Good morning. I had hoped to get you a bit more detail about what has happened at Laurentian in the last few days, but as usual there is less info available than there should be. Here’s what we know:
- Late Monday, the university released a list of 69 programs that have been discontinued. Most of them are programs which have fewer than 30 students (in some cases considerably fewer), and a lot of these programs are in humanities, which is not really a surprise given that total humanities enrolment is about 400, and that’s divided among a couple of dozens of programs (philosophy, for instance, had 9 majors and 4 full-time profs, and while a number of students probably take philosophy courses as electives, there’s no way this program comes anywhere close to breaking even). The most questionable choices from a financial perspective are midwifery and a trio of environmental programs.
- In the end, 83 faculty members were fired, and another 27 vacant faculty lines were terminated. One assumes that these were mostly in departments where programs were eliminated, but it isn’t yet clear how these broke down. So, for instance, there are no more degrees in political science, but it isn’t clear if that means no more courses are being offered.
- The actual severance to those faculty let go was essentially non-existent, regardless of seniority. I’ve heard both “nothing” and “one month” plus 3 months of outplacement HR services, which…is shockingly low.
- Both the faculty and staff unions ratified new collective agreements which included unspecified but apparently across-the-board salary cuts.
It’s not all over, obviously, but it’s worth starting to ask about what lessons we can learn from this whole affair.
The first question to ask here is “how did this happen”. And unfortunately, we don’t really know. It’s pretty clear, as I said back here, that financially the university suffered from a variety of problems on both the cost-side (salaries) and the revenue-side (failure to recruit international students), none of which were acute enough in any given year to signal the alarm but cumulatively were quite debilitating.
But more proximately, there were two specific events that need to be examined but which are currently shrouded in mystery. The first is who exactly was in the room when the decision was taken to start mingling the reserved and unreserved accounts. One gets the impression it happened quite a while ago, possibly before anyone currently in the administration was employed there. But who knew about this and when is a key part of the story, because it sure seems like the need to conceal this problem is one of the reasons why administration was reluctant to be transparent with its financial information.
The second has to do with the events of last summer, and the closing of Desjardins’ line of credit. Did the bank actually withdraw the line of credit? If so, why? Or, did Laurentian University’s President actually choose to renounce the line of credit in order to provoke a crisis? (The careful wording of Haché’s affidavit is ambiguous on this point). If there were non-CCAA alternatives that could have been taken and were not, that’s probably unforgivable.
Clearing up the truth behind these two issues are, it seems to me, key to moving forward. Staff at Laurentian have been through a lot without ever really being told why or how things got as bad as they did. For the community to heal and move forward, reckoning needs to occur. A very precise timeline of events needs to come out in the next few months simply to allow forward movement. I hope the Senate and the Board can force this kind of reckoning to occur.
Now, looking at root causes is not the same thing as looking for “fault”. Fault lies with management, period. Management’s job is to keep the ship afloat, and collectively, they failed. So did the Board. So did KPMG (someone should sue the living daylights out of KPMG for not flagging that the restricted/unrestricted line has been breached). I think there’s a fair case to be made that the institution as a whole and the faculty union specifically was resistant to change and that management was operating in an environment which made it difficult to make tough decisions, but at the end of the day that really doesn’t matter. Management is supposed to make tough decisions and they didn’t do it.
(That said, the idea being forwarded by certain folks at Laurentian that faculty union really wanted to selflessly help because they grieved to try to have the university declare financial exigency in both 2017 and 2020 is highly dubious. Mostly what the union was trying to do was to get management to cough up financial data which is a precondition to declaring exigency. As I wrote on Tuesday, the exigency process was not designed to actually reduce salary costs: it is rather designed to allow the union to argue why whatever financial problems exist either are not problems, or should be solved by some method other than salary reductions).
There is also the question of the responsibility of the provincial government. I think it’s significant, in the sense that an administration that wasn’t so keen on sticking the boot into higher education would have taken a more responsible path. It seems clear that Laurentian’s problems could have been solved with much less fuss simply by the provincial government forwarding a loan in the $35-million range and then clawing back that money from the annual provincial grant over a period of five to seven years. It would have cost nothing, yet at the same time it would force a significant penalty and some restructuring on the university without causing Monday’s apocalypse. That doesn’t mean that the province is “responsible” for what happened, because that would absolve management of things for which they should not be absolved. But it does mean the province deliberately passed up a chance to sensibly solve the problems.
