We Need to Rethink How Memorial is Governed

Between widespread unhappiness about the no-warning removal of The Ode to Newfoundland from Convocation and the sense that all proportion was lost in response to student protestor Matt Barter, 2022 was a rough year on the public relations front for Memorial University. The situation was compounded last month when Memorial’s Chief Risk Officer publicly informed Student Union demonstrators that he intended to remove them from committees and replace them with students taking a more “positive” approach. MUNL President Dr. Vianne Timmons subsequently said she would not remove student representatives from Senate committees—though she did hint that she prefers a less disruptive style of protesting. Not for the first time, in what some may interpret as a confusion of coincidence with causality, she spoke of feeling targeted “as a woman.”

As Justin Brake reported for The Independent, Memorial is now engaged in a questionable policy review process aimed at replacing the current Student Code of Conduct with a Code of Student Rights and Responsibilities. As Brake reports, the outcome threatens to further constrain student protests, authorize a secretive investigation process, and reinforce the University’s ability both to file and adjudicate complaints against students. Memorial is developing a parallel policy requiring teaching staff to foster an ill-defined “respectful learning environment” and allowing the University itself to act as a complainant.

As for the Ode, many who denounced its cancellation applauded the stated goal behind the decision—greater inclusiveness—but thought there were better ways of getting there than a unilateral edict from senior administrators. The fallout is well-known. It includes enough proposals for tweaked lyrics to make anyone’s spindrift swirl and all-party support in the House of Assembly for a resolution asking Memorial to restore Newfoundland’s anthem to the Convocation ceremony, but add the Ode to Labrador. In an instance of collegial governance arriving better late than never, Memorial’s Senate has referred the issue to its relevant committee. That also rescues an opening to engage a clearly-interested public in questions about what role Memorial might play in addressing this province’s colonial history. 

This swift and extensive reaction notwithstanding, some might view the palaver over the Ode as trivial in a context of funding cuts, tuition hikes, crumbling infrastructure, and the very strong likelihood of a faculty strike. But these issues only sharpen the significance of decision-making processes at Memorial, inseparable as they are from how we understand our university and its vaunted “special obligation to the people of this province.”

Lessons from Laurentian

Obviously, safeguarding Memorial’s academic mission is core to that special obligation. Those who hold high office in our university and those who fund it must ensure that students here can get a comprehensive education as good as that in any other province. That responsibility is thrown into relief by the Special Report on Laurentian University, which opens with a set of devastating reflections by Ontario Auditor General, Bonnie Lysyk: “academic careers were short-circuited, jobs were lost and millions of dollars were wasted. Laurentian’s decline also put a strain on the local economy of Sudbury—where the University is one of the largest employers.” And of course a large number of students saw their programs eliminated mid-degree.

Lysyk lays the blame for that disaster squarely at the feet of Laurentian’s senior administration, who engaged in a feckless program of debt-financed capital expansion; misdirected funds designated for such purposes as employee health benefits and academic research; and spent “unusually high” amounts of university money on senior administration and outside consultants. Especially shocking, the AG found that Laurentian strategically chose the Company Creditors’ Arrangement Act process, guided by insolvency lawyers “giddy with excitement to try something new.” A mechanism at odds with the obligations of the public university, doing so enabled the university to bypass core Collective Agreement provisions and operate in even greater secrecy, intensifying Laurentian’s failure to uphold core tenets of sound collegial governance, improvements to which are central to Lysyk’s recommendations, and include enhanced oversight of administrative decisions for both the Board of Governors and Senate.

Without suggesting that MUNL is in anything resembling a Laurentian-like situation, Lysyk’s report provides ample motivation for self-analysis. Memorial is an outlier  in Canada in forbidding academic staff from sitting on its governing board. This distinction, along with a weak commitment to openness and an approach to fiduciary responsibility better suited to private corporations than public universities, led the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) to rank Memorial lowest in Canada on collegial governance. 

The composition of the Board of Regents is determined by the Memorial University Act, not by Memorial itself. But when government opened that legislation last year following recommendations from the Public Post-Secondary Education Review and the Premier’s Economic Recovery Team, Memorial’s senior administration actively tried to control the flow of advice on possible amendments, insisting that any feedback from Memorial—including that of MUNFA, the union representing Memorial’s academic staff—should flow through the Board of Regents. 

The union only learned that the Act was open after government and the Board had already been talking about it for several months. On September 2^nd 2021 President Timmons met with MUNFA representatives, ostensibly to get the union’s perspective on amendments. Memorial, however, refused to share its own advice to government. MUNFA subsequently filed an ATIPP request aimed at getting sight of the University’s recommendations. The returned record was entirely redacted as a matter of cabinet confidentiality, save for the date of the Board’s approval of the submission: August 30, 2021, several days before the President’s “consultation” with MUNFA.

