Abstract
During the depths of COVID-19, Laurentian University, a small Canadian postsecondary institution located in the mid-sized city of Sudbury Canada, declared that it was insolvent and was legally allowed to terminate one-third of its faculty and cut almost one-half of its academic programmes. This historically unprecedented attack on a Canadian public institution utilized a Federal corporate court process, the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA), a piece of legislation akin to the US Chapter 11 process. The result of the still-ongoing process saw the university Administration and Board of Governors working against the interests of the community, targeting the arts, Indigenous, Francophone and working-class communities. This article poses the question ‘to whom do universities belong, and at what point does a publicly funded university stop being a collective “social good” – responsible to the society that spawned it – and start being a stand-alone organization that serves private interests?’
Introduction
For the first time in Canada’s history, a publicly funded university has filed for court protection from private creditors and precipitated a ‘shock doctrine’ (Klein, 2007) crisis at a local university and its surrounding community, with reverberations felt throughout the nation. Located 4 h due north of Toronto, in the hinterland of Canada’s largest province, Laurentian University is northern Ontario’s largest university and serves Indigenous, Francophone and arts communities alike, promising a bilingual (English and French) and tricultural (English, French and Indigenous) mandate.
Today, That Mandate Sits in Tatters
In a process that took a mere 70 days, in mid-April 2021, Laurentian University terminated 110 full-time, mostly tenured, faculty members out of a total of 345 – just shy of one-third of all full-time faculty members and librarians. All were unionized employees with an active collective agreement, enjoying the protection of state labour laws – which were effectively rendered null and void under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA). Those who remained would teach and work in a much-slimmed-down and newly minted ‘Laurentian 2.0’ with 69 academic programmes eliminated, representing about half of the university’s programmes developed over 61 years. Additionally, about 43 unionized university staff members and about two dozen administrators were also permanently fired.
Remaining faculty wages were reduced by 5% and frozen for 2 years of a now-5-year collective agreement, grievance procedures were gutted, new disciplinary procedures were implemented, 5 unpaid furlough days a year were imposed, professional allowances were eliminated and slashed, workloads were increased, faculty research funds suspended, and limits on new course preparation removed (a further effective increase in faculty workloads). Recall rights for terminated full-time faculty were largely paper promises, given that their rights extended to purged programmes. The newly negotiated (some would call it coerced) collective agreement opened the door to replace former full-time faculty members with contract sessional faculty – paid a fraction of a full-time wage, forging a path toward greater exploitation of a precarious group of university workers. One the positive side of the ledger, the faculty pension plan was safeguarded in a secured fund, although current retirees’ supplemental and health benefits were eliminated.
The major cause of this unprecedented court action was financial insolvency due to over-borrowing for capital expenditures and exacerbated by revenue losses (student residences, cafeteria, parking fees, etc.) due to the pandemic. In his CCAA court filing, Laurentian University’s President Robert Haché claimed that the institution had too many programmes and faculty and laid the blame for the university’s precarious financial situation on faculty salaries, rather than decades of provincial government underfunding and longstanding administrative incompetence. Laurentian is a comprehensive university, and the largest of five in Northern Ontario, serving 9000 students. As such, it had a broad mandate that included a medical school, theatre and motion picture arts programme, and a rich undergraduate and graduate humanities programme housed across three Federated universities and the main campus. A drop in student enrolment in the mid-2000s saw the Administration embark on a building programme that relied on large capital expenditures rooted in borrowing from private banks.
One of the oft-repeated reasons for university’s woes was an imbalance of students in what were deemed ‘unpopular’ programmes. The university’s lawyer labelled this ‘insufficient student demand to accommodate all current faculty members’ (Laurentian University Factum, 2021: 23), and maintained that ‘[t]hese terminations will be based on the demands of students as reflected in their historic and current utilization of program and course offerings’ (Laurentian University Factum, 2021: 21). In court documents, the main administration narrative was that the university had to cut less-popular programmes, defined as those programmes falling below the ‘top’ 50 in enrolment: Operationally, the academic programming offered by LU is not sustainable in its current form and must be addressed. Laurentian offers 132 undergraduate programs and 43 graduate programs. Approximately 25% of students are enrolled in the top five programs, approximately 62% are enrolled in the top 25 programs and 83% are enrolled in the top 50 programs. (Affidavit of Robert Haché, 2021: 7)
The unspoken, but well-understood, implication was that academic programmes in the humanities and social sciences were an anchor on the university’s fiscal fortunes. There was also an implication that the demographics of Northern Ontario were in decline. But as former Laurentian economics faculty member Leadbeater (2021) has noted: The Ontario government’s tuition-dependent, corporate-competitive model for Northern universities has not been working for many years. This is not simply a matter of Northern “demography.” Most students in Northern Ontario come from away and, in any case, university participation rates in Northern Ontario are far below those of Southern Ontario, something that should be at the top of a serious regional mandate but is not.
