After 20 torturous months of the CCAA, the Laurentian administration would like the public to believe the CCAA process is coming to an end, but it is not.
Laurentian’s destructive CCAA strategy will live on in a depleted Laurentian 2.0 – not in a vibrant public university. Present and future students and faculty will continue to suffer from Laurentian’s brutal program and services cuts. Our communities will continue to suffer from the loss of the arts, basic science, cultural, and sports activities at Laurentian.
In their decision to resort to the CCAA, the Laurentian board of governors left an enormous cultural crater in our region and its negative impacts are likely to be felt for generations to come.
Laurentian’s administrators and board of governors are raising unrealistic expectations that Laurentian will bounce back to financial health, restore programs, and live up to its tricultural mandate, once they emerge from the CCAA. This is an illusion. Laurentian 2.0 will not resurrect the range of programs, proper staffing, and community connections it once had.
As should be clear, program downsizing and corporate restructuring was the main objective of the CCAA — through breaking collective agreements and ignoring responsibilities to students and communities. Now the enrolment situation is worse, and Laurentian’s public reputation is in tatters.
The only “vision” of the future we hear from the soon-to-be-ex-president Robert Haché is the doctrine of corporatist education: making programs fit market demands, cutting spending on faculty and raising tuition fees. Of course, they also raise Laurentian’s unique tricultural character – words whose substance they have gutted.
After many failures, will the board finally do the right thing?
The LU board of governors and its chair, Jeff Bangs, have an uphill struggle to rebuild the trust they lost. They never once challenged the on-going privatization and corporatization of Laurentian University. Their continued strategy to use the CCAA to downsize and restructure Laurentian was yet more confirmation of their commitment to corporate downsizing and educational decline in Sudbury.
So far the Laurentian board hasn’t uttered a peep about the travesty of their treatment of the federated universities and their students, faculty and staff — or their colonialist contempt for consultation in the closing of the Indigenous Studies program, the second oldest in Canada. Will the board be supportive of Indigenous programs outside Laurentian’s control, as well as recognize the need for an independent Indigenous university?
Laurentian’s slashing of half of the Francophone programs it once offered caused a seismic shift in the Franco-Ontarian community, such that the community itself, including leading cultural organizations in Sudbury, has turned its back on Laurentian.
Will they honour the demands for the establishment of a new Franco-Ontarian university in Sudbury? Will they agree to transfer Laurentian’s remaining Francophone programs to the Université de Sudbury?
The CCAA was also destructive for Anglophone programs, students, and faculty. It devastated arts and basic sciences programs, cultural and sports activities. What will the board do now to reestablish serious programs in Music, Physics, Italian, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies – and what will they do about compensating the many donations and other contributions of local community organizations, individuals, and small businesses to Laurentian?
Laurentian’s actions will cause many Northern students to leave, if they can. But many people in our communities depend on accessible in-person university programs right here. Those with local jobs, sole parents, persons with disabilities, and elders cannot simply move away for university programs.
Here is the testimony of one student impacted by the CCAA: “As a single parent with disabilities who can only go to a university in my own community, it’s really sad a lot of the courses are gone. It’s sad that a lot of students and former professors have moved on. I am stuck. I can’t go anywhere.”
How will Mr. Bangs and his board respond to the educational needs of this student and others?
The underlying question that Mr. Bangs and the board will have to face is increasingly clear: whether they will support continued privatization and corporatization of Laurentian or whether they will advocate openly for Laurentian as a serious public university?
Here in Sudbury, the infamous CCAA legacy is marked in wrecked studies and careers, division, and the creation of a cultural crater in our communities. The departure of a few misleaders in no way makes up for the destruction.
This is a time of deep social loss, not a time to move on, forget and accept injustice. It is a time to regroup and to challenge the multiple disastrous outcomes of the CCAA. If we don’t fight against the CCAA and its consequences, it will be deployed elsewhere. If those of us in the North don’t fight against the CCAA, we will be see the door open to other injustices, other cuts to public services, and yet more decline in our futures.
The Tricultural Committee will continue the fight for a truly public university system in Sudbury and Northern Ontario. We call for the restoration of public university education at Sudbury funded as independent universities representing Indigenous, Franco-Ontarian and Anglophone communities with equal rights working mutually for the common good of the peoples and land of Northern Ontario.
Our recommendations:
- The province should place Laurentian under another public university for a limited period until more open and collegial policies are adopted and implemented.
- The province should support the establishing of independent Indigenous and Franco-Ontarian universities and, further, support a mandate change in Laurentian to be a public, community-oriented English-language university with a full range of programs, including in arts, culture, and basic sciences.
- The misleadership and failures of Laurentian’s administration and board should be subject to a public inquiry and those responsible held accountable.
The Tricultural Committee for University Education at Sudbury is made up of representatives of Save our Sudbury, the Coalition nord-ontarienne pour une université de langue française à Sudbury, and key leaders of local Indigenous communities, who look to preserve the tricultural mandate at Laurentian University to serve the Anglophone, Francophone and Indigenous communities.
