Only time will tell if Tibbits is tarnished

An Ontario college president, unfiltered.

That might be the best — and certainly the most generous — way to describe Conestoga College president John Tibbits’ unscripted, straight-from-the-hip outburst last week at a forum meant to promote Conestoga’s social and economic impact in the community.

The forum was promoting a study that concluded that Conestoga College is “indispensable to the prosperity of the local community by helping both younger and older workers adapt to the changes and challenges of the economic environment.”

Given the increasing scrutiny of late around the number of international student visas issued to Conestoga College, it’s hard to view the event as much more than an exercise in public relations.

Especially since the school’s reputation could speak for itself.

Under Tibbits’ stewardship for more than three decades, Conestoga has set the standard for college education, placing it on par with other post-secondary options. Conestoga also became the first college in Ontario to offer an accredited engineering program.

Tibbits also figured out, long before others, that international students were not only key to the success of an underfunded post-secondary system but also a means of solving a national labour shortage. As Tibbits correctly points out, Conestoga was only doing what the federal government allowed it to do.

But there’s another side to that story and it’s one that has put Conestoga College under the microscope.

University of Waterloo economics professor Mikal Skuterud notes that the Foreign Student Program has “shifted its objective from attracting and retaining top talent … to maximizing tuition revenues of post-secondary institutions, commissions of student recruiters, and low-wage labour for businesses.”

Meantime, Mike Moffat, founding director of PLACE Centre and one of Canada’s foremost voices on housing, noted the trends in student visa applications, pointing out that the more than 30,000 issued to Conestoga College in 2023 were “more than twice as many as any other institution in Canada.”

With that in mind, it might be easier to understand why Tibbits may have felt last week that the best defence was a good offence, and when accused by a fellow college president of being a “bad actor” in the international student game, Tibbits fired back.

Only he fired back, according to the school’s board of governors, using language that is “unacceptable and does not align with the values and principles of our institution.”

It serves no purpose here to repeat the unsavoury language, though rest assured it was most unbecoming of a college president and community leader.

What would serve us well is to consider the conditions in which some students in our community find themselves living and ask how we can do better for them.

As for President Tibbits, should one inappropriate outburst tarnish an otherwise highly polished legacy? Probably not, but that’s for the board to decide.

Meantime, there’s also a campus in Waterloo that bears Tibbits’ name.

For how long will we travel past that building and wonder, “Isn’t that named after the guy who called another college president a youknow-what?”

Only time will tell.

The more than 30,000 student visas issued to Conestoga College in 2023 were “more than twice as many as any other institution in Canada.”