Unfortunately, the ‘demography’ explanation became part of a general political legitimation for long-term cuts. As applied at Laurentian University, it would doom programmes and faculty to further precipitous decline. Viewed solely from the standpoint of an isolated local problem, the issue simply calls for a bailout that sees bank loans paid off on the backs of almost 200 employees, whose negotiated termination and severance payments would be wiped clean by a pay-out based on pennies paid out for each dollar owed. In short, faculty and staff bore the brunt of the fiscal price for local mismanagement and the destruction wreaked by the COVID-19 pandemic. These decisions received the assent of the university’s Senate, and all collective agreements were ratified by faculty association and staff union members – albeit with a gun to their heads.
While the CCAA courtroom may give these grim proceedings an air of legitimacy, don’t mistake what happened at Laurentian University as anything other than a corporate-style takeover of a public university – an anti-democratic act by an employer that is utterly hostile to its workforce and intent on privatization by stealth. The CCAA proceedings were an assault on a feisty multicultural and multilingual arts community that’s sprung from the blackened rock.
The Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act: Failure of the State to Legislate
This form of court-imposed institutional violence was delivered to the doorstep of Laurentian faculty, librarians, and staff courtesy of a Great Depression-era piece of Canadian legislation originally aimed at forestalling the breakup of private enterprises after declaring bankruptcy. Known as the Companies’ Creditors Arrangements Act, this corporate law is Canada’s version of Chapter 11, as it allows a corporation the opportunity to hold off the bill collectors while the owners of a firm get their financial house in order, which invariably means a march towards solvency through the mechanism of layoffs and organizational rationalization (read: organizational cuts). CCAA law gives employers wide latitude to do what they will in order to reduce their operations and achieve a position of fiscal equilibrium, with a guarantee that any court proceedings, collective agreement provisions, lawsuits, and similar legal actions can – and often are – stayed by the CCAA court. Torrie (2020: 124) notes, that during the Great Depression: . . . restructuring was so closely associated with job losses that important employers, like the CNR (Canadian National Railway) and Algoma Steel, were not allowed to restructure, either privately or under the CCAA. Instead, the federal government nationalized or subsidized such corporations to ensure ongoing employment for workers.
The CCAA is loosely written as laws go, and so the rulings of the Justice in charge and case law precedents both set the stage for the CCAA’s interpretation. In the absence of the law, past practice becomes the effective law. Insolvency lawyers extol the virtues of its creativity and the wide latitude given to judges – it’s the raw clay that allows itself to be moulded like the ‘Golem’ of Yiddish horror stories. Just look at the opening sentence of the university’s lawyer, DJ Miller’s, contribution to The Americas Restructuring Review 2021: ‘If necessity is the mother of invention, then insolvency is a perfect incubator within which creative solutions can emerge’ (Miller, 2020). The publisher of this tome, Global Restructuring Review (cite), describes the publication as ‘the world’s only daily news and analysis service on cross-border restructuring and insolvency’.
