Laurentian University and my take on the truth: sadly, the truth hurts.
1. Insolvency and CCAA protection should never have occurred.
2. Entire programs were cut vertically and several excellent faculty members were lost.
3. In the uncut programs, several productive senior faculty members were cut horizontally because of their "high" salaries. $200,000 per year toward the end of your career is not a high salary. People need to remember that many of us went to school for 12 years after high school to obtain our Ph.Ds.
We did this because we liked doing research and contributing to academia. We weren't paid well throughout our entire careers. If we had worked in an organization for those 12 years, we would have risen through the ranks and had salaries that were at least triple what we made as academics by the time we were near the end of our careers.
Furthermore, we would not have accrued debt. We would have retired long ago with massive RRSPs: This involves opportunity costs.
Note that people making enormous amounts of money in the private sector do not have their salaries revealed on the Sunshine List: People would be astounded by their gross salaries and they have deductions that are not available to academics.
4. Because of changes in the qualifications necessary for the title of full professor, Laurentian University will likely promote several unqualified people to full professor in order to appear as though it has senior faculty. After the present culling of productive senior faculty members, job titles will be fairly unrelated to salaries (that is, they will not make more money as a function of this change in title). Any decent academic who was not cut at Laurentian University will be on the job market now and will leave, if possible, because of the potential lack of job security.
5. No university that I know of has no Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy Departments (and several other departments and programs that were culled).
6. Few people are going to apply for admission to Laurentian University because its future is still unclear and it lacks any breadth of programs.
7. Wrap all of this together and it might be the death knell of the university.
8. The economy of Sudbury will be greatly and adversely affected.
9. People don't like to hear the truth even when the truth hurts.
Robert C. Sinclair, Ph.D.
President & CEO
Sinclair & Associates Consulting