This story was updated on Jan. 23 at 3:20 p.m. to better reflect the nature of Evans comments to The Globe and Mail.
When Aidan Carli, ArtSci ’23, noticed his alma mater had made national headlines earlier this month, he wasn’t surprised.
As a recent alumnus of the university, Carli has been following the budgetary crisis at Queen’s. When he saw Queen’s front and centre on The Globe and Mail’s website last week, he felt glad Queen’s budget woes had garnered attention.
“The media and the province should be holding Patrick Deane and Matthew Evans’ feet to the fire,” he said. “I don’t think this is purely an internal problem, and I think that’s the story that should be featured more centrally.”
With dwindling international student enrolment, inflationary costs, and the 2019 tuition freeze remaining in place, universities in Ontario have struggled under strained budgets.
Following revisions to the initial $62.8-million projected deficit, the University projects a $48-million deficit after interim measures such as the hiring freeze were implemented in May.
According to an interview by Evans given to The Globe, salaries for the largest proportion of expenditures at Queen’s. While attempts are being made to minimize job loss, Evans said some people will likely lose their jobs.
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Carli said he felt a disparity between funding and resources allocated to STEM over humanities programs throughout his time at Queen’s.
A Politics, Philosophy, and Economics student while at Queen’s, Carli is now in his first year at the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto. He feels the education he received in undergrad prepared him for success in his current program, although he mentioned attending Queen’s over Western University, the University of Ottawa, or Dalhousie University—all of which were schools he considered for undergrad—wouldn’t have made a difference in getting him to the stage he’s at now.
Angela Walsh Noble, BFA ’02 and BEd ’03, heard rumblings about budget cuts through her network of Fine Arts alumni. After describing the time she spent at Queen’s as some of the best years of her life, she was deeply saddened to hear about cuts to academic programming.
Walsh Noble is particularly concerned about the quality of education at Queen’s deteriorating, given that one of the draws of the academic programming is smaller class sizes that promote discussion.
“As an educator myself, whenever I see cuts happening to school boards and schools, it affects the students, it affects the education,” she said. “What makes Queen’s special and what I was talking about during my time there 20 years ago, that’s something I’m worried that could get eroded.”
Walsh Noble said she has donated to Queen’s here and there for the Fine Arts department which had issions suspended in early 2023. As a more recent alumnus, Carli hasn’t donated yet, and said he would never donate to Queen’s with the current istration still in place.
“I love this school, I want it to succeed. I feel very ionate, about the humanities in particular,” Carli said. “I want to protect these things. There’s a part of me that wants to give money to preserve that, but I wouldn’t give money to the to the people that are running the school right now.”
Amid the current budget crisis, Carli is concerned new grads will be looked over when applying to jobs and graduate programs because of its effect on Queen’s reputation.
“When you’re applying to grad school and the person looking at your application is going to see that you went to this university that is ranked low, they’re not going to look into why it’s ranked low, or that it wasn’t ranked low when [you] went there,” he said.
“It really hurts alumni and new alumni, because my degree got that much less impressive.”
As Carli watches the story evolve, he said he hopes to see student governments step up. He called out the AMS and ASUS, believing their responses to the cuts have been inadequate.
“Mobilizing students will put pressure on the istration to make the changes they know they can,” he said. “I really hope people take this seriously and realize that this is an existential threat to the value of academia and to Queen’s.”
Corrections
A previous version of this article incorrectly stated Angela Walsh Noble’s years of graduation. Incorrect information was published in the Jan. 23 issue of The Queen’s Journal.
The Journal regrets the error
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