Canada enjoyed a robust economy during the post-war period right to the 1980s recession, and the CCAA was seldom used (Torrie, 2020: 89). But after back-to-back recessions in the 80s and 90s, Canada’s Parliament reformed the Act in order to allow for a “. . . new, debtor-centred interpretation of the CCAA (borrowing from narratives surrounding US chapter 11), the act was (and is) still used to advance the interests of large secured creditors such as banks and life insurance companies (Torrie, 2020: 93).” By the Reagan-Thatcher era of the 1980s and 90s, state intervention was suddenly viewed with a great deal of suspicion, and nationalization of private enterprises was cast aside as a potential solution to widespread job losses. In the shadow of the neoliberalism, corporate restructuring was rehabilitated and was newly regarded as a viable . . . alternative to liquidation and winding up, and had a role in saving jobs, with knock-on benefits for the wider community. This appears to be the first time that company restructuring was broadly associated with job retention in Canada. (Torrie, 124)
By the mid-1990s, this once-benign law was rediscovered and revived by largely unscrupulous, employer-friendly lawyers and employers. These robber-barons schemed to use the CCAA to order mass terminations of employees, strike a knife in the heart of collective agreements, and plunder workers’ pension plans. It allows employers to deny their employees the severance pay and benefits they negotiated at the bargaining table in seemingly good faith. Then the new corporate entity can restructure ‘unprofitable units’ which are, in turn, broken away from the parent corporation and sold off. In the case of Laurentian, the university’s factum stated that the court order ‘provides that the Applicant [Laurentian University] may terminate the employment of such of its employees as it deems appropriate’ (Laurentian University Factum, 2021: 21). The university’s lawyers further argued that terminations of this kind have ‘become fundamental to CCAA proceedings and [their court order] is broadly worded to facilitate a successful restructuring’ (Laurentian University Factum, 2021: 21). Citing previous case law (Windsor Machine & Stamping), the university’s lawyer noted that the same Judge overseeing that 2008 CCAA proceeding had ‘granted an initial order [. . .] to terminate the employment of such of its employees as it deems appropriate’ (Factum, 2021: 21). In the case of Windsor Machine & Stamping, ‘47 union employees were terminated’ (Laurentian University Factum, 2021: 22).
The university’s lawyers briefly touched on the question as to whether tenured university faculty would be treated any differently than a typical unionized employee when they wrote: [t]he Applicant acknowledges the challenges that will be faced in this aspect of the restructuring, including as it relates to tenure. Faculty at a university are highly specialized in their field of study and are not able to be moved within programs outside their area of expertise. (Laurentian University Factum, 2021: 22)
The university’s rationale for terminating, rather than transferring, tenured faculty began and ended with that brief mention.
In sum, the abdication of the Canadian state’s traditional pre-neoliberal role in nationalizing, or otherwise bailing out struggling private enterprises, has become so pervasive in the 2020s that even a struggling comprehensive university serving an underserviced, sparsely populated populace could not attract a modicum of state intervention, and was left to the mercies of a commercial court and private predatory lenders.
Personal Viewpoint
I was terminated on 12 April 2021, alongside 193 other faculty and staff, and left to seek alternative employment. As a mid-career academic forced out of my 16-year career as a tenured faculty member, I realized full well that my prospects for full-time employment at my previous rank or salary were remote at best. Having spent two decades of working in industrial and service industry jobs prior to switching career tracks to academia, I’ve often referred to my faculty position as ‘hitting the lottery’. When considering my 13 years of postsecondary education, undergoing the dissertation defence process, the many part-time, sessional contracts an early career PhD graduate is compelled to take, the odds of being hired in one’s area of specialization, the application for promotion and tenure, and finally the hamster wheel of publishing research, developing new courses, and taking on a clutch of fresh classes each semester, the occupation of paid, full-time faculty member seems understandably scarce.
The rarified atmosphere of the position is accompanied by a privileged identity: I was paid to be an intellectual – not many can make that claim. The realization that I would lose a valuable part of my identity as a paid intellectual was a blow almost as severe as the financial loss. But the greatest loss I currently feel is that of independent time. The life of a faculty member in a programme that’s constantly struggling to survive was no bed of roses, but it remains preferable to the workplace alienation that I currently endure in my new job. Time is now precious, more precious than had been anticipated. Just as space was sought after in ‘a room of one's own’, ‘a clock of one's own’ has become a new life goal for me. The 70, 80 or sometimes 90-h work weeks around the clock 7 days a week, now appears a distant luxury. As an admittedly privileged academic, my time and my schedule – outside of classes – were effectively my own. Today, my time belongs entirely to my employer – a common condition among members of the labouring classes, but a bonus that I once enjoyed as a working faculty member. Every moment outside of work – time set aside to write, research and read – has now become even more precious. It's only been a few months since I was terminated, but my old life of relative privilege has become a longed-for memory. For almost 20 years, I had the presence of mind to appreciate my faculty position and its relative freedom at the time; in retrospect, I appreciate that life even more now. The bitterness I feel can be attributed to the relinquishing of this freedom as well as many other material losses: as an unsecured creditor, I’ll forfeit 90%–95% of the negotiated termination and severance payments due to me; I’ve been forced to accept a pension plan that’s a fraction of what it would otherwise be had I been allowed to work longer and accrued more pensionable years of service; my students have lost their programme and are left on their own with nothing more than vague promises from Laurentian’s president of ‘Laurentian 2.0’ as somehow being a better, more streamlined university in its now-diminished state.