The more fraught question is what lessons people outside Laurentian should take from all of this. The main one people seem to want to take is “more public funding”. This is of course what they call “highly motivated reasoning” which might happen to benefit their institution/constituency/whatever. If funding were really the problem, this problem would not have been confined to Laurentian and perhaps more to the point, it’s a form of magical thinking in which universities’ problems are always on the revenue side, never on the cost side. It never seems to occur to people that greater public funding might come with greater restrictions on spending, particularly when it comes to faculty salaries (one of the reasons that the average professorial salary in Ontario can be around the 95th percentile of salaries province-wide is precisely that less than half of this amount is coming from the public purse: increase provincial funding and you’d better believe compensation would be a way hotter issue than it currently is). Would more funding have helped? Maybe. But lack of funding wasn’t the cause. The cause was an unwillingness to make difficult decisions and an inability to collectively confront unpleasant financial realities before it was too late. And that’s the main lesson: institutions need to do whatever it takes to make sure reality can’t be ignored, to ensure that the entire community is well-informed about the true state of finances (and the degree of risk associated with them). You’re never going to get everyone to agree about how to spend money but operating under a fundamental misapprehension about how much there is to spend is fatal.
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I’m not sure it’s so dubious. For faculty in the trenches across the country, financial exigency was thought to be the nuclear option until the CCAA option showed that it isn’t. Is to so hard to believe that faculty—who do participate in collegial governance, after all—have some sense of (moral) fiduciary duty toward their universities? With the benefit of hindsight, is it also so hard to believe that in the case of real financial danger, the transparency offered by financial exigency through a collective agreement isn’t preferable to the alternatives? Seriously, if you’ve been basing your analysis off of Haché’s affidavit exclusively, you might want to read through Colin’s affidavit for the other side of the story.
It is not hard to believe that faculty have a sense of obligation to the university. It is, however, hard to believe that a faculty union, in a strike year (2017), lodged a grievance to initiate a proceeding with the purpose of reducing university expenditure.
Why is this hard to believe? Fabrice Colin states this is a sworn affidavit submitted to the court. If it’s untrue, that would be perjury. Is that what you’re saying?
On the other hand, it would be worth asking why LU Admin didn’t want to declare financial exigency in 2017.
I’m not disputing he existence of the grievance. I’m disputing the motivation behind the grievance.
I’m not sure there’s anything I can write that will be persuasive, but you can’t overestimate how shocking the revelation of LUFA’s 2017 and 2020 grievances has been in the eyes of Canadian faculty. Until Monday’s grim lesson on the destructive power of the CCAA process, ‘financial exigency’ was basically a synonym for ‘institutional apocalypse’. From an admin perspective, Occam’s razor may well imply that LUFA’s grievances must have been MAD-grade brinkmanship, but when the same events are viewed from the faculty trenches, Occam’s razor implies that they must have been a last-ditch response within the framework of the existing collective agreement (with its transparency and due process) to looming catastrophe.
Again, if you’ve read Haché’s affidavit, read Colin’s—why should the former necessarily be more credible than the latter?
I’ve read them both. I don’t particularly find one to me more credible than the other. I don’t actually think LUFA’s grievances were MAD-grade brinksmanship, particularly because the exigency process is so circumscribed as put as little pressuree as possible in faculty, as I described on tuesday. I think it was an attempt to get more financial transparency from the university because they thought it would give them an edge in bargaining, no more no less. Certainly a legitimate move, but not a selfless one.
(And to be fair, Colin himself does not spin it as a selfless move – his deposition merely says “we grieved” without stating any motivations. I think others, perhaps less aware of the context of the 2017 strike and the actual details of the exigency clauses, are giving it this spin)
One last thing: right before Laurentian’s administration invoked the CCAA, LUFA was preparing to file a complaint of bad faith bargaining with the Ontario Labour Relations Board unless the administration provided up-to-date financial information to justify its claims (https://www.sudbury.com/local-news/lu-faculty-demand-financial-data-threaten-bargaining-in-bad-faith-complaint-3297691). This, not financial exigency, surely represents the mechanism of last resort for getting financial information from the administration in a context of collective bargaining.
I am glad that you’ve read both, and you are absolutely right, there isn’t necessarily anything selfless about those grievances. However, if the situation really is bad enough as to warrant a declaration of financial exigency, then it’s manifestly in the immediate best interests of LUFA’s membership to have the protections offered by the financial exigency language of their collective agreement—transparency, accountability, due process, and benefits for laid-off faculty (e.g., severance pay)—all of which seem to have been completely absent from the CCAA bloodbath. Indeed, lay-offs would presumably be a measure of absolute last resort in such a process, so a financial exigency process that avoids lay-offs would (naively, I guess) be a long-term self-interested win-win. Of course, this is financial exigency as viewed from a faculty perspective.
