Let’s start with the money.
$20.4 million.
1. Queen’s University ended the 2023-24 fiscal year with an operating surplus of $20.4 million. The year-end consolidated financial statements are included in the agenda package for this weekend’s Board of Trustees meeting. QCAA has posted a commentary on the statement that draws our attention to the unusual accounting categories the statement’s authors developed to maintain the ‘crisis’ narrative that has been driving policy decisions at the university for the past 18 months. Once again, the University has decided that very little of the considerable income earned on its investments – the Pooled Investment Fund (PIF) earned $70.6 million – over the past year will be used to support the operating budget. As the QCAA commentary says: “Queen’s’ internally restricted funds (i.e., non-endowment funds) grew from $389.6 million to $405.5 million while the administration sent message after message about the dire state of its financial picture. This total includes $111 million in capital reserves not allocated to any project.”
A $20.4 million surplus. Think of this number while you are doing the work of your staff colleagues who were laid off or not renewed this summer, or while you are teaching a class that has twice as many students as last year, or while you are helping students navigate the reduction in course options for finishing their degrees, or while you are trying to figure out how you will recruit the students you need in your lab should the proposal to cut the QGA (Queen’s Graduate Award) for master’s students take effect.
The University’s overall surplus for 2023-24 was $76.2 million.
2. A post to the Queen’s University community on Reddit offers some AI-generated headlines that capture the creativity and originality of the accounting language in the university’s financial statements. Two examples: “In Bold Move, University Redefines ‘Profit’ as ‘Loss-Not-Yet-Realized’”, and “University Proudly Announces Record-Breaking ‘Pre-Income Deficit.’”
3. In other mind-boggling news, this past week the Society of Graduate and Professional Students (SGPS) announced that the University’s “Senior Leadership Team” (a classificatory category that here and elsewhere often signifies a body engaged in unilateral, non-consultative decision-making for “efficiency’s sake”) is planning to stop offering Queen’s Graduate Awards (QGA) to master’s students in 2025. The SGPS has released a statement and call to action and an FAQ. QCAA has posted a short commentary. Queen’s Students vs Cuts are calling for a student walk-out tomorrow – Friday 27 September at noon at Richardson Hall – to save grad funding and demand the resignations of the Provost and Principal.
At today’s (26 September) Senate meeting, Senators were to be asked to approve the minutes from the previous meeting, including this statement: “In response to a question, Principal Deane noted that graduate student support is a priority for Queen’s and that the university is working on an internal approach to increase such support, given that the federal investment in graduate scholarships is not as significant as the institution would have liked.”
4. And just in case you thought we might get through a whole issue of the newsletter without special attention to the Faculty of Arts and Science, where the effects of the manufactured budget crisis have been most keenly felt … FAS Faculty Board meets tomorrow, Friday 27 September at 2:30 pm in Dupuis 217. The important news here is that given inadequate technical/staff support for Faculty Board, members are now required to attend in person to vote. The meeting will be streamed over Zoom (Meeting ID: 997 5865 7092 Passcode: 388880), but those attending remotely will not be able to vote. FAS is the only Faculty to limit participation in hybrid meetings in this way. Faculty Board is a key component of collegial governance; meetings are where we discuss and make decisions pertaining to the academic functions of FAS. We should be doing all we can to increase, not restrict, people’s ability to contribute. The agenda for tomorrow’s meeting is available here.
Related to the FAS restrictions on participation in collegial governance – the Board of Trustees is now restricting observers of Board meetings to attendance via Zoom. Previously, observers attended meetings in person.
5. Thanks to members of the Department of Biology for writing an open letter detailing the impact of budget cuts on their ability to maintain the quality of their programs and conduct their research. They write: “We hope this letter will inspire other faculties/departments/schools to speak out and communicate widely on this issue, and ultimately that this letter will engender a sense of cohesiveness and community across those departments/schools most severely affected to strongly resist further cuts. The bottom line is that the budget cut impacts are being felt within each department/school, and there’s little avenue apart from rumours and gossip to get a sense of how other departments are being impacted. Transparency from the administration, and open communication among departments and schools, both seem sorely lacking, and so faculty and staff perspectives are constrained in departmental silos that smack of a ‘divide and rule’ administrative approach.”
6. In case you missed it: a post on the QCAA blog about the ‘resiliency’ workshops that were offered to Queen’s employees this summer. At a time when morale at the university could not be lower, when staff are struggling with over-work and the frustrations that come from poorly implemented structural changes, workshop participants were advised to turn “lemons into lemonade,” and to “smile more.” Among the other strategies suggested by the workshop facilitator: “getting down on the ground for a set of push-ups to stop the train of negative thoughts and keeping a rubber band on one’s wrist to be snapped in moments of difficulty.”
Also on the QCAA blog, a post about equity issues related to the recent round of staff layoffs.
7. Over the summer QCAA released a report called An Indictment of Leadership. “The report turns the evaluative lens away from frontline staff towards senior administration, emphasizing their increasing ineffectiveness in supporting Queen’s’ academic mission. The data QCAA gathered shows that spending on administration started outpacing spending on teaching in the mid-1990s, and that in 2024 administrators gobble up 18% of the university’s shared services budget, even as they represent only 1% of academic staff. Employees state overwhelmingly that they have lost faith in senior leadership, and An Indictment of Leadership explains why.” The report came out shortly after members of the Queen’s Management and Professional Group (Grades 10-14) had been granted a pay increase of between 4.25 and 4.75%.
Queen's Coalition Against Austerity 