My colleagues who were not terminated and remain behind feel the acute pressure to keep their programme and departments whole in the face of institutional cuts that have led to a palpable state of precarity and chaos. Courses once taught by full-time tenured faculty have been contracted out to newly hired part-time faculty members who are paid as little as one-twentieth of a full-time salary. As I write, the institution remains in insolvency protection – now extended to early 2022. Official figures have reported a decline of incoming student enrolments by 30% – anecdotally, this figure is as high as 50% or more in some programmes.
From the standpoint of a Canadian who has spent over four decades as a unionized employee, it was a taken-for-granted notion that the umbrella of working-conditions and job protection that I enjoyed was largely spelled out in my collective agreement. While no negotiated agreement was perfect – far from it in many cases – I believed that I could rely on the printed word of a legally binding contract within the boundaries of its interpreted language. As my co-workers and I discovered, the employment provisions of the CCAA legislation had been challenged in Canadian courts, and in 2003 Quebec Court of Appeal ruling in the case of Jeffrey Mines [2003], ‘the court ruled that an employer continued to be bound by the terms of a collective agreement for those employees who continued to provide services after the company sought CCAA protection’ (Payne, 2009: 7). So, on the surface, the collective agreement and its provisions – including workloads, salary, working conditions, layoff provisions, exigency clauses, termination and severance payments, pensions, benefits, among others – remain ‘alive’ although portions of it may be suspended by the court using the powers to place a ‘stay’ on legal proceedings, including those within a collective agreement. As I discovered first-hand, the CCAA suspended that contract language and in practice withdrew selective provisions of our collective agreement. In short, the court has the power to temporarily freeze the collective agreement while under the protective dome of the CCAA. Long-fought-for clauses, working-conditions, pension agreements, benefits – all carefully negotiated over a period of decades, are fast-frozen by a Federal court and its judge, while employees can be cut from the payroll without consequence.
The Transformation of the Commons
The crucial moment arrived unannounced on 1 February 2021, when Commercial Insolvency Court Justice Morawetz wrote a directive stating, ‘[T]his Court orders and declares that the Applicant is insolvent and is a company to which the CCAA (Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act) applies’. Laurentian University’s lawyers’ first win was recognition that the university fits the definition of a corporation and was subject to this law.
Why was this law applied to a publicly funded university, where were the state institutions that would typically be expected to shield a public institution from private creditors, and what’s the long-term cost? I suggest that the absence of the provincial government underwriters, and the use of the Federal insolvency legislation were not necessary, but a forced ‘choice’ in order to violently rewrite and model the first corporate-style makeover of a small Canadian university. Canada’s public institutions, from hospitals to municipalities, have now been noticed by the sleeping giant that is the ‘insolvency community’. This isolated Canadian example may be a test-case for other untapped public resources, such as hospitals and municipalities.
Think Wall Street the movie, only without Gordon Gekko’s ‘Greed is Good’ speech. Instead, we have a collection of university administrators who view the university as a site of production and a source of profit, with a view of employees not as knowledge workers, but simply workers.
Appending ‘corporation’ to a public university seems an odd manoeuvre, even in the midst of a four-decade-plus span of neoliberal policies and politics. This begs the question, are Canadian capital and the state conspiring to use this small northern Ontario university as a case study to see how far it can use existing instruments to undermine labour protections? If so, should the demand of labour call for rescuing Laurentian University or instead fight against the use of this austerity measure – a Great Depression-era law creatively used to set fire to public institutions, from hospitals to schools to roads to public health?