Anyhow, what if’s won’t help the faculty and staff who have been laid off and the students whose educations have come to a screeching halt. Let’s just hope that those most proximately responsible for this catastrophe (ie, through any actual negligence) are brought to account, and that we can have a national discussion about just how appropriate the CCAA process is for major public institutions. I know there’s snark in some quarters about the appropriateness of last night’s emergency debate in the House of Commons on a provincial matter like the fate of a university, but the CCAA is a federal law.
Why do Haché, the VP Finance (especially), the VP Academic, and the VP Research still have their jobs? They are all paid good salaries to have known what the problems were; and if they didn’t know, they shouldn’t have had the jobs. Why have the Board and Senate not been dissolved for incompetence? Why is anyone 65 or older who is eligible for a full pension still working there?
Sudbury is not all that large a community. I suspect there will be some awkward meetings in town when the 40-year-old unemployed former faculty member crosses paths with the university’s exec, or the 70-year-old faculty members who wouldn’t retire and still have jobs.
I would imagine it;s because someone had to steer the ship through to May 1 and a new set of agreements. Changing management or governance mid-stream would have been very disruptive and made these accomplishments more difficult.
I suspect that much of the Board will now be replaced (for one thing, the nine members from the federated colleges are going to be tossed). What happens to management will be up to a new Board.
The nine members of the three federated universities are more or less puppets. They have not been put there by the colleges themselves. There is zero communication between the federated universities and their so-called “representatives” on LU’s board.
A few questions, though I don’t really expect you to know the answers. I also don’t want to give the impression that I’m challenging you with these questions, either, though they are, to some extent, rhetorical. I’m grateful for your coverage, in fact.
1. To begin with, does the university’s list of collapsed programs include those taught by the federated colleges? I hear about Indigenous Studies being cut, but it isn’t listed. Is it being cut by virtue of cutting the relationship with Université de Sudbury? Are there, in other words, many more humanities programs being cut than are reflected in the official list?
2. What was the fraction of Laurentian’s expenses represented by faculty salaries? At U of T (and UBC, where arbitrators have generally based salaries on the U of T model), it’s about a third. That’s just not capable of sinking an institution. How much of the expenses are buildings that didn’t fill, a medical program with placements in isolated communities, the defunct Barrie campus? How much are administrative or staff salaries? How much is this a matter of being top-heavy, and a hang-over of “initiatives”?
3. How much of the faculty salaries arise from a desire on the part of administration to deal with faculty entirely through monetary means, treating them as employees to be “incentivized” in service of a strategy, rather than the university made flesh, who must be protected to pursue the life of the mind by the lights of their own reasons? How much of the high pay is a matter of seniority, and how much of cumulative merit for doing whatever the admin felt like rewarding?
4. You give the example of four philosophers teaching nine majors and electives to around 400 humanities students. Who is responsible for creating a university in which a core subject like philosophy is so marginal in the first place?
The rot, in conclusion, is not just a matter of cash flow this year or the next, or of a particularly high salary structure, or of lack of public funding, though all of these are no doubt material. It’s the product of a fundamentally deranged notion of what universities are, how they should be governed, and what the relationship with their faculty-members ought to be.
I may not have all the answers, but I have some insight.
1. The list of programs cut is not comprehensive and as such does not include all the programs that are being lost through the dissolved agreements with the federated universities. It actually underestimated what remains.
2. I don’t have the data, but data has been shared that supports the fact that there are too many admin per faculty or student than what is expected for a university of this size. NOSM’s budget is separate so the remote-rural placements are not a contributing factor. Fun fact : Administrators get bonuses. Who gets bonuses in the public sector ? That’s right. They do here. And who gets bonuses at a time when the situation is this dire ? Again. People did last year. As for Barrie, yes. Absolutely a contributing factor. Not allowing Barrie to continue was a provincial decision (I believe – don’t quote me) and it might have saved some money or even generated revenue had it’s life not been cut so short. What faculty today would give for a fraction of the severance packages that they received ? Empty buildings ? Yes. An exaggerated campus modernization plan that didn’t follow the ‘build it and they will come’ dream. Problems with recruitment ? Yes. It happens when strategies are not followed or are, at best, inconsistent. Even in Sudbury, there are programs offered that no one knows exist. It should not be a surprise, because all programs should have been well marketed and advertised. Maybe now the list will be easier for people to remember. Merci Robert Haché.
