I have not lived in Sudbury for several years, but as a former Laurentian University professor I have always felt close and committed to the institution where I was employed for 35 years. Recently, that feeling of closeness, now tinged with sadness, has been rendered more profound because of the events that have taken place at Laurentian and about which I have been reading for a few sad weeks. Despite President Robert Haché’s missives, couched in comforting and oleaginous prose, the facts, as I understand them at least, belie his positive President-speak language. One hundred-plus professors kicked to the curb in a shockingly tawdry fashion — by Zoom, no less.— 60 plus programmes jettisoned with, as far as I can see, no clear rationale for tossing them overboard.
Some say, with some justification no doubt, that government underfunding is the issue, but when has it ever been otherwise in the Ontario university system? I can never remember a time when universities in this province haven’t complained to whatever government was in power that they couldn’t fulfill their mandates because they had to do more with less. Such is the way of that world. And still these universities, including Laurentian, got on with it without eviscerating programmes and people the way Laurentian is in the process of doing in a seemingly slash and burn fashion.
What needs to be scrutinized to an extent not yet fully accomplished perhaps, is the way in which Laurentian has effectively fouled its own nest by spending money it had no right to spend to pay for its own profligate behaviour: rather than trying to work within its means at a time of restraint, it increased costs by adding new and expensive programmes, bloating the administrative side of the enterprise, and buying or building new infrastructure. Others have asked this question but it cannot be asked often enough: where was the Board of Governors when all of this was happening, a board that had government representatives sitting on it?
And what about the students who have lost their programmes as a result of decisions recently taken? For them, the tragedy could not be greater. The toll taken on many of them simply cannot be assessed or measured. The sadness is almost beyond words.
Students lost to the institution; professors fired; programmes excised; the federation universities apparently gone the way of all flesh. When will Laurentian stop loping off its own limbs? As is the case with out-of-control flesh eating disease, there’s only so much amputation that can happen before the patient succumbs to the illness. Through its actions, Laurentian has done irreparable harm to its body politic. Somehow it needs to heal.
Douglas Parker
Ottawa
VP Academic, Laurentian University, 1998-2004