This week in austerity and budget cut news #6

There is no shortage of material for these newsletters! We have been gathering a lot of information on austerity measures at other schools and on Nous. So far the big lessons from elsewhere are to pay attention, learn as much as you can, and build community to make it more possible to challenge changes that are damaging to education, collegial governance, working conditions, and job security.

1. On Monday the provincial government announced a modest increase in funding for universities and colleges. The amount is less than half of what was recommended by the government’s own Blue Ribbon Panel last year. The freeze on tuition remains. A $15 million Efficiency and Accountability Fund will be used for “third party reviews [like Nous’s UniForum survey and benchmarking process] that will identify actions institutions can take to drive long-term cost savings and positive outcomes for students and communities.” 

The Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA) released a statement, noting that even with the addition of the promised $1.3 billion, Ontario universities will continue to be funded at a lower rate than universities in all other provinces. OCUFA identified the $15 million Efficiency and Accountability Fund as a “gift to private consulting firms who have no connection or investment in our public postsecondary system.”

On Monday afternoon Western University released a statement critical of the announcement and ongoing under-funding in Ontario.

2. The influence of external consultants, like the Nous Group, is being felt not just at the institutional level but across the sector, as evident in the provincial funding announcement. Last fall’s Blue Ribbon Panel report drew on discussions with Nous to promote benchmarking (a process that Nous will soon be carrying out for Queen’s) across the sector (see page 33). Indeed, the report suggests that the Council of Ontario Universities could facilitate this approach to “cost efficiency and effectiveness.”

3. With the support of QUFA, QCAA has organized a hybrid (in person with online option) teach-in to address some of the issues raised by the introduction of Nous to our campus. Titled “Consulting Firms, Benchmarking, and the Politics of Ratings,” the teach-in will be held on Monday March 4th, from 12-1:30 pm, in the Mitchell Hall Event Commons (which is the room with the huge windows on the first floor). Refreshments will be available. The teach-in will also be available at this link via Zoom. Speakers will include: Dr. Michael Savage, Senior Research Analyst at OCUFA and a former consultant who has worked with both Higher Education Strategy Associates and Nous Group; Dr. Norma Möllers, Department of Sociology;  and, Dr.  David McDonald, Department of Global Development Studies. The teach-in is the opening event of QCAA’s Week of Action Against Austerity. A poster for the teach-in is attached.

4. QCAA’s Week of Action Against Austerity will run from Monday March 4th until Friday March 8th. Events will include the teach-in, a documentary film screening about student activism against austerity at Trent University, an after-work social (with optional poster making) at the Grad Club, a Faculty of Arts and Science Faculty Board meeting, and a No Cuts at Queen’s rally outside Richardson Hall. Times, places, and more info available on the QCAA website.

5. On Monday, QUFA sent a strongly-worded open letter to the Principal and Provost, reminding them, among other things, “that the CA envisions the University as a single financial entity where resources are deployed as needed, including by means of unit cross-subsidization, to maintain the academic mission of the institution. That mission is also paramount over all others.”

6. Last week the Dean of Student Affairs, Ann Tierney, hosted a town hall meeting for staff. Staff were told Student Affairs would receive a 2% reduction in shared services transfers over the next three years. The Dean was “hopeful” that this cut would not affect Student Affairs “too much.” Staff asked questions about lay-offs, further rounds of the UniForum survey, early retirement incentives to reduce staff numbers by attrition rather than layoffs, and support for employees in the face of constant uncertainty. They received no conclusive answers.

7. Dr. Daryn Lehoux, Head of the Department of Classics at Queen’s, wrote a column for Saturday’s Globe and Mail on the purpose and value of the humanities. Lehoux wrote that humanities courses help students develop critical skills, including “the close examination, careful analysis, creative reconfiguring and constructive debating of challenging questions that have no easy, right-or-wrong answers. Those arecritical job skills, are they not?” He concludes by challenging the current tendency to force universities to fit frameworks more appropriate to businesses: “a university is not like a business in one very important way – education is a value, and education has value, all by itself…At universities, we are educating citizens to think critically and to participate intelligently in our democracy, in our society, and in our world. And if money, and money alone, now becomes the top priority of Canada’s research and teaching institutions, then our country and our world are in deep trouble.”

8. A recent article in The Conversation (an online publication that makes academic research and analysis available to a broader public) also weighed in on the question of what a university education is for, especially in terms of the relationship between university degrees and the job market.

9. QCAA has been learning about the aftermath of Nous-led services effectiveness surveys at other universities. Staffing cuts and the centralization and automation of services have been key strategies for achieving ‘efficiency’ at schools in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and Canada. This article from the student newspaper at the University of Alberta describes how the provision of services changed during the restructuring that was imposed post-Nous.

10. At some universities Nous has recommended the restructuring of university collegial governance systems. This was the case at Laurentian.  As Alex Usher of Higher Education Strategy Associates noted in 2022: “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.” Needless to say, there is nothing about the financial crisis at Laurentian that necessitated these particular changes.