Danielle Drescher said when she heard her program at Laurentian University had been cut a year ago, “it felt like the world stopped on a dime.”
She knew her program, Italian studies, could be on the chopping block, and she’d been living in suspense while trying to finish out her school year. The second year student had so many questions about her future — what was she going to do?
At the time, she described the day as “catastrophic,” and involving a lot of crying.
A dark day
Drescher is one of the people affected by Laurentian University’s massive program and staff cuts that took place April 12, 2021, as part of its ongoing court-supervised insolvency restructuring under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA).
On what has been dubbed “Black Monday,” the community learned that Laurentian had cut 58 undergraduate and 11 graduate programs and 194 full-time positions (116 full-time faculty, 41 unionized staff and 37 non-union jobs).
Higher education consultant Alex Usher referred to this as “the largest set of cuts at a university ever, in Canada.”
“These program changes, combined with the recently-announced termination of our agreements with the federated universities, will focus Laurentian’s academic offerings on those programs which are of higher demand,” said a press release issued by Laurentian at the time.
“This focus will also allow us to further align our financial resources to ensure that these programs are adequately supported. Our ongoing program offerings remain extensive, and reflect the breadth of academic pursuits that are available at Laurentian.”
Twenty-nine of the programs cut were French-language programs, which recently led the French-language Services Commissioner of Ontario to say LU had neglected its obligations under the French Language Services Act.
Among the disciplines cut were music, physics, Italian studies, mathematics, midwifery, political science and many more.
Laurentian said at the time it anticipated that approximately 10 per cent of undergraduate students (excluding those studying at the federated universities) would be affected in some way by these program adjustments, as well as 44 graduate students.
(Of course, more students actually ended up being impacted after Laurentian cut ties with the federated universities operating on campus — classrooms at the University of Sudbury, Thorneloe University and the University of Sudbury are now empty as a result).
The Laurentian employees were told they were losing their jobs via group Zoom meetings.
Those let go have yet to see any severance money, as this is tied up in Laurentian’s CCAA process. Union officials say they expect those owed money to receive only a small percentage of those funds when Laurentian finally pays out its creditors.
Some Laurentian staff members belonging to the Laurentian University Staff Union (or LUSU) who lost their jobs have now been hired back. LUSU president Tom Fenske said he only has about 10 people left on the recall list, saying the obviously LU “cut too far.”
Meanwhile, the Laurentian University Faculty Association (LUFA) said the university’s faculty complement is even lower today than it was after the cuts last spring.
LUFA has filed a grievance related to Laurentian failing to replace the 10 professors who have left the university since last spring.
Students and faculty left scrambling
To mark the one-year anniversary of “Black Monday,” we decided to catch up with Drescher and others who have been impacted by the cuts to see how they’re doing today.
Drescher said that last April, she was hesitant to reach out to her professors, who, after all, had just learned they’d lost their jobs. But eventually the profs reached out to her and other students, and helped them figure out what to do.
She said she was able to transfer to the University of Toronto Mississauga, where she is enrolled in that university’s Italian studies program, and she’ll still be able to graduate on time.
“I'm really thankful that I did get to transfer,” Drescher said. “I absolutely love the school that I'm at now.”
That being said, her tuition has doubled, and for some reason, her OSAP loans got cut in half. “So this year financially has been super stressful,” she said, adding that being from a small town in southwestern Ontario, she also appreciated Laurentian’s nature-filled campus, as opposed to being in the big city.
A native of Tillsonburg, Ont., Drescher said she decided to study Italian at Laurentian after doing a student exchange in Italy in high school. She is planning to go into international relations or translation.
While Drescher had heard in advance that Italian studies might be cut by Laurentian, those involved with the midwifery program say they were in shock that their program was among those cut.
An April 2021 affidavit from Laurentian president Robert Haché said LU made the decision to close the midwifery program due to the financial costs associated with running the program that could not adequately be met by funding received from the Ministry of Colleges and Universities (MCU) and the Ministry of Health pursuant to a transfer payment agreement.
The affidavit further argued that because the midwifery program is generally regarded as “an expensive program to run (relative to other programs), it is difficult for LU to solely rely on grant funding to continue operating the program.”
Further compounding matters is the fact that the MCU has imposed an annual cap of 30 new students that may be accepted into the midwifery program at LU, which limits its potential growth, Haché said.
But the program’s former director, Lisa Morgan, said the province provided more than $1 million a year in envelope funding for the program, and tuition brought in another $1 million.
“We were a well-financed program and passed on $250,000 of our envelope to LU every year, AND (sic) they kept the students' tuition dollars,” Morgan said to Sudbury.com, in an email.
After Laurentian declared insolvency Feb. 1, 2021, Morgan she and her colleagues were “naive” and did not suspect midwifery would be on the chopping block. After a year, she continues to scratch her head.
