As the Laurentian saga continues to unfold, one is forced to consider the possibility that what is in play in Ontario is not a one-off event of an unfortunate university that did not manage its finances well but perhaps a broader strategy to restructure the university sector. While such an opinion will be labelled as paranoia by many it remains that a number of variables seem to be coming together that may ultimately create a number of Laurentians.
If this is happening by coincidence, then it is ultimately a reflection of the inconsistency and incompetence of government policies. If it is not a coincidence, then it remains that perhaps conditions are being created to provide incentives for universities to change in a manner that the Ontario government thinks they should. It is no secret that governments have a predisposition for professional programs as opposed to arts and science and the list of the 69 discontinued programs at Laurentian happens to include a rather large number of arts, science and social science programs.
Universities are semi-autonomous and increasingly subject to government program and operation oversight, but they are still independent enough to resist the types of rapid program shifts that government politicians, policy makers and bureaucrats are fond of as they pursue assorted agendas and flavours of the month. Their faculty associations have also negotiated agreements that include exigency clauses that make it difficult and expensive if not impossible to implement short-term, long-term or permanent layoffs. How to get around exigency clauses and get rid of tenured faculty? Why file for insolvency under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA) which essentially allows the university to financially restructure and get around the exigency clauses.
Financial pressure is needed to create a situation whereby a university may eventually feel it needs to file for insolvency. Ontario universities have been subject to essentially declining or frozen grant funding for a number of years now. They have compensated by raising the revenue portion from tuition on domestic students, but the Ontario government decided to cut tuition fees by ten percent and then frozen them. Indeed, it has now extended the freeze for a second year because it says it “wants to protect students’ and families’ pocketbooks during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Now, Ontario and Canadian demographics are such that the pool of domestic university aged students has not been growing substantially and the result is the pursuit of international students who not only are coming in large numbers but can be charged higher tuition than domestic students. However, on the same day that Ontario announced that it was extending the Ontario domestic student freeze another year (out of province students are exempt from the freeze) it was also revealed that the federal government was facing demands by Ontario to suspend the entry into Ontario of international students. Needless to say, given the importance of international students and their tuition to the finances of many Ontario universities, the results for university finances this fall would be catastrophic.
So, what are we to make of all this? Is this all an unfortunate coincidence of a number of independent measures and decisions randomly coming together to create a financial storm for the university sector? Is it simply the result of a government that does not understand how to consult and as a result makes damaging policy decisions that border on incompetence? Or has the government decided to take the case of Laurentian as an opportunity to see if it can create the nudge for massive changes in a university sector that to date has been able to resist change?
Of course, the pursuit of such a strategy requires a sophisticated and calculating behind the scenes over-mind and the Ontario government to date has not exhibited such a tendency. It probably is a combination of coincidence and poor policy making. On the other hand, it could be as simple as the Ontario government realizing that most people do not care too much about universities making them an easy target for financial cuts to what remains of government university funding down the road. Smaller universities in the end require less grant funding.