Instead, Canada’s labour movement might step back and consider resisting this weaponized attack on a public-sector institution on broader grounds – on the grounds that government exists to defend the public ‘good’ – of which critical postsecondary education is a part. Rather than an isolated strike at a vulnerable public trust, the left-progressive movement should gather its forces and defend Laurentian University as it would defend a hospital, a public health unit or a public school – because these may indeed be next to suffer a similar blow.
Meanwhile, the provincial government is standing by silently, claiming that they’re prohibited from commenting while the CCAA process steams forward. It’s an odd thing for the Minister of Colleges and Universities to say when one of Ontario’s 30 universities falls into debt due to the province’s decades-long history of underfunding. But Ontario universities are publicly funded and regulated, and the government of Ontario is the funder and regulator. Yet, the province is happy to allow Laurentian University administration to cut the university down to size with little to no consultation.
When all is said and done, at the end of the process, the provincial government of Ontario will most likely swoop in and fund a much-diminished, much-cheaper-to-operate Laurentian University, with an emphasis on work-related programmes aimed at the region’s hard-rock mines and other local employers. That’s the vision shared by the province and the university administration – a narrow, career-oriented institution with low-paid teachers, representing a major cost-savings. Needless to say, Ontario’s other universities are watching carefully.
Not an Isolated Case
Laurentian University is a working-class school, located in the hinterland of northern Ontario. Sudbury was established as a prototypical, single-industry, hard-rock mining town. Its catchment area is primarily composed of the grandchildren of Italian, Finnish and French-Canadian working-class miners and their offspring. Fully 60% of students who attend Laurentian are labelled ‘first-generation’ university students – a euphemism for the kids of the working class. About 65% of graduates remain in the north – and there’s the rub: an attack on the local university is an attack on indigenous communities, Francophones, immigrants and the working class alike.
This small Canadian university is hardly alone. As Peters (2021) points out, bank bailouts alongside cuts to public services has been with us for over 30 years. During the pandemic, Australia embraced so-called austerity measures and oversaw the firing of thousands of university-sector workers. The Guardian (2021) reported that ‘at least 17,300 people lost their jobs in UK universities last year – including permanent staff as well as casuals who did not have their contracts renewed – according to the latest data from Universities Australia’ (Zhou, 2021).
In a fury of shock doctrine activity, in early 2021, nine UK universities announced a series of pandemic-related redundancies. As one university spokesperson put it: ‘[t]ypically, the universities say they need to restructure to remain financially sustainable and to counter risks, such as a fall in international student numbers as a result of the pandemic’ (Fazackerley, 2021). Unsurprisingly, most job losses in the postsecondary sector have hit the least privileged and most marginalized education workers, as noted by The Washington Post: office and administrative staff employed by colleges have suffered the largest and most consistent job losses [. . .] Those who worked part-time were especially impacted when schools began shedding jobs in the spring, as were people with some college credit and no degrees, and younger workers aged 18 to 24. (Douglas Gabriel and Fowers, 2020)
Yet in the case of Laurentian University the most highly paid, degreed, and privileged faculty were those most often targeted. This leads me to ask the question ‘to whom do universities belong, and at what point does a publicly funded university stop being a collective “social good” – responsible to the society that spawned it – and start being a stand-alone corporation that serves private interests?’
What About the Public Trust(s)?
What an odd state of affairs to have a government-funded institution, long recognized as a public sector organization and governed by public sector legislation suddenly transformed into a de facto private sector corporation – one that is capable of declaring that it will close its doors if it isn’t given protection its creditors. This judge’s act, this judicial statement, asks us to suspend disbelief. We are effectively being asked to pretend that there is no government and no public funder. In a twist from an Ayn Rand novel, we are to believe that the university is alone in the world, and that its fate must be determined by its President, Board of Governors, and a court, as though it might surely fail and fall into bankruptcy. This is what we are being asked: to pretend that we alone possess our roads, our hospitals, our schools, our transit systems. We are supposed to believe that there are no longer any governments, or that their role in the lives of people is minimal at best, peripheral and outside our collective orbit.
The PATCO Story
The Laurentian CCAA saga recalls another perfectly legal attack on collective bargaining rights. That is, the US Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) strike and the firing of an entire unionized workforce. The story is a familiar one to those who have lived or studied recent labour history: despite being considered ‘essential’ workers and lacking the legal right to do so under the Taft–Hartley Act, in 1981, US air traffic control workers – frustrated at poor working conditions, and wages that had remained frozen for a dozen years in the face of rampaging inflation – threatened to go on an unprecedented strike. Ronald Reagan warned that he'd fire every US air traffic controller if they went on strike, and so, when PATCO members eventually did strike, Reagan carried out his threat and 48 h later, fired 11,345 workers.
