Queen’s executives don’t deserve to handle more public money

Queen’s University is in rough shape and our leadership isn’t equipped to deal with it.

It could be argued the leadership crisis at this university is a greater threat than its financial woes. Upper management lacks mechanisms of ability, regularly fails to consult those impacted by decision making, and rarely explains their decision making to staff or students.

Any legitimate financial pressures Queen’s faces is undermined by the fact department heads and other unit leaders can’t trust the narrative sold by their direct superiors—that’s if they receive any communications at all.

Queen’s announced in May it would be facing a significant deficit this year due to inflation and the province’s tuition freeze. The Board of Trustees voted to run this deficit for two years, while taking measures to balance the budget.

At the initial estimated deficit of $62.3 million, the measures that would need to be taken—especially over a two-year span—would be drastic, to say the least.

Yet a Queen’s Coalition Against Austerity report on Queen’s shock doctrine notes Queen’s has overestimated its deficit by an average of $44 million over the past six years.

Last year, the operating deficit was vastly exaggerated by the transfer of $55 million from the operating budget to pay off an internal loan which, interestingly, wasn’t due. While there was a reported ‘loss,’ the university itself made a surplus.

During Jan. 17’s emergency Senate meeting, Vice President (Finance and istration) Donna Janiec confirmed Queen’s put aside $20 million last year and another $35 million this year towards a new sciences building.

The real picture of Queen’s finances is quite blurry. DBRS MorningStar’s report on Queen’s finances released in May described Queen’s as having the financial flexibility to endure a difficult operating environment without making drastic budget cuts to manage budgetary pressures. Given contradictions in messaging, it’s understandable that there’s little trust between staff and executives.

To handle this crisis, the Board of Trustees hired Provost Matthew Evans to mitigate a strained budget. The move looks questionable now—Evans’ comments from a December town hall meeting were picked up by The Globe and Mail and led to a spate of news stories alluding to the potential closure of Queen’s.

The blame for this lies squarely on the hiring committee—a preliminary Google search of Evans’ name indicates a deeply worrisome management style.

In a university management position, Evans implemented a controversial metric-based restructuring project that lead to frozen research funds, and researchers locked out of their offices and emails.

Evans, however, is merely symptomatic of a wider issue at Queen’s. He isn’t wrong when he stresses that he’s not directly responsible for the exact nature of cuts—that’s on the Board of Trustees and other of the istration.

Analysis suggests Queen’s spends a disproportionate amount on its ever-expanding number of executive positions. The University spends 68.7 per cent more per student on upper istration than the University of Western Ontario.

Given the province cites bloated istrations as justification for the tuition freeze—which Queen’s blames for this crisis—it isn’t antagonistic but entirely constructive to look at the school’s excessive bureaucracy.

Part of this crisis must be put on Queen’s New Budget Model (NBM), adopted in 2013, which turned faculties into largely independent entities. The elimination of research from budget considerations is surely linked to Queen’s slip from the U15. Department funding is decided by central offices, with its model predicated on rewarding faculties for prudent financial management under deans invested with practically unilateral powers.

The NBM didn’t anticipate the FAS would instead be run like a personal fiefdom.

The FAS has taken extraordinary measures to dodge all questions, such as disabling the chat on FAS Zoom meetings, giving departments and students conflicting information, failing to formally announce changes to incoming students, equivocating or downright lying about hiring freeze exemption requests, and circumventing consultation processes.

These failures in communication were highlighted at the Jan. 15 ASUS Assembly. Despite the event being originally billed as a discussion period with FAS Dean Barbara Crow and Evans, Crow sat in the audience in silence and refused to take any questions.

The sudden decision to close issions to Arts & Science online programs is a particularly good case study in how FAS currently operates. The changes were carefully timed to occur after major faculty meetings at which they weren’t disclosed and shortly before the winter break, effectively allowing questions to be dodged.

Despite ASO’s manifold accessibility advantages, no EDII review has been published, raising equity concerns. FAS department heads and even the FAS’s own budget subcommittee weren’t informed, despite the decision’s purported fiscal motivations.

Another deep concern among faculty and students stems from cuts to FAS courses and academic programming. This would see departments facing dissolution and majors being diluted, requiring fewer courses in specializations to receive a degree. Students would be pushed into classes unrelated to their majors to fill out credit requirements, netting the university’s financial gains through inflating class sizes and reduced professors, all at the cost of even the façade of quality education.

This change won’t only render Arts and Sciences degrees useless to pursue graduate studies at any other institution, but will harm the value of every Queen’s degree.

Much of the Arts and Science’s leaked memo indicates this agenda; moving graduate students from their respective departments and sharing TAs across departments saves no money. The pressure on departments to eliminate electives and specializations will force students into other departments’ courses.

FAS moving to this model without formally acknowledging it has spawned a costlier central office while maintaining existing structures, contributing to the faculty’s massive deficit. Now, having created this issue, Crow wants to slash the budgets and powers of the departments, utilizing the so-called crisis to further promote the very agenda that created the initial problem.

The FAS’s mismanagement itself is symptomatic of Queen’s wider tendency to deflect criticism or misdirect student concerns. Evans has engaged actively in a divide and conquer technique, pitting faculties and departments against each other for subsidization.

The divisions and secrecy go deeper; graduate student employees were initially barred from his staff town hall. At ASUS’s town hall, the media was blocked from entry, contravening ASUS Assembly policy. A 2022 external review of Queen’s budget model hasn’t been seen by anyone outside its 13-person Steering Committee, a committee collectively making $3.74M annually.

Evans’ abrupt withdrawal from January’s AMS Assembly—which was always transparently d as an open forum—only further indicates his office and those answerable to him are failing to uphold basic principles of transparency and ability.

If Queen’s senior management is embarrassed by the national press it’s receiving, that’s for the best.

Leaked documents only attract attention when important information is concealed, making a public relations disaster inevitable. Crow’s evasion at ASUS Assembly has reinforced mistrust of her leadership.

As this mistrust grows, and student concerns mount, it becomes harder to argue—as Queen’s does so desperately—that executives here deserve to be handling more public money. Unless there’s change across the board, this crisis is only going to worsen.

Ethan is a fifth year Classics and Archaeology student.