Calamity at Queen’s: Provost’s panicked cuts consume a university older than Canada

The gravest mistake so far of Queen’s University’s new Provost Matthew Evans, who is presiding awkwardly over an existential financial crisis at the Kingston, Ont., school, was to speak the truth but phrase it as a conditional.

“I’m concerned about the survival of this institution. Because unless we sort this out, we will go under,” he said.

Universities are not supposed to be in the headlines. Look at Harvard, not really the Queen’s of the South, but similar enough, scandalized by its own failed leader over a foreign war and a plagiarism scandal. They are supposed to be in the journals, not the papers. No news is good news in the ivory tower, and most news is bad.

So it is today with Queen’s, which used to swagger against McGill University and the University of Toronto, boasting all their academic heft without being in a big city. Now it is barely in the top dozen, and flirts with dropping out of the all-important U15.

The place is floundering, and campus tension is high. A hiring freeze is in place for the foreseeable future. Government support seems variously incompetent and hostile. Nearly all university revenue comes from tuition and government operating grants based on student numbers, but at the provincial level, tuition has been frozen by law for several years, costing Queen’s nearly a quarter of a billion dollars. At the federal level, just this week came news of a cap on international students, who pay four times the tuition charged to Canadians, and have not returned in pre-pandemic levels. By failing to meet projected targets for numbers of international students, with 152 fewer than planned, most in Arts and Science, the whole school has lost more than $12 million this year.

Queen’s has got a deficit, not a death wish. Of course it won’t “go under,” which is why the provost’s threat has backfired so explosively. What will happen, which is what he meant all along, is they will make budget cuts whether faculty like it or not, such as eliminating any course that attracts fewer than ten students or five at the graduate level.

But this is easier said than done. National Post interviews with department heads and other Queen’s students and faculty reveal these cuts are being made in a hurried panic, dictated from on high without clear rationale, guided by blunt strategy that is laying waste to the traditional academic cornerstones of an ancient Canadian institution, older even than the country itself.

Some even see a wider effort to not only increase class sizes, but to force all undergraduates into a more streamlined curriculum, less specialized, denying them the chance to pursue their fields into the darker corners in their upper years. Nine students reading Kant each year, for example, might seem like a waste of a room. But none seems like a waste of a university.

Queen’s takes its liberal arts heritage seriously. When it opened its first classes in 1842, its first professor, the Reverend Peter Colin Campbell, taught classical literature. In its Memorial Room to the school’s war dead, there is an inscription around the wall, from Wordsworth, another provocative conditional: “We must be free or die, who speak the tongue that Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold which Milton held.”

Now, under the blanket ban on small classes, Queen’s Department of Classics and Archaeology has to cut all instruction in Latin and Ancient Greek beyond the first year introduction. Shakespeare would not approve. What’s a Classics department without Latin and Greek?

“Precisely. That’s the death of our department,” said department head Daryn Lehoux.

This will lead to the end of most upper-year language courses at Queen’s

Bronwyn Bjorkman, Queen’s head of Languages, Literatures and Cultures.

Interested in modern languages? Too bad. All second-year courses in Italian, Arabic and Hebrew will be cut next year, along with third-year Spanish and German. Upper-year Chinese barely makes it past the 10-student cut off with a dozen students on average, so it might survive. German is done a little differently and might still be available in connection with literature studies, but not for studying the language.

Over in Art History and Art Conservation, the class size cap will eliminate some of the technical courses in one of the only programs in Canada to offer technical art study, said department head Norman Vorano. “If we begin to see these types of restrictions on our graduate courses, I worry that it will seriously reduce our graduate art conservation program,” he said.

“Students come to Queen’s for the chance to work in close proximity to internationally recognized experts and this often occurs in upper-year undergraduate seminars. Some upper-year seminars are capped because of lab requirements. Other seminars are small because they involve student travel and field research. Other seminars have low enrolments because they offer highly specialized and deep subject matter engagement, precisely why students come to Queen’s,” Vorano said.

The School of Music and Drama is in a similar situation, and so are some upper-year chemistry laboratory courses, among many others.

“There’s still no sense of a vision for the university or for Arts and Science,” King said. “And there is an implicit devaluing of Arts and Science whenever leaders are asked about the vision that’s driving this and what we’re looking at at the other end. That’s a real concern.”

“There’s no pedagogical justification for making classroom sizes larger, they’re already too large,” said Dax D’Orazio, a postdoctoral fellow in political studies.

He said junior lecturers like him are at risk of losing the teaching experience that is crucial to graduate student training and a key part of the skills that traditionally transfer from graduate education to professional jobs, such as managing conflict and giving and receiving feedback.

