance. There’s no Senate; the powers of the Senate are vested in the President and the Board, and there’s a very focused mandate to serve the needs of the labour market and only offer applied and professional programs.

And of course, we don’t have tenured faculty. We have a small group of continuing faculty and then a large contingent of associate faculty. So it’s a very different kind of model, a very different kind of university, and I think a very interesting experiment in Canadian post-secondary history.

AU: Let me focus on just one bit of that here, because it’s that focus on the needs of the labour market, and also being largely distance education. Not entirely, but that’s always been a big part of it. A lot of it is either fully online programs—though I guess that wasn’t the case in 1993—or programs where you’re bringing people in for short periods of time and people are working at their own pace outside that. In 1993, I don’t think we had any universities like that in this country. I guess there would have been BC Open, which became part of Thompson Rivers, and you would have had Athabasca. That’s a very specific mission. How did it shape the institution’s core identity and character over time?

PS: I think, typical of startups, it evolved organically, and I would argue that it took the path of least resistance, because there wasn’t a ton of support from other universities for Royal Roads at the time. So it sort of went where it could go.

The flagship programs were in the leadership area, and then over time other things and other specialties developed. I think what became distinctive pretty quickly was blended programming. So, as you indicated, a lot of the instruction is online, but most programs had an in-person component—short-term residencies where people would come in for two or three weeks a couple of times a year. It was cohort-based.

That original mandate to serve the needs of the labour market, applied professional programming, certainly shaped the way the university developed and the kinds of programs that it adopted. But it was very organic. We’ll probably talk about this in a moment, but we’ve just recently opened a brand new campus in the adjacent city of Langford, which is entirely face-to-face instruction and focused on undergraduate education.

AU: As you said, you just opened a new campus in Langford, and you’re now running in-person three- and four-year programs, I guess. How do you balance running a university that’s mostly blended and now somewhat in-person? Those are two different things—being presential or non-presential. That’s a really difficult balance to make, I would imagine, right? There are very different types of campus operations that are required. How do you balance them?

PS: The genesis for that Langford campus—when I started as President just over six years ago, I even remember in my interview with the board committee—my argument was that this university is not sustainable in the long run unless it expands. That whole market of mid-career professionals is a very competitive market right now. Given demographic change, more and more institutions were getting into that space.

So we started developing a business case to open a campus and to offer all four years of undergraduate education. Up to that point, we had only offered undergraduate completion—third and fourth year—which was a great model until 2005, when BC colleges got degree-granting authority. After that, you could begin to see a decline in domestic enrolments at Royal Roads. It was a slow decline, but it was definitely there.

So the idea of opening a campus focused on undergraduate education was really about becoming a university not only in that community, but for that community—one of the fastest-growing regions in Canada, of course, the West Shore here on southern Vancouver Island. The idea was really to expand our reach and extend our mandate.

To your question about how you run these two things: the Langford campus is going to focus on undergraduate education. You might know that we invited the University of Victoria, Camosun College, and the Justice Institute of BC to offer programming in our space, so it’s a very different kind of collaborative model. The Colwood campus will stay mostly focused on graduate education, so we have a bit of separation there.

But it does take us into a different realm, absolutely. We are going to have to get our heads around resident student populations and all that comes with serving undergraduate students, which is quite different from the typical student we’ve served over the last few decades. The average age of our students last year was 39. That will begin to change as the numbers build at Langford.

AU: You mentioned in your first answer that your faculty don’t have tenure in the traditional sense; they have continuing appointments. You also noted that you don’t have a senate. Now, pretty much every university president I know dreams of having this, right? They think it would give them untold flexibility, much more than they have right now. Does it? I mean, do you have greater room to manoeuvre than your counterparts, or are the norms of academia such that even though your staff don’t have tenure and there isn’t a senate, there are still a lot of informal ways that staff can exercise inertia?

PS: I would say generally we have a lot more flexibility than a traditional university. Talking to some of my colleagues the other day from across the country, there’s this kind of narrative out there right now that universities are pretty much ungovernable, particularly the big ones. A lot of that obviously has to do with the relationship with senates and how that all unfolds, and all the challenges around collegial governance in a unionized environment.

So we do, on paper, have a lot of flexibility. But you’re right—internally there are advisory structures, and there is still resistance to things, as one might imagine. That said, I can’t imagine having done what we’ve done in the last three years at Royal Roads without this unicameral structure in place.

Some examples of that are the ability to make decisions to establish new campuses very, very quickly, but more than that, the ability to close down programs and to establish new programs. Because those powers are vested in the Board and the President, we have a committee of the Board called the Program and Research Council, which has board members on it, but we also have the ability to include external members as well. That’s really where programs get approved, and you can curate that council in a way that is very supportive of innovation and change.

AU: The past few years have been challenging for Canadian universities. Royal Roads has always been more tuition-driven than most, certainly in British Columbia. I mean, you’re the scrappy, almost private university, right? So how have you done over this last period? Have your financial challenges been similar to the rest of the sector? Have you had a better time of it, a worse time of it? What’s been going on?