3. For the most part, increment is based on seniority. Women’s experience going in tends to be recognized at half of what is recognized for men so they save some money there – this is a wrong that Laurentian University has also decided not to ‘right’.
4. Agreed : there was a time when first-year students were required to take 1 course in each faculty : you would take 1 science, 1 philosophy, 1 humanity, 1 elective, 1 course in your major. The goal was to make for well-rounded individuals. There has been such a push for disciplinarians, that we forgot about the wealth of knowledge that is developed when bringing today’s youth to think critically, to question, to argue, to defend their position, to see things from a different perspective, and that is done in the philosophy, arts and social sciences departments. It is the foundation of a university. It is shameful that Laurentian University has been reduced to the shell it has now. As for the nine majors, they are irrelevant : four philosophers teaching 400 students is quite appropriate. Perhaps one could have imagined a university that did not have a need to have majors associated with all programs in order to keep offering courses that would continue to shape young minds ? It seems the current president, VP and VPA lacked imagination here when they took out the axe. They could have benefitted from a course or two that help foster the soft-skills that so many employers are seeking today in the bright minds they choose to hire. Hire for attitude, train for aptitude. That is still true. Mark my words : the pendulum will swing back and those courses will return once we recognize the value they bring to any professional. Sadly, the president, VP and VPA are just too short-sighted to have thought this through. The remainder of programs, coupled with the way they treated their staff, students and faculty will ensure that enrolment will decrease for years to come. One wonders if that was the plan all along. But they’ll be ok. It is with absolute certainty, that I believe ‘they’ already have other plans in the works for their next career move because there is no way they can imagine that anyone be it staff, faculty or student, will want to collaborate with them to rebuild what they so callously and effortlessly destroyed. The relationship is broken and the trust has vanished.
With the removal of the members representing the federated universities on the Board of Governors, the BOG is but one member shy of not having quorum, so it cannot operate. Let that sink in. Who will be the member who stands up and dissolves the BOG ?
It’s clear Laurentian had incredibly incompetent administrators, a clueless Board, and auditors who seemingly didn’t notice the failure to segregate restricted funds from unrestricted. It’s not believable that the university’s problem came from the faculty salary line, which most likely doesn’t exceed about a third of the operating budget, and which is easily adjusted by not replacing faculty who retire, die, or quit for other jobs. Universities get into trouble when they borrow to spend on fixed assets, particularly new buildings. The costs of operating these buildings can’t be avoided, and, generally, the buildings are of little use to the private sector.
The question now is what to do when the provider of a public service screws up like Laurentian’s management has. If, say, a hospital management violates guidelines, spending millions on new machines, paid for by borrowing money they can’t pay back, do we shut the hospital, or does the province find a way to keep it open, while firing the administrators who screwed up?
It does seem clear that the issues – from incompetence to bargaining in bad faith to actual financial malfeasance – are all on the administrative side, but it’s the faculty who have lost their jobs. Why aren’t any of the administrators who are actually responsible for this catastrophe collecting their severance (they can have whatever they gave the faculty) and looking for their next position?
I haven’t been able to find a discussion of the role of Dominic Giroux, who became president of Laurentian (2009-2017) at age 38. He was not an academic (MBA + 2 BAs, one in education and one in public policy). Laurentian was praised in some quarters for hiring a businessman, rather than an academic, as president; just the sort of person who could save the university and put it on a sound financial footing. In his tenure at Laurentian he was responsible for several high-profile and high-expense initiatives, among them an expensive new student centre, funded with massive loans. These unpaid loans ultimately crushed Laurentian. If Mr. Giroux ever chooses to come back to Laurentian, by the terms of the sweetheart deal he signed, he can do so at any time, at the rank of full professor, despite his lack of academic training or fitness for any such position. (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/laurentian-faculty-more-transparency-contracts-1.5019967) Laurentian can take comfort in the fact that he is very unlikely to do so, and is probably as we speak quietly deleting his Laurentian years from his CV and hoping no one remembers them.
I’m surprised – a side note – that Mr. Usher doesn’t distinguish between the number of majors and the number of students taught in a program; very few students go on to become philosophers, but very many benefit greatly from a couple of philosophy courses taken while pursuing a major in something else. This is part of the function of the program, and part of the function of the university is to expose students to a range of ideas and subjects; now not a possibility for Laurentian.