Morning, everyone.  Apologies for the pause in posting: it’s been a rough few weeks, health-wise.  I am not 100% yet, and blogging might not be 4x per week for a little while, but time to get back in the saddle: there’s too much going on to sit on the sidelines.

So, it’s a big day at Laurentian University.  The administration – or at least the tiny portion of if that actually knows what’s going on – has called a super-duper secret Senate meeting for today, in which it will unveil its restructuring plans and in particular how those plans affect academic programming.  The packages go out in a couple of hours, the whole thing gets voted on in the PM, and the institution’s President has been hinting that if he doesn’t get the vote he wants, then he is in fact going to drive the bus over the cliff and send the institution into bankruptcy.  Hell of a way to run a railroad.  And this is after Laurentian surprise move last Thursday to unilaterally terminate its federation agreement with its three federated universities – Thorneloe University, Huntington University and the University of Sudbury.

Now at this point in the story, people either say “holy cow, that’s a big deal!”, or “what in God’s name is a federated university?”.  The rest of this blog is mostly an answer to the latter question. 

As higher education began to be regularly subsidized by provincial governments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, all provincial governments faced the same problem: dealing with the fact that existent universities were pretty much all denominational in one way or another, and therefore government funding decisions implicitly pitted one religious community against another.  In Ontario and (later) Manitoba and Saskatchewan, the deal was pretty clear – you could be a religious institution, or you could get public funding. Places like Queen’s (Presbyterian) and McMaster (Baptist) eventually gave up their denominational affiliation to get public funding, but others chose a different route: “federate” with a non-sectarian institution and get the money, not directly from the provincial government, but indirectly via the public university with which they federated.

What this meant was a rash of federation agreements:  Trinity (Anglican), Victoria (Methodist) and St. Michael’s (Catholic) at the University of Toronto; Huron (Anglican), Brescia & King’s (both Catholic) at Western: Conrad Grebel (Mennonite), Renison (Anglican), St. Jerome’s (Catholic), St. Paul’s (United) at Waterloo…I could go on.  In Manitoba, something similar happened when St. Paul’s (Catholic), St. John’s (Anglican) and St. Andrew’s (Ukrainian Orthodox) federated to the University of Manitoba.  The United church stayed clear of this federation but eventually secularized itself to become the University of Winnipeg.  Campion (Catholic) and Luther (take a wild guess) Colleges at the University of Regina have similar stories to tell, as do St. Peter’s and St. Thomas More at the University of Saskatchewan. 

Federation agreements were not, of course, the only way to go.  Quebec basically got rid of religious oversight in the post-secondary sector during the 1960s by turning all the collèges classiques into secular CEGEPs (technically they had the option of attempting to become universities, but only Bishop’s took up the option, and this confused the hell out of Quebec bureaucrats, who assumed well into the 70s that Bishop’s was bluffing and would eventually change its mind).  Prince Edward Island went in a similar direction in 1970 when it forcibly merged the Catholic St. Dunstan’s with the Protestant Prince of Wales to form a single, secular, provincial university.  New Brunswick and Nova Scotia just said the hell with it and funded religious institutions directly.

Anyways, Laurentian has four federation agreements.  One of them is with the (formerly Catholic, now secular, always francophone) Université de Hearst in – you guessed it, Hearst.  The other three are…a bit odd.  The Catholic University of Sudbury pre-dates Laurentian by a few decades, and when Sudbury first started agitating for a publicly-funded university it was the leading candidate to take over.  The problem is, local anglophone WASPs were scandalized at the idea that a Roman Catholic institution might lead the charge.  The local United Church started up Huntington University and the Anglicans started Thorneloe.  The Ontario government told all of them to get their act together, and the result was a single secular institution (Laurentian) with three affiliates.  Each of the affiliates offers some religious/theological degrees but have also developed various small speciality programs like theatre, women’s studies, gerontology, Indigenous studies and journalism, though few if any of these programs could work if their students could not also take courses at Laurentian.

Laurentian’s unilateral termination of these agreements – something which, to be clear, it is not entirely clear it has the power to do – is basically a death-knell for all of the federated institutions in their current form.  It’s not impossible for them to survive, but to get public money would require abandoning their religious affiliation.  Not impossible – many have done it before – but it’s not clear how viable any of them would be with their current suite of programming.  The one with the best shot is probably Sudbury, which at least in theory has the option of becoming the province’s “real” francophone university (there is a somewhat serious proposal to this effect making the rounds. Unthinkable two months ago, but given UOF’s disastrous first round of recruiting, it’s at least within the bounds of possibility, if the university can ditch its religious affiliation in the next few weeks).  But it is still a tricky road forward, not least with internal Franco-Ontario politics (the partisans of a Toronto campus will go apes**t).

Anyways, it’s all very complicated, and there are a lot of ugly possibilities, even before we get to the actual details of the restructuring operation.  If I get the details early enough tomorrow, I’ll write about it.  But in the meantime: spare some thoughts for all our friends and colleagues in Sudbury.  It’s a nasty business; here’s hoping everyone can make it out on the other side.