Issues of accuracy and trust came up as Laurentian University’s senate discussed consultants’ reports on reforming the insolvent university.
Earlier this month, reports authored by an outside consultant outlining recommendations to guide the transformation of Laurentian in years to come were released. One of those recommendations focuses on operations at LU, the other on governance.
But the real work is still ahead — what to do with the information presented in the reports, which were authored by the firm Nous Group.
A discussion of the Nous reports took place at a March 22 meeting of the LU senate, although no decisions were made that day.
The governing body was unable to take any actions on the matter at this week’s meeting, as the agenda item on the Nous reports had been put under “discussion items” instead of “decision items.”
But Laurentian president Robert Haché said that the senate needs to make some progress by late this spring toward implementing the changes recommended in the report.
The university goes back before the court May 31 under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA), at which time it will move toward a plan of arrangement with its creditors, which will set how they will be paid out.
Haché said the Nous report will inform the plan of arrangement.
Many senate members expressed their concern about the situation, including senate member Ernst Gerhardt, who’s an English professor at Laurentian.
He said he found several factual inaccuracies within the report. For example, the governance report gives a quote from a senator (on page 38) that Laurentian’s senate never agrees to close programs, even when they didn’t have students for years.
But Gerhardt said this is factually untrue, as the senate does close programs (even outside of the CCAA process) — he said he was among the faculty members who worked for almost two years to end the rhetoric stream of the English program last year.
He said he was worried the report was going to be accepted without the same kind of critical study that would be applied to academic work.
“I guess that's my concern, is that this report is already in a process that's rapidly hurtling towards May 31,” he said.
“This report itself will form part of the credit arrangements that you've just spoken of. And yet, there are significant problems with it that one would hope would be addressed, right? One would hope that it would not just be accepted, because it's a report written by consultants.”
Later in the meeting, after several senators expressed their concerns about the situation, Haché said it’s important not to “overemphasize the role of creditors.”
He said he thinks it would be “overstating” that they would be drilling down to the minutiae of the report.
“I think they have a high-level expectation,” Haché said. “And I think that's reasonable, that they want to know that the stewardship of the university will be done in an appropriate manner going forward, but I don't think any of them claims to be an expert in the university governance.”
Senate member Christina McMillan-Boyles, a nursing professor, said she would like to see “actionable considerations” from the senate on what they’re “actually going to do with this report,” looking at not only its flaws, but what is valuable.
Haché said his preference would be to have a smaller group work on the issue, and report back to the senate, although he’s happy to work with the full group on the Nous report, if that’s what is necessary.
He said that one of the challenges with Laurentian’s senate is that it doesn’t seem to trust its committees.
“But there needs to be a way to move the conversation forward productively, and absolutely, there is a need to rebuild trust,” Haché said.
Laurentian University Staff Union (LUSU) president Tom Fenske also commented on these trust issues, saying “in the not-too-distant past, as you can imagine, there was a body of the Senate created that led to a significant amount of people leaving the university.”
Fenske was referring to a committee of senate that chose the programs that were cut by Laurentian last year as part of the CCAA process.
Senate member Chantal Barriault, director of Laurentian’s science communication graduate program, pointed out that the committee made these cuts “under duress.”
She said that there are mistakes in the Nous reports, but the senate needs to move forward. “We're going round and round in circles,” Barriault said.
Gerhardt said he planned to bring several motions forward to the senate executive committee (known as Senex). Those motions could then be brought forward to the full senate membership for discussion at a future meeting.
