Unrepentant and defiant, Laurentian’s board of governors denies responsibility for their own insolvency decision.
As members of the Terminated Faculty Committee, we read the recent opinion column by Jeff Bangs “Laurentian board chair urges ‘yes’ vote from creditors” with a mix of disappointment and disbelief.
We’re disappointed because Mr. Bangs urges Laurentian’s current and former employees to vote “yes” to the proposed Plan of Compromise and Arrangement that would see creditors, including former employees, receive as little as 14 pennies for every dollar owed to us, over as protracted a period as four years. This would mean walking away from hundreds of thousands of dollars of our own money.
Bangs also accuses those who believe that there should be more debate than “vote my way or the university will close” as disseminating “misinformation in the community.”
While accusing us of “preying on peoples’ hopes and fears,” in the next breath Bangs warns that the only alternative to a vote “for” the plan is that “jobs will be eliminated, pension plans terminated and students dispersed to other post-secondary institutions.”
It seems to us that Mr. Bangs is actually the one guilty of fear-mongering. It's a weapon the Laurentian administration has been using throughout this process.
For example, on "Black Monday," April 12th, 2021, only hours after firing 116 professors, Laurentian coerced the faculty association into ratifying a collective agreement under threat of the university shutting down. The repeated threats of 'going into liquidation' by the university have been repeated so often, they no longer have any ring of truth to them.
Terminated former faculty have collectively experienced economic devastation, and the careers for which we trained for over a decade have been wiped out. Yet Bangs’ appeal to us is that it would be unimaginable to see Laurentian disappear, and according to him, the responsibility for the failure of the university’s plan would fall on our shoulders.
We remind Mr. Bangs that the very faculty who were terminated last spring are among those who built Laurentian into the institution it once was before the board of governors and President Robert Haché got their hands on it.
However, Mr. Bangs doesn't acknowledge that, as the auditor general reported, the board of governors made the “strategic” choice to restructure the university through the CCAA insolvency process when there were other options available. Those other options included accepting an offer of $100 million from the provincial government which would have avoided the need for this CCAA insolvency process in the first place.
Laurentian’s secretive practices have been catalogued by the Auditor General in two interim reports. Last December she wrote that “Laurentian [discouraged] university staff from speaking freely with us [...]” and stated that Laurentian’s “protocols have created a culture of fear.” Earlier this year, the Ontario Legislature had to resort to issuing an unprecedented Speaker’s Warrant to extract financial information from Laurentian. The university’s lawyer threatened to go to the Supreme Court of Canada in order to “protect” the university’s right to maintain its secrets.
We’re in disbelief because the university’s resistance to transparency still hasn’t ended. They’ve provided us with a “yes or no” option, as though these were the only choices before us – and they haven’t given us enough information to make a reasoned decision. For example, the real estate review is under wraps, and the correspondence between the university and the Ministry of Colleges and Universities is under a court-ordered ‘sealing order’ at the request of Laurentian’s lawyers.
We haven’t even been provided with the financial information that would tell us what Laurentian will do with the $30-$40 million in annual savings realized by cutting 195 jobs. In an email, the court-appointed monitor has confirmed the administration and the board of Laurentian have chosen not to compensate terminated employees for these savings, but will instead spend it on building maintenance and other expenses.
This means that terminated faculty and staff have been involuntarily ‘drafted’ into subsidizing Laurentian University’s reconstruction.
Just as there were alternatives to claiming insolvency, there are alternatives to the unfair plan of arrangement we’ve been asked to vote on – a plan that would see Laurentian governed with less voice for faculty, and more board input.
Remember, this is the same clan that got Laurentian into this mess in the first place.
Mr. Bangs surely must know that he is making empty threats, and trying to terrify people so that they vote yes, rather than doing his job as board chair to ensure that Laurentian gets the government support that it needs.
The current plan is absolutely unacceptable; it would change the nature of the university, and it offers nothing of substance to terminated faculty who lost their jobs — not because they did something wrong, but because LU was mismanaged by the incompetent board that is now led by Mr. Bangs.
Mr. Bangs’ claims are both tone-deaf and disingenuous. He urges a “yes” vote in order to preserve, among other things, an institution that is important to the Indigenous and Francophone communities, even though, in the course of the CCAA process, the second oldest Indigenous Studies program in North America was closed thanks to the board’s actions, and the Francophone programs at Laurentian were decimated by cuts that were disproportionately aimed at them.
The damage to these communities won’t result from a failure of the plan, because it’s already been done.
Finally, current employees of Laurentian University should understand the acceptance of a plan that treats terminated faculty so shabbily is a sign they will be treated in the same way, should there be more job cuts in their future.
When will Mr. Bangs and the board take responsibility for their actions that brought us to this precipice in the first place? We're still waiting for an acknowledgement that the Auditor General of Ontario's independent audit and interim reports are a more accurate reflection of the truth.
Terminated faculty don't accept Mr. Bangs' version of events, or the certainty that he alone knows the outcome of a rejected plan. In their back-to-back bailouts that total $116.5 million, we believe that the provincial government has committed to the continued existence of a university in Sudbury.
While the closure of Laurentian University may be possible, we believe another university with a new name and a fresh board of governors will very likely take its place.
Jeff Bangs’ disingenuous arguments and blatant fear-mongering are unworthy of a board of governors chairperson representing a publicly funded university, even one as sorely mismanaged as Laurentian has been.
The path he proposes leads to a top-down, corporatized and privatized university, and disregards community needs. The board's proposed model is built on injustice, not only to many terminated and dedicated faculty, but to many students and remaining faculty, to Indigenous and Franco-Ontarian communities, among others.
In light of the absence of facts, and the manipulation of the real options before us, we have no choice but to encourage all former and current employees of Laurentian to vote against the plan of arrangement as it now stands.
The Laurentian University Terminated Faculty Committee is made up of former members of the university staff who lost their positions at the school as a result of the insolvency proceedings.