PS: It has been really challenging, Alex. You know, the original management team at Royal Roads, when it was established, actually told the provincial government that Royal Roads would be self-sufficient in a number of years, which was a terrible mistake. As a result, the level of provincial funding from the beginning was very low, and the institution has been much more tuition-dependent.

We did become pretty reliant on international students, and before we saw the major restrictions from IRCC, our international student numbers were in the 22 to 25 percent range. So that was pretty hefty. But we’ve also been challenged by declining domestic enrolment, for a whole variety of reasons. Chief among them, as you well know, is that the content game is over. You can get good content pretty much anywhere right now, at low cost or for free. And there’s a ton of competition in our space, particularly in professional master’s programs and in the modalities we use—online, blended, all of that—which we didn’t face years ago.

So we faced what I would describe as a real existential challenge about three years ago and saw significant financial pressures. We adopted a three-year action plan as a turnaround strategy. When I met with the Board this June and a board member asked me, “Is the plan working?” I said, “I can’t say it’s working, but I can say it’s not not working.” When I met with the Board again a couple of weeks ago, they asked the same question, and I said, “I can tell you the plan is working now.”

We’ve seen prospect numbers increase significantly. We’ve seen applications begin to rise. We’re closing the operating gap. We’re looking at a balanced operating budget next year. We actually balanced last year, but that was because of an endowment. So I think we’re heading in the right direction, but it’s taken a real focus on what I call product, price, and customer experience. We’ve done a lot of work in those areas.

AU: Phil, we were talking about the things that Royal Roads has done to improve its situation, and you’ve taken some risks, right? I think the most interesting—and the most striking—risk is the decision to establish a campus in the United Arab Emirates. Now, that’s a pretty common move in the UK and Australia, but it’s rare in Canada. What led you to take that step? Why did you pick Dubai?

PS: I’ve been a Deputy Minister of Advanced Education in BC, and in Ontario I worked very closely with federal officials. I could see the kind of train wreck coming on immigration a few years back, and we were trying to think ahead. Being a small, special-purpose university, you have to hustle. You have to think ahead and figure out where things are going.

Transnational education seemed to me to be an important strategy to diversify our risk, particularly around international students. We’ve also seen very high visa refusal rates from certain countries, especially in Africa. So this was a way of diversifying risk and reaching students who couldn’t reach us.

The Emirates is obviously a really important hub. There’s a huge percentage of the world’s population within just a few hours’ flight. It’s also a supportive regulatory environment. There have been many examples of successful transnational education ventures there, and many examples of unsuccessful ones as well.

We worked with a partner, the Ottawa Education Group, which is headed up by Dr. Alastair Summerlee, formerly President at Guelph and Interim President at Carleton for a while. They introduced us to a partner who has become our investor-operator in the Emirates.

So for those reasons, we decided it was a good risk to take. We had a set of criteria we looked at before making the determination to proceed: academic quality, reputation, financial viability, the regulatory environment, human resources implications, partner dependency, and market demand. Having assessed the opportunity against those criteria, we came to the conclusion that it was a very good location for us. And we are the first Canadian university in the Emirates.

AU: Yeah. So what lessons have you learned so far? What are the three things you would definitely do again, and three things you’d never do again?

PS: We’re small and special-purpose, so we’re not one of those big universities that can invest millions of dollars in our own bricks-and-mortar campus. So absolutely, if we do it again—and I am actually looking at an opportunity in Sri Lanka right now—we need to find an investor-operator we trust, and also a kind of manager we trust. So that’s number one.

The other thing is that, again, we’re small and special-purpose. We’re not ranked, and in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, ranking really matters. In Dubai and Abu Dhabi, you have to be in the top 100 of QS, right? So we need to find emerging markets where we can be first movers. And the other thing I would say is that you need to assess the opportunity very quickly, make a decision very quickly, and just move.

The third thing I would definitely do again is hire a dedicated project manager who can manage the relationship with the partners, because it’s not easy. There are tons of issues you have to deal with.

Three things I would do differently: right up front, I would invest more in cross-cultural understanding. There are very different understandings of definitions and terminology—how you count students, courses, credits, what the recruitment models look like, all of those kinds of things. I think we needed to spend more time understanding that so there were fewer surprises as we proceeded.

The second thing is to focus more on internal change management and capacity building. Establishing branch campuses requires not only external partnerships, but also sustained internal alignment across academic, administrative, and governance units. So I would invest more there.

And then the third thing is probably building more contingencies into the startup phase. There were some real complexities around scheduling and resourcing initially, and I think we made some assumptions around timelines and approvals that were probably a little overly optimistic.

Having said that, we opened in April this year. We have between four and five hundred students right now, and we’ve already had two dividends paid out to us, right from the beginning, without us having invested any capital at all. Obviously we’ve invested time, resources, and energy, but it’s our investor who has put up the money to get this thing up and running.

AU: I assume you’re too savvy to see an international campus as a silver bullet. So what else is Royal Roads doing to strengthen its revenue position?

PS: I would say the transnational education work, for me, is about diversifying risk, reaching students who can’t reach us, and stabilizing our position. But the fundamentals we have to address at Royal Roads are that we’re a small, special-purpose university in a very competitive environment. And the content game is over. So what are we offering? What is our unique value proposition?