Laurentian’s midwifery spots have now been reallocated to programs run out of Ryerson University and McMaster University, and students studying the discipline at LU transferred to these two universities.
Morgan said she is aware of the approach of the anniversary of “Black Monday,” as “this day will stand out in my life as one of the most bizarre and heartbreaking days of my life,” Morgan said, in an email.
“I recently watched a movie where the lead character fires a bunch of people via Zoom. The scene is meant to be so 'over-the-top' that it gets a laugh. How could anything so heartless and traumatic be accomplished via Zoom? It was only a little funny to me because this was my life.”
Although this was bad on the surface, the injustices rolled in rapidly after that, she said.
“There would be no severance or termination pay and our pensions were up in the air,” Morgan said.
“There was no recourse. And to make things even worse, because a retroactive pay cut had been approved, my final paycheck was withheld as I owed LU money dating back one year towards the pay cut!”
She said that one year later, she has been unsuccessful in securing work, despite four degrees and 15 years of teaching experience.
Morgan has sold her home in Sudbury, and will be moving in with her daughter in Ottawa, as she can’t qualify for a mortgage.
“I will be leaving Sudbury and not looking back,” she said. “I continue to have bitter feelings towards the LU administration and am frustrated by the news reports that show that more money has been spent restructuring than it would have costs to maintain the faculty.
“This all could have been handled so much better with more input from the people delivering the product — the professors. What is an institute of learning without teachers?”
Morgan also put us in touch with one of her former students, Chantal Longobardi, who is finishing up her final year of midwifery studies.
Longobardi said she was in “utter disbelief” a year ago when the cuts were announced, and worried that she wasn’t going to be able to graduate. “I had invested a lot of money, moved my entire family,” she said. “We were not sure what was happening.”
As it turned out, Laurentian’s midwifery classes were split in two between Ryerson and McMaster. Longobardi is now studying through Ryerson University, although she will be able to graduate from Laurentian through a “leave of permission.”
Longobardi’s family is still living in Sudbury while she’s on placement in Peterborough (this was arranged prior to LU’s announcement a year ago).
The chopping of the midwifery program at Laurentian was “just a really poor decision,” she said.
“It just goes to show just how thoughtless those decisions were,” Longobardi said. “You didn’t even dig deep to see which programs are profiting you.”
She said it’s a “huge loss to northern education, and also for midwifery alone.” With Laurentian’s midwifery program being located in Sudbury, more midwives ended up practising in Northern Ontario.
Midwifery was also offered at Laurentian in both English and French, and the program’s loss is a blow to Francophone education in the North.
“I think a lot of people were just completely flabbergasted that this program that was so well loved and elevated as one of the prime gems of the university, was all of a sudden gone,” Longobardi said.
Morale on campus ‘quite low’
As well as speaking to students and faculty, Sudbury.com requested an interview with Laurentian president Robert Haché on the occasion of the one-year anniversary of the cuts. That interview was not granted.
Students’ General Association president Eric Chappell said the impact of last year’s cuts really ranged from student to student.
These impacts have also been on top of those presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has also been very hard on students as well.
He said the SGA has helped its members by navigating the system as they found ways to complete their degrees.
“We've seen students like midwifery that had to move to other locations for completing their degrees,” he said.
“As time has gone on, more students have found pathways to completion. Even though they are a narrow pathway to completion, there has been, you know, more of that has been sorted out over time.”
Laurentian University Faculty Association (LUFA) president Fabrice Colin said last year’s cuts were “surely the darkest moments of Laurentian University.”
Of the 116 faculty positions lost at LU last year, 83 were professors who were terminated, 17 were older profs who decided to retire “to save as many jobs as possible,” and 16 were vacant positions that were eliminated, he said.
Not only were the cuts to jobs and programs devastating to the Laurentian community, they affect Greater Sudbury as a whole, Colin said, pointing to a prediction of $100 million in economic impacts made last year by a Thunder Bay economist.
“Morale is quite low on the campus,” he said, also bringing up the enrolment drops that have occurred at LU over the past year. “The community, the faculty members, the staff members, they’ve lost confidence in the leadership (of Laurentian).”
Colin said he’s looking forward to the value-for-money audit of Laurentian University by Ontario Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk, who is expected to release her report in the coming weeks.
“The work of the auditor general will shed some light on what happened because at this point,” we don’t really know what happened, he said.
LUSU president Tom Fenske remembers the LU cuts of one year ago as a “very, very dark day,” adding, “The way they went about it, the confusion, just all the processes involved, it was truly a horrible day.”
Healing is now required to mend Laurentian, and that’s going to mean new leadership, Fenske said, acknowledging this has already happened at the level of the board of governors.
“You can’t snap a finger and make everyone feel better about it (the cuts),” he said. “I think that the institution needs to do a much better job on helping people heal from it.”
