Tag: Laurentian University

Tracing Laurentian’s Path Part 2: External Shocks

Tracing Laurentian’s Path Part 2: External Shocks Broadly speaking, four external shocks contributed to Laurentian’s downfall.   First, the Barrie Campus and the costs associated with that experiment; second, the loss of 140 Saudi students in the summer of 2018 following the Canada-Saudi Twitter spat; third, the province’s decision to cut tuition by 10% in early 2019; and fourth, COVID.  I’ll add a fifth which was technically not a financial shock but certainly a waste of money.  Let’s go through each

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Tracing Laurentian’s Path Part 1 : The Building Spree

Morning all.  It’s been just over a year since the Laurentian University President and Board of Governors made the decision to declare insolvency.  Largely because of the institution’s decision to maintain radio silence with its own community and with journalists it doesn’t feel it can handle, there are major aspects to this story where we still do not have a complete picture of what happened, either in the long term (how did Laurentian get into this pickle) or the short-term

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Laurentian Blues (8) Causes, Fault, and Lessons

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

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Laurentian Blues (7) – The Process

Last week, the Laurentian University Senate met in a bizarre closed-door session to approve a package of cuts, the details of which are still mostly unknown.  On the basis of this, quite a number of people received termination notices at Laurentian University yesterday.  I have not seen any definitive numbers on losses (the university, typical of its entire approach through this crisis, is being crap at communicating actual information), but I have seen estimates of anywhere between 80 and 110

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Federated Universities (A kind of Laurentian story)

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

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