“From my perspective as junior scholar, research is part of the heart of the institution but it’s not everything,” D’Orazio said.

There’s still no sense of a vision for the university or for Arts and Science

Samantha King, head of Queen’s School of Kinesiology and Health Studies.

As word of this calamity has spread through the residence halls and back home to tuition-paying parents, students and their parents have recently been calling professors in panic, wondering whether their department, or even their school, will exist by the end of their undergraduate degree. Reassurance is not always available.

Evans’ work so far has seemed to make things worse on the way to hopefully making them better. Hired last August, he has developed a reputation as a hatchet man who answers questions with rebuttals and provocations. In the faculty town hall in December, he was remarkably chippy for a crisis meeting, telling people that their questions were “predicated” on plainly ridiculous assumptions, such as that he can manipulate the Board of Trustees or that there is some secret stash of endless money.

You could not miss the scolding tone.

“Everyone was happy about it,” Evans said of the period a few years ago when the school was in surplus, before the provincial government imposed a tuition freeze, when Queen’s was flush with money from high-paying international students. “Now, when we’re in a situation where we have deficit, faculties, some faculties, are complaining about the fact that they have a deficit. Well, you didn’t complain about it when you were making surpluses and hanging on to those surpluses. So, you now have to deal with it when you have a deficit.”

Evans said the urgency of the budget cuts is due to two reasons. One is that last May, the Board of Trustees signed off on a deficit budget for this year with a condition that in 2024-25 there be a deficit of no more than five per cent, with a balanced budget the next year. The other, as he put it to an audience member at the faculty town hall: “Frankly, if we don’t do it in that time, we will run out of money… Yes, we will… Do you want me to answer the question or not?… Honesty you’re getting. That’s your problem.

“If we carry on spending at that rate, we will run out of reserves by 2025-26. This faculty (Arts and Science) in fact will run out of reserves earlier than that. This faculty will run out of reserves next year,” he said.

In a presentation to the Queen’s Senate to discuss the operating budget and Queen’s academic mission and priorities for “rebalancing,” Evans said a “tax” of 1.5 per cent has been levied on all the school’s faculties and shared services to create a “deficit mitigation fund” that will be used to help the Faculty of Arts and Science eliminate its deficit on time. He also anticipates having to negotiate with other faculties and schools — applied science, business, medicine, law, education — for one-off subsidies to Arts and Science, which will test just how much the school values its largest faculty.

“They have to be used for the purposes they were given. In the end, that’s why Laurentian went down,” Evans said at the December town hall. (Laurentian University in Sudbury filed for creditor protection in 2021, closing many of its programs.)

There is a cold irony, then, in the school’s recent project to legally review several historical awards established with donor funding “to assess original donor intent and what changes or revisions may be permitted,” as internal correspondence describes it.

Lehoux, for example, said he got a call from a donor who wanted to top up the funds of the Wallace Near Prizes, founded by the late W.W. Near, Esq. of Toronto, but was told by school the money could not be directed so explicitly, to the study of Latin and Greek.

“So the money is gone, I can’t give those prizes anymore,” Lehoux said. “My department has always turned a profit. We have never had a budget deficit. And we’re on the chopping block as if we’re the problem. It’s just that we’re a soft target.”

A statement read: “In order to change the terms of awards such as these, it is necessary in most cases to go through the courts who set a high bar in terms of making any changes the university may want to make to the original terms of these awards that were set when the original donation was made. We are working to update and adjust these terms to provide more flexibility so we can distribute all available funding to students while respecting the spirit of the original gift.”

The Faculty of Arts and Science is led by Dean Barbara Crow, who has a different reputation than Evans as a leader. She has barely answered any questions about this crisis, to the point of joining a town hall for the faculty’s undergraduate student society and sitting mum in the audience. She presided over the surplus years that Evans described, boosting salary spending for various new administrative positions.

On Tuesday night this week, Evans was to address the student government assembly. It promised to be dramatic. Faculty planned to show up, as students had done at their fateful town hall in December. On the agenda was an item for discussion asking the Arts and Science Undergraduate Society executive why they have not lobbied Dean Crow for answers, given her lack of transparency. “When will there be an opportunity for students to get answers? How do we know she will actually attend?”

Barely 24 hours before it was to begin, the provost cancelled, according to a report by the Queen’s Journal, the student paper that has closely followed the saga.

The provost’s withdrawal, abrupt and late, recalled his curt exit from the town hall in December. At the end, he grimaced as he noticed students walking into the auditorium, silently protesting the cuts at the meeting from which they had been formally excluded, holding signs and wearing campus merch.

“Oh god,” Evans muttered, exasperated, then stood up and left.