University debacles show failure of oversight
Just when life couldn’t get any worse for Ontario’s universities, one campus is on life support and another is dead on arrival. Still others are caught between credit watch and death watch.
The virtual bankruptcy of Sudbury’s Laurentian University, in mid-pandemic and midterm, is a reminder that our post-secondary institutions have long been running on empty: COVID-19 has emptied many campuses of local students, and weaned them from the cash cow of foreign enrolments.
Now, the slow drip of government-controlled cash flow — grants are frozen and tuition fees were cut by Premier Doug Ford — leaves universities more vulnerable than ever to the vagaries of the coronavirus. And in need of a course correction.
When businesses go bankrupt, they fail for a reason — they’re spending more than they’re earning, usually when people aren’t buying what they’re selling. Declining enrolments at Laurentian are being blamed on demographic shifts up north, but a better explanation may be that it wasn’t adapting to changing demand, and more demanding students.
Today, campuses with preexisting co-morbidities — declining enrolments and rising deficits — are the most exposed. Small universities — mostly but not solely in the North — are struggling to hit their marks and find their markets.
Larger universities are more resilient — for the moment. But the entire post-secondary sector has been shaken by Laurentian’s unprecedented decision to file for creditor protection. (Full disclosure: I’ve been a visiting professor and practitioner at Ryerson University since 2017.)
More than a failing grade, it’s a system failure — a case study in university mismanagement and blind governance by its board of directors, but also blinkered government oversight. Laurentian kept spending money it didn’t have for professors it didn’t need to keep teaching students it no longer had.
That same blind spot has been exposed with the Ford government’s erratic planning for a Toronto-based Frenchlanguage university, which is looking more like a Potemkin campus. Behind the façade, fewer than 50 francophone students have applied to study in what is arguably Ontario’s least francophone-friendly environment.
Laurentian’s cry for help is being described as the canary in the coal mine. Shovelling cash into a stillborn French campus in anglo Toronto feels like a bottomless money pit.
How to explain the government’s margin of error? It is better at passing the buck than showing us the money.
The response from Colleges and Universities Minister Ross Romano to Laurentian’s death throes was to plead ignorance, feign surprise and blame its supposedly self-governing board. But that suggests wilful blindness from a government with a mind of its own.
The Ford government has been imposing its vision on the post-secondary sector from the first — appointing its own board members (whose impeccable Progressive Conservative credentials often exceed their pedagogical or pecuniary capabilities) since winning power. Fair enough, but don’t blame the board if you control the board’s membership.
Ford’s second contribution was to order an unexpected 10 per cent tuition cut — the Tory equivalent of spending (in this case saving) other people’s money, without having to make up the difference. By permanently depriving campuses of cash flow two years ago, the government precluded the possibility of offering students a well-deserved temporary discount these last two semesters, when COVID-19 forced classes online.
The Tories also demanded that universities make most student fees optional, and ordered everyone to come up with free speech policies — a fashion imported from America as flavour of the month. And they imposed comprehensive new performance metrics on universities that were tied to the economic success of their graduates — oblivious to the ups and downs of the economy (which can render even the best educated STEM graduate unemployable in a bad business cycle — or a brutal pandemic).
Blame the former minister, Dr. Merrilee Fullerton (now working her magic in longterm care) who seemed intent on transforming the sector without talking to anyone. When Romano inherited the post-secondary mess in 2019, he talked to everyone without truly transforming anything.
To claim now that he didn’t see any of it coming, when his government not only appoints the boards but oversees all the financials, sounds awfully short-sighted. True, many problems predate the Tories, but their contribution to the disruption facing universities was an eruption of political ideology rather than informed pedagogy.
As stewards of higher education, the Tories can point with unjustified pride to shepherding a bizarre application for university status by Canada Christian College, a bible college whose claim to fame is its infamous president, the homophobic and Islamophobic so-called “Dr.” Charles McVety. A college, as reported in previous columns, whose financials are as mysterious as its president’s musings are notorious.
That Ford was so ready to devalue the currency of postsecondary schooling by upgrading that benighted campus revealed how little he values higher education in a province that depends on the knowledge economy. Today, for better or for worse, student enrolment is shifting dramatically from the humanities to life sciences, and from the pursuit of pure knowledge to the hunt for applied learning that leads to jobs.
COVID-19’s shift to online learning has spurred even more questioning of traditional classroom teaching models, from the rigidity of (overpaid) tenured positions to the precarity of (underpaid) part-time professors. And the vulnerability of (overstretched) students.
So much disruption requires adaptation. So far the response has been distraction and inaction.