Controlling Collegiality

More recently, MUNFA has grieved the administration’s (puzzling) requirement that academic staff serving on certain advisory committees sign confidentiality agreements that would prevent them from conferring with colleagues and others on committee business, which includes matters of broad interest to the campus community. The additional demand to remain silent about committee work in perpetuity threatens  MUNFA members’ fundamental academic freedom rights to intramural speech. 

Outside the union, in keeping with principles of shared governance, nine Faculty Councils have passed a motion calling on the search committee for Memorial’s next Provost/Vice President (Academic) to include an open finalist phase. Shortlisted candidates would meet students, faculty, and others, answering their questions about priorities and approach. The search committee would gain a chance to see how candidates engage with the people to whom the new Provost matters most, while those people could offer informed input on the two or three shortlisted candidates.

Part of the context for the Faculty Council motions is Memorial’s refusal to include an open phase in the search that appointed Vianne Timmons. Instead, MUNL’s Senate was summoned on 24 hours’ notice to a special meeting where it was informed that Timmons was the Committee’s choice. Timmons was not present for questioning and Senators were asked to endorse her to the Board of Regents with no information about who else had been shortlisted and no time for independent research on her record. The timing of a meet-and-greet with Dr. Timmons suggested that she was likely in town when the special meeting was held.

No announcement has yet been made on the current Provost search process. 

This secretive approach is at odds with democratic principles essential to collegiality, understood as “the full participation of academic staff in the institutional processes that shape the conditions of academic work.” It reflects and reinforces a corporatized and administrator-driven approach to running universities that the Association of Nova Scotia University Teachers describe as a culture of entitlement. Some academic administrators emerge from the ranks in their own institutions and return at the end of their terms. However, assisted by the now-routine use of executive search consultants (“headhunters”)—often appointed without search committee input—many are recruited externally. A wide net is a good thing of course, and an outside hire can sometimes be the best result. But when so many leave for the next “opportunity” before completing their current contracts—at times, as in the case of Memorial’s most recent Provost, at head-spinning speed—we need to ask whether Memorial is best served by the current process. 

Presently, more than half of Memorial’s Vice Presidents and Deans are in their positions on a temporary basis. This situation is not unique to us, suggesting the rise of an administrative class whose members may be more attached to the management role than to any particular institution. In many cases, administrators are also distant from the core work of the university, having spent years away from teaching and scholarship. The costs extend beyond the considerable sums regularly transferred from Memorial’s budget to mainland search firms (does MUNL lack the in-house capacity to run a job search?). Every search involves significant human resources, not least in faculty time that might otherwise be spent on research, students, or other collegial activities. 

Acting and interim administrators, though often strongly committed to the institution, are hobbled by their place-holder status. Five years into her tenure at the University of Regina, Vianne Timmons asked for help from Saskatchewan’s auditor general after the media reported on problems of oversight at the university. Bonnie Lysyk, who held the AG position there at the time, identified frequent turnover among senior academic administrators as one of the institution’s fundamental problems.

What is to be Done?

No one can contemplate the challenges facing Memorial without acknowledging the effects of government’s sustained cuts to the university’s operating budget. These are evident in the state of many campus buildings and the massive tuition increases facing new students. Less immediately visible, the complement of permanent faculty whose duties reflect the holistic academic job has shrunk in many traditional academic disciplines. Full-time faculty numbers in Memorial’s history department, for example, are roughly half what they were a decade ago. (Incidentally, as a colleague observed to me recently, it is getting harder to track these changes as MUNL’s Calendar files—what gets archived—no longer include faculty lists.) Meanwhile, students here are losing the opportunity to take degrees in major world languages.

As the saying goes, budgets are always about choices and that applies to both the Province—which benefits both socially and economically from the University—and the University itself. The nature and outcome of choices made cannot be separated from who is involved, in what ways, and with access to what information. 

There are currently several openings for improving governance at MUNL. These include an ongoing review of Senate governance; collective bargaining between Memorial and MUNFA, which includes proposals from the union to strengthen the Collective Agreement definition of collegiality and enhance information sharing; the auditor general’s review of operations and spending at MUNL ahead of legislative changes that might grant greater financial autonomy to the university—or as President Timmons puts it, allow the university to be “more entrepreneurial and nimble”; and, ultimately, the anticipated legislative revisions themselves.

The last of these must ensure a governing Board reflective of the distinctive needs of the public university. Academic Staff inclusion must be meaningful not tokenistic, while Board members must be drawn from the wider community, not just the executive class. For our part, faculty must resist the disaggregation of our teaching, research, and governance work. Above all, we must not shrink from exercising our academic freedom right “to discuss and criticize policies and actions of the University.”

I’ll end this commentary where I started, with reference to the difficulties of last year, this time observing that there is a positive side to the negative press: people in this province clearly care about what happens at Memorial University. They see it as our university, not “the university.” As the rockiness of 2022 also shows, the public university is more than a provider of classroom education. A space for searching debates about difficult issues, it has a vital role in our democracy. It cannot fulfill that role without also embodying it.

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