What Laurentian reports are we talking about now?

Last summer, after the big round of layoffs at Laurentian, the administration said it wanted to do three big reviews before exiting CCAA protection – one for its real-estate portfolio, one for its overall operations, and one for its governance.  The first one, to my knowledge, has not been released, but the second and third were released last week.  You can see them here.

Ok – anything you want to disclose before we start?

Yes.  HESA bid on the governance report.  We were disqualified on account of being in a “conflict of interest” on the grounds that a) I had once had a contract there and b) I had publicly stated opinions about Laurentian (and no, neither of those things is actually a “conflict of interest”).  You can see a longer discussion of this here. So, feel free to read the following comments with whatever-sized grain of salt you think appropriate.

Who wrote these reports?

Laurentian decided not to award the contract via RFP and struck a deal with the Nous Consulting Group, a major consulting firm from Australia which is trying to get a foothold in Canada (some of you may remember Nous as the consultants the University of Alberta used to organize its Academic restructuring work in 2020). 

What’s good in these reports? 

Well, the Operational Review is both interesting and remarkably detailed.  On the whole, it does a pretty good job of analyzing Laurentian’s management weaknesses. Many at Laurentian will likely be amazed to find out that their financial services department are apparently unable to conduct month-end, quarter-end or even annual reporting and is also incapable of conducting variance reporting because of the budgeting process.  And yeah, the weaknesses are all over the place. 

Now mind you, I suspect that if you ran this same analysis at any Canadian institution with enrolments under 8,000 students some similar weaknesses would emerge.  Nous compares Laurentian’s manager-to-staff ratios – what they call “spans of control” – in various departments in such a way as to suggest Laurentian is particularly manager-heavy.  But the benchmark institutions in this analysis are all very large institutions (and not always Canadian ones) where large departments are the norm.  Small universities have the same departments – because they are fulfilling the same functions – but they have fewer staff because, well, they don’t have as much work to do as at bigger institutions.  This is why admin costs as a percentage of total expenditures tend to be inversely related to institution size.  So, while the diagnosis of problems seems to make sense, beware some of the solutions – they seem to be ones which make sense at large institutions but not small ones (I would point out here that they don’t have many small universities in Australia, and this may be something of a blind-spot for the consultant).

And also, the slides are pretty good.   That’s always nice to see.

What’s not so good?

Two things.  The approach to strategy, and the recommendations on governance.

On strategy, the Operations Review has lots of bad things to say about the previous Strategic plan.  (Again, disclosure: I was asked to be a part of the committee that developed the previous Laurentian strat plan).  A fair critique of that strategic plan is that it was – to use the terminology I developed on strategic planning back here – more bucket-like than pillar-like, and I think the plan would have been better had it been reversed.  But you can’t say that this wasn’t what the community wanted: the public consultations were extensive, and I think that it largely reflected the priorities the institution felt were important at the time (also, some slightly bolder bits of the plan were trashed in the aftermath of the 2017 strike so as not to rock the boat).   It would also be fair to critique it for lack of follow-up if the goals of the strategic plan were– as Nous points out – not incorporated into senior management’s annual objectives. Here, I might point out that this strat plan went through three Presidents and a financial catastrophe so maybe its absence from people’s quotidian management priorities is not all that surprising.

But what got me is the report’s insistence that institutional strategic plans’ goals had to be “specific, measurable and realistic”.  I agree this is important if you think the purpose of a strategic plan is for a strong central authority to keep everyone on task and on time, and it’s possible that there some institutions in Canada that work this way.  But if you view strategic plans – at least partially – as democratic exercises in getting communities to re-think their purpose and explain to the world at large how they view their place in the community and what kind of impact they want to have, and not just how many widgets they are using and producing every year, then this approach is – and I am choosing my words carefully here – horsepucky.  Good strategic plans in higher education are like water navigation: you set a course and some rules to steer by and set sail.  It is not about creating railway timetables.   

You said there were two not-so-good things?

Yes, the other being the main conclusions of the Governance Report.  In Australia, when universities took a managerialist turn in the 1990s, two things happened –Governing Boards were reduced in size, but they also grew in importance relative to academic governance bodies (I recommend Simon Marginson & Mark Considine’s The Enterprise University: Power, Governance and Re-invention if you want to know more about this process).  Unsurprisingly, this is exactly the route that an Australian higher education consultancy suggested at Laurentian.  Both the Senate and the Board are to be reduced in size by about 40% but, more importantly, the powers of Senate are to be circumscribed, leaving it as little more than an academic quality assurance body, able to make recommendations on individual programs, but not to make recommendations about the academic direction of the institution as a whole.  Instead, unbelievably, this power is to be reserved to the Board, a body whose proposed skills matrix includes sixteen different areas, only one of which is to have the first freaking clue about higher education actually works. 

In fact – get this – Nous thinks that Laurentian’s administration thinks that an external body (I’m guessing Nous has themselves in mind here) should conduct “performance reviews” of Senate.  I’m honestly unsure if I’ve ever heard of a weirder perversion of the idea of academic self-governance.  And if you read the fine print on page 23, the report claims that this is based on a model at Queen’s University, which is utter nonsense since if you follow the URL to the cited Queen’s sub-committee, you will see that the body being referred to does not have the words “performance review” in its mandate at all.  Nice try, guys.

This is a plan which would make Laurentian’s Board – a Board which, recall, made all the key decisions that ran the institution into the ground in the first place – more powerful than it currently is, and probably the most powerful Board in the province.  And its Senate, concurrently, will be turned into the weakest in the province.  And this is all based on a highly-torqued e-mail survey (not interviews, because God Forbid expensive consultants should deal with the hoi polloi, but e-mail surveys) in which choice quotes about Senate’s dysfunctionality were cherry-picked and made to look like actual “evidence” to back the idea that the Board should take over big responsibilities which it currently does not have and for which it is desperately ill-equipped.  Because, basically, that’s the way they do it in Australia.

So How Should Laurentian Proceed?

Follow-up the Operational Review where needed, but use some common sense about using concepts like “spans of control” in small universities.  And reject the Governance Report outright: it doubles down on every bit of the top-down, don’t-give-a-rat’s-hairy-ass-what-the-community-thinks approach that has been the hallmark of President Haché’s approach to this crisis from the very beginning.  It makes everything worse.  Just don’t do it.