At 7 a.m. on 3 August 1981, the air traffic controllers’ union declared a strike, seeking better working conditions, better pay ($600 million over 3 years, compared to FAA's offer of $40 million), and a 32-h work week (a 4-day week and an 8-h day combined). President Ronald Reagan declared the PATCO strike a ‘peril to national safety’ and ordered them back to work under the terms of the Taft–Hartley Act. Only 1300 of the nearly 13,000 controllers returned to work.
Ronald Reagan demanded that PATCO strikers return to work within 48 h, or they would be terminated immediately. When 11,345 ignored his ultimatum, he fired them all. Meanwhile, the FAA kept air traffic flowing, at a reduced volume, with the help of supervisors, non-strikers and military controllers. PATCO was decertified by the Federal Labor Relations Authority on 22 October 1981. The decision was appealed but lost, and attempts to use the courts to reverse the firings failed.
In the summer of 1981, neither the AFL-CIO nor airline industry unions acted decisively. As PATCO strike historian and Drexel University professor Art Shostak recalls, ‘The labor movement fussed and fumed, finally to stand exposed as a paper tiger’. PATCO's most significant aid came from abroad in the form of a brief job action by Canadian air traffic controllers who risked fines and suspensions for refusing to handle flights bound for or originating in the US. Labour journalist Steve Early (2006) wrote: Reagan's mass dismissal of PATCO members – and their black-listing from further federal employment – was the biggest, most dramatic act of union-busting in 20th-century America. PATCO's destruction ushered in a decade of lost strikes and lockouts, triggered by management demands for pay and benefit givebacks that continue to this day in a wide range of industries. Whenever longtime union members gather to bemoan the weakened state of labor, PATCO is invariably mentioned. If only we had all stuck together, they say, and displayed the kind of strike solidarity necessary to meet Reagan's challenge, the history of the last 25 years might have been different for labor. (Early, 2006)
Reagan's firing of the government employees encouraged large private employers to hire scabs instead of negotiating with unions during labour conflicts. In 1970, there were over 380 major strikes or lockouts in the US; by 1980, the number had dropped to under 200, in 1999 it fell to 17, and in 2010 there were only 11. The Bureau of Labour Statistics listed 25 major strikes and lockouts in 2019, including 13 work stoppages in the educational services industry. This was the highest number of strikes for any single year between 2010 and 2020.
Reagan's Director of the United States Office of Personnel Management at the time, Donald J Devine, argued: When the president said no, American business leaders were given a lesson in managerial leadership that they could not and did not ignore. Many private sector executives have told me that they were able to cut the fat from their organizations and adopt more competitive work practices because of what the government did in those days. . . (Glass, 2017)
As labour journalist Steve Early wrote: The lesson of PATCO [. . .] is as old as unions themselves: An injury to one is an injury to all. No labor movement can long survive, much less thrive, without a strong culture of mutual aid and protection. When labor organizations practice solidarity some of the time, rather than all of the time, they do a grave disservice to their own members – and the millions of unorganized workers whose pay and benefits have also suffered since Reagan's death blow to PATCO. (Early, 2006)
Contrast that with the joint statement issued in May 2020 by the President of Canada’s umbrella labour organization and his counterpart at the nation’s Chamber of Commerce: Canadians remain physically distanced but the COVID-19 pandemic has tied our well-being to one another like never before [. . .] Indeed, we are at our best when we work together. Over the past month, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce and the Canadian Labour Congress united in our crisis response efforts and witnessed this truth first-hand. We brought together labour and business to help maintain relationships between employers and employees [. . .]. (Yussuf and Beatty, 2020)
This hand-to-the heart pronouncement of an alliance between the organizations representing Canada’s corporate lobby and the nation’s unions may serve to explain why the Canadian labour movement’s reaction was so anaemic – following in the footsteps of the AFL-CIO during the PATCO crisis. Just as the dismissal of PATCO members was virtually unprecedented in the US public sector, such is the silence from Canada’s labour movement.
