Assuming Laurentian University’s new 2024-2029 strategic plan is approved by its board of governors later this week at the governing body’s Feb. 16 meeting, the university will have fulfilled one of its major legal obligations following insolvency.
Following 22 months of insolvency restructuring under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA), Laurentian exited creditor protection in late 2022.
As part of the plan of arrangement approved by its creditors, Laurentian was obligated to create a new strategic plan with the help of consultants.
It was originally supposed to have approved the strategic plan by the end of 2023, a tight timeline, given consultations only started last spring, but Laurentian was allowed to push final approval to this month.
Last year, Laurentian also approved a transformation plan for the university, something that was also mandated under its plan of arrangement.
‘Laurentian’s Plan for Connection, Innovation, and Impact’
The strategic plan’s approval is on the agenda for the Feb. 16 board of governors meeting. You can view the 22-page strategic plan document to be approved online here, through the board’s package materials.
Laurentian’s senate has already endorsed the strategic plan at their Feb. 13 meeting.
The Sudbury university is a bicameral institution, meaning it has two governing bodies, the board of governors and the senate.
“All universities have strategic plans, typically for five-year spans, and it is often a rather routine business to construct them, but definitely not so for this plan for Laurentian, as it represents a unique opportunity to shape the future of the university at a time of transformation and renewal,” said interim LU president Sheila Embleton, in her written report to the university’s senate.
She added that out of the strategic plan will also follow the more detailed academic and research plans.
The strategic plan document, entitled “Laurentian’s Plan for Connection, Innovation, and Impact,” was the result of consultations with more than 2,500 individuals over a seven-month period.
The plan features four overarching strategic directions: 1. Enhancing our student experience; 2. Energizing the school’s academic and research mission; 3. Building up the communities serve by Laurentian, and; 4. Valuing and supporting staff, faculty and students.
Identified goals in the strategic plan include:
- Becoming the northern university of choice through recruitment locally, provincially, nationally and internationally;
- Enhancing extracurriculars;
- Refreshing Laurentian’s campus master plan;
- Expanding academic and research excellence in areas of northern impact, such as mining and critical minerals;
- Re-imagining the Laurentian Voyageurs varsity brand;
- Transforming Laurentian’s operations following insolvency, and;
- Improving the university’s governance.
Plan’s review of international students ‘takes on greater importance’
During the Feb. 12 senate meeting, Chris Loreto, managing principal of StrategyCorp, the consultant that helped Laurentian craft its strategic plan, brought senate members through the implementation strategy for the plan.
“What this does is it takes the strategic plan and adds a level of granularity to support the institution in co-ordinating how it's going to operationalize the strategic plan, beginning in the first year, and hopefully sets out a process and approach that can be repeated to further develop the implementation activities that are going to be necessary to support the plan in years two through five of its lifecycle,” Loreto said.
Notably among the activities proposed in the implementation plan is establishing a task force to review Laurentian’s international recruitment strategy in the wake of the recent federal government announcement on that topic.
“This, subsequent to being written, obviously takes on greater importance given the federal government's moves to cap the number of international students that will be allowed into Canada, but particularly into the Ontario market,” Loreto said.
Senate members’ thoughts
Senate member Ernst Gerhardt said during the meeting he would not endorse the strategic plan.
He said the section on governance is copied and pasted from an earlier report by a consultant called Nous Group on Laurentian’s governance.
The strategic plan describes the senate as “the governance body responsible for academic policies, regulations and standards for degree programs.”
“In March 2022, the senate did, in fact, repudiate the recommendations from the Nous report, particularly the language regarding academic policy,” Gerhardt said.
“So the senate has actually affirmed on March 30, 2022, that it prefers to be responsible for the educational policy of the university, understanding that academic policy falls under that broader umbrella term. So I had raised this prior to this moment, but no changes were made. So that is why I will not endorse.”
As he did when the draft of the strategic plan was presented to senate in November, senate member Markus Timusk brought up the inclusion of Laurentian’s tricultural mandate in the document.
For years, Laurentian has been known as a bilingual (French and English) as well as a tricultural (French, English and Indigenous) institution.
Timusk said Laurentian doesn’t really have a definition for tricultural, and wondered if it could be written explicitly into the strategic plan.
“It's being used now in the strategic plan in multiple areas to dictate all sorts of important aspects of this strategic plan,” he said.
Interim president Embleton said that perhaps it’s best not to “define it down to the last detail.”
“I think … what the word in the plan is trying to mean is that we pay attention to these three aspects of our culture, rather than getting too much into defining precisely with any one of those means,” she said.
Senate member Shannon Bassett asked how the university’s budget would be allocated toward the strategic plan’s goals.
“The strat plan basically informs what one does, informs the choices one makes, because as you know, they're always difficult choices to make,” interim president Embleton said. “We can't possibly fund everything we would like to do. So some of the filtering mechanism comes from the goals of the strat plan.”
Heidi Ulrichsen is Sudbury.com’s assistant editor. She also covers education and the arts scene.
