As crowds amassed outside Richardson Hall, cries of shame echoed through the room where the Board of Trustees met to discuss the ongoing budget deficit.
Led by Queen’s Students Versus Cuts (QSVC), roughly 50 people held signs and chanted outside of Richardson Hall at 7 p.m. on March 8, protesting the Board of Trustees meeting inside. Attention turned to Provost Matthew Evans as Trustees discussed provincial funding and a renewed focus on STEM programs.
“I know that for many people, these challenges have been felt at a deeply personal level,” Principal Patrick Deane said, addressing the protesters outside.
“All of us have the same objective, and that’s for the Queen’s we are all part of, and proud of, to continue to be strong and vibrant.”
Provincial funding, transitioning enrolment capacity from the Faculty of Arts and Science to Smith Engineering, and increasing the University-wide “tax” on faculties to two per cent were highlighted as ways to balance the budget.
In his final verbal report Rector Owen Crawford-Lem said the Board isn’t prioritizing the student experience when making decisions.
“What I hear less and less in these conversations around these tables is the student experience,” Crawford-Lem said.
Outside of the Board’s focus on research and academic strategy, Crawford-Lem listed the food in the dining halls, program administrators, and new inclusive programs during orientation as at risk. He hopes the alumni sitting on the Board will fight for the student experience.
The Board welcomed new chair David Court, Comm ’79, announced publicly after the closed sessions, who will assume the role on June 1 to serve a four-year term.
Budget deficit remedies
To connect with students, Evans and Deane met with QSVC, the group protesting outside the meeting, on Feb. 8.
The Board is attempting to repair the University’s structural budget deficit. The Faculty of Arts and Science (FAS) will need $16 million in subsidies from other faculties annually until 2026-27, but more must be done for the FAS to survive independently, Evans said.
All of the “University Deficit Fund,” money accumulated through a 1.5 per cent faculty tax, is going to the FAS. The University-wide tax will be raised to two per cent in 2025-26, Evans said.
“Even so at that level, these mechanisms won’t clear the deficit by 2025-26; we will need to find other mechanisms to do that,” Evans said.
According to Evans, Queen’s will increase out of province tuition by five per cent and reallocate 91 enrolment seats from the FAS to Smith Engineering to move more students’ spots into a higher tuition bracket.
The budget on the table has yet to consider evolving expenses, such as renovation costs to Bader College, the impact of the international student cap, and operational risks due to staff cuts. Investments into new technologies and the new provincial government funding program also haven’t been factored in.
“There’s a series of fairly substantial risks we have to acknowledge in the budget,” Evans said.
Provincial government funding
The University will receive $6 million dollars from the Ontario government, but Michael Fraser, vice-principal (university relations), said balancing the budget will take $20 million.
“It is better than nothing, it helped short term, a little, but isn’t an answer to a structural deficit,” Fraser said.
The Ontario Government will be providing funding to specific STEM programs, and Queen’s wishes to capitalize on these funds.
READ MORE: How are graduate students keeping up with the cost of living?
With the continuation of the Ontario tuition freeze, Board members expressed frustration at the lack of compensation from the government over the past three years.
The provincial government is funding external audits to identify inefficiencies within university budgets across Ontario.
Food insecurity for graduate students
SGPS President Devin Fowlie said the strategic goals of the Board—producing high quality research and improving the university’s position globally—would be impossible without graduate students’ effort, yet graduate students are facing significant challenges at Queen’s.
The SGPS’s Food Insecurity Relief Program closed 24 hours after receiving 458 applications in November. A survey found 29 per cent of students at Queen’s are food insecure.
As the Board debated how to curb food insecurity, Crawford-Lem asked the Board to consider raising the base stipends for graduate students.
The Board is exploring many solutions and food insecurity is an ongoing challenge, Trustee Nancy Evans said.
Tags
Board of Trustees, budget deficit, Faculty of Arts and Science, provincial funding
All final editorial decisions are made by the Editor(s) in Chief and/or the Managing Editor. Authors should not be contacted, targeted, or harassed under any circumstances. If you have any grievances with this article, please direct your comments to journal_editors@ams.queensu.ca.
John Sherbino BAH, MIR
The ‘Structural Deficit’ is a self-inflicted wound emerging from, in one instance, an over-reaching dependence on foreign students’ revenue and its related over-staffing in administrative and instructional areas. Another fester lies in the shift of focus to industrially rewarding applied and to a lesser extent, theoretical technical instruction and research.
These are valuable areas internationally, intellectually and socially but sadly are now seen by the administration and governments as superior to the study of the (for the university) economically unrewarding studies of, the visual arts, sociology, history and languages.
This is the direction and the helm is firmly in hand.