That’s really the core focus of our three-year action plan—sorting out those questions. As examples, we’ve fundamentally changed the academic structure of the university. We’ve moved from seven schools to three. We’ve merged the two professional program faculties into a single Faculty of Interdisciplinary Studies. We’ve established three advisory councils in the areas of those three schools, which advise us on programming, with the intention of being much more closely aligned with the labour market and getting students career-ready.

I’ve mentioned the diversification into undergraduate education with the establishment of the Langford campus. We’ve also invested significantly in overhauling our recruitment and admissions processes. We’ve really upped our game in terms of communications and marketing. We’ve seen an unprecedented increase in research income over the last couple of years—a 400 percent increase. We had a record year in advancement last year, raising $20 million. For a small institution with just over 2,000 students, that is huge.

We’re also working on the ancillary side. We have this fabulous location, and we’re leveraging it every way we can. We’ve had movies filmed here. We’ve had a Netflix series filmed here. We do about 60 weddings a year. So we’re constantly looking for all the opportunities there.

But fundamentally, we have to figure out what the product is right now, how we can compete in this space, and how we can offer what I call excellent customer service. There are a lot of options out there, and we have to distinguish ourselves.

AU: What about the cost side? I mean, it sounds to me like the changes you described to the faculty structure are really about giving you more flexibility in creating new programs—that’s still largely a revenue-side thing. On the cost side, what are the areas where you’ve found you’ve been able to economize?

PS: Going back about three years, we could see this challenge emerging and building really, really quickly. So we moved pretty fast to cut costs. We implemented voluntary retirement programs and voluntary departure programs. We reduced our total workforce by about 10 percent back then, and we’ve been able to reap the benefits of that.

And we’ve done all the other things as well that others have done as part of the financial triage we’ve all had to undertake recently.

Moving forward, we’re going to be very mindful about not becoming overly reliant—particularly on international student revenue. Obviously, we have to stabilize first, but we’re also investing money into strategic funds and trying to be less reliant, on the operating side, on things over which we don’t have much control.

We also took a much more aggressive stance on our investments. We invested heavily in tech, including Nvidia, over the last little while. As a result, we’ve seen a significant increase in both Royal Roads University investments and our foundation investments. That’s helped us build a bit more buffer, a bit more runway.

Obviously, we don’t have the huge endowments and resources of the large universities, which can withstand these kinds of storms much more effectively than small, special-purpose institutions like ours. So fundamentally, right now, we have to constantly be figuring out where things are going.

We have to be very adaptive, very responsive, very nimble. People ask me, “What’s the vision of the university?” And I say, that’s the vision of the university. The world is changing so quickly and is so turbulent that the vision is to be a university that can respond in real time to what’s happening.

AU: If we came back five years from now, best-case scenario, what would you want to be able to say about Royal Roads University—about how it turned itself around? What’s the end goal? Who do you want to be in 2030?

PS: Yeah, that’s an interesting question. In our three-year action plan, we laid out a vision for 2028—certain numbers of FTEs split across domestic, onshore international, and offshore international; where we wanted the endowment to be; where we wanted our investments to be; the kinds of programming spaces we wanted to be in—all of that.

But if you ask me five years out, I’d say this: that familiarity and awareness scores—which we track closely, along with many other metrics—are significantly up. Royal Roads is seen as the place to come if you’re a professional. We’ve historically focused on mid-career professionals, but I’d like us to be thought of as Canada’s university for professionals who are looking to scale or upskill.

I’d want us to be seen as very tightly aligned with the labour market and highly responsive to it. I’d want us to be seen as highly innovative, with very contemporary platforms. I’d want us to have succeeded in the transnational space and to have built really strong partnerships.

My own view is that small, special-purpose institutions like us will not survive without partnerships. We have international ones, but I’m also working really hard on domestic partnerships. We have an agreement with Mount Royal University, which, as you know, is exclusively undergraduate. We’ve signed an MOU with BCIT. I would love for us to develop a joint venture with BCIT, along the Guelph–Humber lines, as an example.

We’ve also been in discussions for the last couple of months, and straight after this meeting I’m talking to the Canadian Armed Forces about a significant partnership starting in September next year. So part of that five-year vision is having successfully established those partnerships and being in a position where we’re responsive and able to adapt, no matter the circumstances we find ourselves in.

Because I have no doubt that the next five years are going to be as turbulent—if not more turbulent—than the past five.

AU: Let’s hope the military doesn’t ask for their campus back. Philip Steenkamp, thank you very much for joining us today.

PS: Thanks, Alex.

AU: It just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Tiffany MacLennan and Sam Pufek, and you — our readers and listeners — for joining us. If you have any questions or comments about today’s episode, or suggestions for future ones, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us at podcast@higheredstrategy.com.

Join us next week, when our guest will be Dr. Frank Ziegele, Executive Director of the CHE: Centre for Higher Education in Germany, who will be discussing his recently translated book “Authentic Universities: Higher Education Institutions in Times of Transition” with us. Bye for now.

*This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service. Please note, the views and opinions expressed in each episode are those of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host and team, or our sponsors.