“I’d wear it on a t-shirt”: The National Post Defangs Nous 

Thursday’s National Post has a cracker of a story on Nous, the consulting firm that has taken up residence in at least 20 Canadian universities since the start of the pandemic. The article follows news of Nous’ recent troubles in its home country, where its contracts with the Australian National University have been investigated by parliament. 

The piece describes the rapid spread of Nous’s “slash-and-burn” template across Canada. Fueled by stagnant provincial funding, the company has found a growing series of eager hosts for its services. In the process, Nous is helping to reconfigure structures of power and governance in contemporary universities. 

The author, Joseph Brean, speaks to Deb Verhoeven, a professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Alberta, who describes how “middle-ranking administrators feel their fate is ‘informally tethered to the top dog.” This helps to create a “general sense of precarity, in which nothing is certain because senior management is just going to change again in a few years.” In this environment, university leaders become “a class apart….no longer senior academics who have risen through the campus ranks, but more like movable CEOs.”

The emergence of the “hatchet man” who is appointed to enforce blunt budget cuts and then get out of dodge is familiar terrain for Brean, a Queen’s alumnus who in January 2024 broke news of Queen’s Provost Matthew Evans’ town hall “gaffe” to a national audience. 

What becomes clear in yesterday’s story is that the administration signed its contract with Nous just one week before the testy town hall meeting at which the Provost made the reputation-damaging claim that serious budget cuts were necessary to ensure the university’s very survival. The terms of the client service agreement included that Nous would “support Queen’s” in making “an overarching narrative” of a “case for change.”

Nous calls this narrative “renewal,” which Brean notes is described by critics as “a misleading concept, a sly branding of a corporatization mission that seeks only cost savings through blunt budget cuts justified by inflated claims of crisis based on hysterical readings of an increasingly complex table of benchmarks.” 

Despite recent news that the Ontario government is going to revamp university funding, the Nous executives Brean interviews dismiss the idea that universities should advocate for funding from governments as unrealistic and instead argue (with what Brean terms “a hint of smugness”) that universities must be “financially literate.”

Sound familiar?

For Brean, Nous is a vampire offering “endless renewal” in exchange for the blood of public education (Verhoeven & Eltham, 2023), a nickname that Nous executives seem to revel in: “I’d wear it on a t-shirt,” said Matt Durnin, principal of the group. 

For the administrative thralls at Queen’s, the blood bond hasn’t been straightforward, thanks to a “well-organized anti-austerity movement at Queen’s” which Brean notes has made it hard for university leaders across Canada to use Nous. 

Let’s keep that up, shall we?