You may remember that late in 2018 the Ontario government decided to put the kibosh on funding l’Université de l’Ontario français (l’UOF).  Then last fall, the federal government – showing a key eye for supporting minority language rights in Ontario if not consistency in funding minority language rights across the country – popped up and offered to pay for half of the running costs over the next eight years.  Up front.  As in, all the running costs for the first 4-5 years, with Ontario agreeing to pay for the staff starting in 2023-24 (I hesitate to use exact dates here because the feds and the province signed an actual agreement in late January but – typically – failed to publish the actual document because apparently it is a state secret).

Now, I am pretty sure that the Government of Ontario has made out like a bandit on this deal.  Basically, it gets to open a new university for zero dollars upfront, while they see whether the university hits its rather ambitious enrolment targets.  As I have said before, I am skeptical about this.  There is certainly a case for a francophone university in Ontario, but less so for one based in Toronto. 

Why is this thing in Toronto, you ask?  Well, to maintain some kind of community support for the project, its backers had to pretend it wouldn’t hurt enrolment at Ottawa or Laurentian, the province’s two bilingual universities, which meant it couldn’t actually be located where the bulk of the province’s francophones are. But then one had to make the case for a significant underserved market in south-central Ontario and the GTA that a) was interested in francophone education and b) would prefer taking courses at a new, untested university over existing programs with real track records at Ottawa and Laurentian.  And there is flat-out no data to prove this: none of the studies done to back up the idea of l’UOF (in particular this one) chose to ask students about the relative benefits of a new francophone institution versus those of existing bilingual institutions.  Which means either Ottawa and Laurentian are going to lose quite a number of students, or l’UOF is going to have real recruiting problems.

(This is the point in the conversation where anglophones always ask: what about Glendon College at York? Good question. The majority of students there are anglophones learning French; my guess is few of them would be likely to switch.  About 30% of Glendon students are francophone and it’s possible that some of them might prefer something francophone to something lightly bilingual, but judging by Glendon’s promotional material, the whole point of them being there is to gain English proficiency, so again, not an obvious market for l’UOF there). 

Backers of l’UOF tend to make three ripostes to these points. The first is “but look at how many francophones there are in South-central Ontario!  200,000!  That’s about as many as there are in New Brunswick!  Surely we can support a university on that!”  That’s true, as far as it goes, but a community of 200,000 in a province of 700,000, which has very dense concentrations of francophone speakers (and hence francophone businesses and services) is quite a different linguistic environment than 200,000 in a section of a province with 10 million English speakers.  The trade-off you have to make as a student (or parent) is: ok, my kid will learn in a language in which s/he is more comfortable – but is that going to make it any easier to get a job in an economy which above all else demands English-language skills? 

The second riposte is a variant on the first: look at the growing number of francophones in the GTA and look at the growing number of students enrolled in francophone school districts.  These are both true but might not be quite what they seem.  There has been a lot of francophone immigration to Toronto over the past decade from France and other francophone countries.  But it seems exceedingly unlikely to me that they would choose to send their kids to a francophone university because many of them chose Toronto on account of it being an English-speaking environment.  And as for booming enrolments?  Well, francophone school districts like the Conseil Scolaire Viamonde can play numbers games as well as anyone.  Yes, their numbers are increasing, but not because there are increasing numbers of uniquely francophone kids.  Rather, they are letting in kids like my daughter, Little Miss Sumo, who are anglophone but being raised with just enough French to be considered worth educating in French.  It’s not clear that many of these kids are going to be looking for a French postsecondary education, although, hey, LMS does write a heck of a lot better in French than English at the moment so you never know.

The third riposte is “we’re going to be offering some innovative programming not offered elsewhere”.  This might be a good tack to take, and it might not.  Higher education is a pretty isomorphic industry. If you’re a new university, is it safer to try to make a reputation from scratch by doing things differently, or by imitating the leaders?  I suspect it’s the latter but certainly respect anyone trying to break the mold.  That said, l’UOF’s claims of originality may be overstated.  If you look at the programs they are planning on offering, what you have are some pretty highly-specialized yet not particularly professionally-oriented programs with names like “Human Diversity Studies”, “Globalization Studies”, “Urban Environmental Studies” and “Digital Culture Studies”.  These may indeed be niche programs at the undergraduate level, but in my professional experience, I am pretty sure 18 year-olds are likely to find this kind of nomenclature very confusing and hence off-putting.

So, here’s where the Ontario government has the potential to make out like bandits.  If the launch goes fine, then come 2023-24 they will be funding a working university with few problems.  But if the launch goes badly and l’UOF is not yet close to getting the 1250 students it says it will have by that time (the business plan is here and is cagey about what the actual break-even point for the institution is, but my guess is that 1,000 or so is probably the bare minimum needed), then Ontario will not have been on the hook for any of the infrastructure money and can pull back accordingly on per-student funding through the funding formula. Win-win.

Now of course, what may happen before then is that l’UOF may pivot from the current business plan into its most obvious Plan B; namely, becoming a Toronto gateway for francophone international students who may have a long-term interest in immigration.  That would be somewhat at odds with the notion of l’UOF as a specifically franco-Ontarian institution, but there is probably no shortage of demand from that quarter

In other words, even if l’UOF doesn’t hit its fall 2020 target of 380 students, don’t hit the panic button just yet.  It might take some significant changes of strategy, but there is more than one way for this new university to succeed.