Hi everyone,
Tiffany here.
A quick reminder that Focus Friday is happening today, from 12:30-1:30pm Eastern.
Coming out of several recent conversations, whether on institutional recovery, sustainability, or governance, one theme keeps surfacing: institutions are being asked to make difficult academic decisions in an increasingly constrained financial environment. And yet, many of those decisions are made without a clear, shared understanding of what programs actually cost to deliver.
So this week, we’re turning our attention to program-level financial viability and how better costing data can support stronger, more transparent academic decision-making.
To explore this, I’ll be joined by Joanne McKee (Chief Financial Officer, Toronto Metropolitan University), Donna Kotsopoulos (Dean & Professor, Western University), Jovan Groen (Director of Academic Quality and Enhancement, Western University), and Brandon Dickson (PhD Candidate, University of Waterloo). Together, they’ve been examining how program financing tools and costing frameworks can clarify sustainability, inform cyclical review, and strengthen stewardship — all while protecting quality.
We’ll dig into questions like:
- What does it actually mean to understand the true cost of an academic program?
- Who should own the conversation about financial viability in a bicameral system?
- And what would change if costing became an explicit part of program review across the sector?
As always, this will be a discussion-oriented session, with plenty of time for questions and reflections from the group.
If you haven’t registered yet, you can still join us here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/8YRkWqMbToSQRzE34F1o-w
Looking Back
Two weeks ago, we turned our attention to one of the hardest questions facing Canadian universities right now: how do you make meaningful institutional change work within collegial governance, especially in a period of financial constraint?
Joining me were Jennifer Stephenson (Associate Dean Studies, Faculty of Arts and Science, Queen’s University) and Bill Nelson (Associate Dean, Teaching and Learning, Faculty of Arts and Science, Queen’s University). Together, they walked us through what they’ve come to call the “Agency in a Box” model, a practical framework for aligning academic leadership and the academic collegium to drive change that is both effective and legitimate.
They began by naming a familiar tension: universities are often described as places where change is slow, contested, or even impossible. But rather than accept that narrative, Jen and Bill asked a different question: if we can’t rebuild institutions from scratch, how do we work within the structures we already have?
At the heart of their model is a recognition that universities are not traditional hierarchies. They are professional bureaucracies with two distinct but interdependent groups: academic leadership (those with authority over resources and policy) and the academic collegium (those with disciplinary expertise and operational know-how). Change succeeds, they argued, not when one group dominates the other, but when there is a structured “handoff” between them at key stages.
The first step is what they call problem translation. A budget deficit, for example, may feel abstract to an individual faculty member. As Jen put it, “As an individual faculty member, I don’t have the time and energy to care about that… it’s not my expertise.” The work of leadership, then, is to translate that institutional problem into something concrete: what does it mean for curriculum, workload, and sustainability? When faculty understood that delivering the existing curriculum with significantly fewer colleagues would be impossible, the urgency became real.
From there comes the “box.” Leadership defines the parameters (resource limits, governance requirements, timelines) but within those constraints, faculty are given real agency to design solutions. As Bill emphasized, “The box is a constraint and a promise at the same time.” The promise is critical: if a solution fits within the agreed parameters, leadership commits to implementing it.
At Queen’s, this approach was applied to a sweeping modular degree redesign in the Faculty of Arts and Science. Over 16 months, more than 100 degree plans were restructured and 25 suspended. Rather than closing departments outright, the faculty standardized minors, streamlined requirements, and created greater flexibility across arts and sciences. The result was a framework that allowed departments to adapt to workforce reductions while preserving disciplinary depth and identity. Students, they noted, responded enthusiastically to the increased cross-disciplinary opportunity.
The conversation also addressed the emotional and political realities of this work. There was pushback. There were difficult meetings. There were tense moments in governance. But by structuring the process around authentic agency, ensuring that solutions were genuinely shaped by those who would enact them, the initiative built momentum rather than resentment.
Importantly, Jen and Bill challenged the common “administration vs. faculty” framing. This is a false binary, they argued. Both groups are academics; both hold different forms of expertise and authority. The key is not better messaging or louder communication, but structured partnership. “We’re going to get better answers and better outcomes if everybody works together,” Jen said in her closing reflection.
In a sector where many institutions continue to face deficits and difficult decisions, the model they shared offers something both pragmatic and hopeful. It doesn’t promise easy change—but it does suggest that sustainable change is possible when constraints are clear, agency is real, and trust is upheld.
As Jen reminded us, “We can’t just do nothing.”
You can catch the full conversation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuG0W1xPtDA
Looking Ahead
Our next Focus Friday will take place on March 13, and we’ll be joined by a cross-functional team from the University of Alberta who will walk us through how different parts of the institution are working together to build and use AI in a coordinated way.
We’ll hear perspectives from: Teaching & Learning (Karsten Mundel), IT (Warren Kufuor-Boakye), Research Office (Paolo Mussone), Graduate Programs (Ali Shiri), and Library Services (Janice Kung).
Together, they’ll explore how collaboration across these units is shaping AI strategy and implementation on campus, not as isolated pilots, but as an institutional effort. You can register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/ZfgX0_xvRjynX4cMjqZ48g