Moreover, the university deliberately bypassed a clause that reads ‘Financial Exigency shall be defined as substantial and recurring deficits, which threaten the long-term solvency of the University as a whole’ (LUFA, 2017: 217). This definition appears to fit Laurentian’s situation like a glove, yet the university’s administrators apparently decided that their odds were more favourable in a courtroom. But this clause assumes that concern for the university’s future was a shared value between equal partners. The exigency clause in the faculty association’s collective agreement wasn’t ignored, but rather dismissed by Laurentian’s lawyers as both ‘too lengthy’ and ‘too expensive’. Given that the Supreme Court of Canada deemed (in BC vs Health Services, 2008) union membership and collective bargaining rights enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms via the right of free association, bypassing this collective agreement clause represented an attack on the constitutionally guaranteed rights of faculty association members.
Precisely 40 years after tens of thousands of American PATCO workers were terminated and their union dissolved, things haven’t progressed very much at all for Canada’s supposedly more advanced unionized workforce.
Conclusion
The Laurentian University saga is more than a local failure on the university’s part to adhere to their contractual obligation to consult with their own experts in a relationship described as ‘collegial governance’. Instead, these institutional life-and-death decisions have been made by university administrators and outsourced financial industry managers who are unqualified to make decisions on matters of academia. It appears that Laurentian’s current Administration cares little for its historic role as an institution of higher learning, and its responsibility to the community that surrounds and depends on the institution. The decisions made by university administrators were largely biased in favour of financial solvency over and above the need to maintain a comprehensive university with programme from across the arts and sciences. As seen in court documents, decisions were based on biased assumptions, misinformation, such as the student demand for certain programmes – a wholly inappropriate set of criteria to use when determining academic standards. In the Canadian context, universities have historically not been managed by decisions based primarily on cost-effectiveness and so-called Responsibility Center Management budgeting models (Drexel University, undated) under which departments are treated as revenue-generating units are wholly responsible for managing their own revenues and expenditures, and yet these were the key criteria for the austerity measures implemented at Laurentian University.
Universities have traditionally been considered ‘social goods’ supported historically by social investment for the benefit of society writ large, yet not a word of this historic mandate was even hinted at by university Administrators. The neoliberal turn has supported a shift so that ‘small’ classes must ‘make its costs’ and otherwise not be allowed – so we cut liberal arts and the humanities. It has moved students to be viewed as consumers resulting in pressure to give ‘good’ grades. And it marginalizes faculty turning them into precarious workers. Corporate profits are achieved by cutting costs and only providing programmes that can ‘pay’ for themselves.
The CCAA is an instrument of class warfare that effectively voids collective agreements negotiated in good faith. But there is little good faith to be found in the boardrooms of corporate-style universities, whose leaders have come to regard their degreed workforce as a cost to cut. As Globe and Mail columnist Yakabuski (2021) puts it: Dozens of professors earning comfy upper-middle-class wages were shocked to learn that they did not have jobs for life after all. The precedent set by the sacking of 83 professors – another 27 teaching jobs were cut through early retirements and the elimination of vacant posts – has some wondering whether the ivory tower is really a safe space anymore.
The answer to Mr Yakabuski’s question is that the ivory tower is no safer than the factory floor, the retail sector, or the deepest nickel mine. Laurentian’s shedding of 194 workers has been estimated to drain as much as $150 million (CAD) from Sudbury’s local economy, although the decimation of local working-class university as a centre of arts, culture and knowledge cannot be estimated. The memory of a flowering institution and the people who built it will eventually fade, but for the rest of us, the unfolding Laurentian University story may be a harbinger of a soon-to-be inescapable trend: that academic standards will invariably collapse in the face of corporate power concentrated in the hands of university administrators whose mandate and interests lie largely in building a surplus, exploiting part-time contract faculty, destroying collegial governance, and deskilling the existing academic workforce. As Klein (2007, 561) argues: The universal experience of living through a great shock is the feeling of being completely powerless: in the face of awesome forces, parents lose the ability to save their children, spouses are separated, homes – places of protection – become death traps. The best way to recover from helplessness turns out to be helping – having the right to be part of a communal recovery.
Like Klein, I argue for a communal response to disaster capitalism’s efforts to hijack public trusts.
