Imagine, if you can, what it must be like to be Sandy Collins. Sandy is a very young man who is - right now - living the first line of his epitaph.
Imagine, if you can do two at one, what it must be like to be Veronica Hayden. Veronica is Paul Davis’ principal assistant.
Both took to Twitter last weekend to harass Liberal leader Dwight Ball over the fact that he seemed to be saying contradictory things.
They must have been feeling very proud, strong, and determined.
And then it was Monday.
As of March 31, 2014, Memorial University had an annual deficit of about $330 million.
In 2013-2014, the annual cost of subsidising tuition for out-of-province students at Memorial was $112 million.
The provincial government operation subsidy to the university has doubled since 2004.
Those are a few of snippets from the Auditor General’s 2014 report.
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Just for the sake of looking at some numbers, here are some statistics on university enrolment in Newfoundland and Labrador over the past decade.
The figures are from Statistics Canada.
The very best thing that may be said about the idea of a law school at Memorial University is that the proponents of the idea have failed to make their case.
The very worst is that the university is currently wasting everyone’s time by talking about something with no shape, no form, and hence no substance.
After all, the committee that held its last public meeting the other night has the task – according to Memorial – of looking at “the demographics of existing Canadian law schools, current and future needs for more lawyers, and benefits to Memorial, among other goals.”
They needed to do this before they started “consulting”.
As students head back to Memorial University, you can see the impact the ongoing tuition freeze is having on the university’s budget.
You can see it in the policy to pass credit card handling fees on to students. In the official university organ – the Gazette – the university claimed it eliminated the fee. That’s not true. The fees still get paid. The university just transferred responsibility for paying them directly to students who want to pay fees using a credit card. According to a November 2012 story in the Telegram, the university expected to recover about $550,000 by making students pay the extra fees.
That seems like such a measly sum compared to the university budget, but when the administration has very few ways of raising capital, they have to squeeze every penny until the Old Girl screams.
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Related:
One of the things about writing SRBP is that posts sometimes show changes in thinking as your humble e-scribbler gains more information.
Over the last few posts and on Twitter, some of you may have seen a comment to the effect that you could replace the government subsidy to the university with a tuition hike and be cash to the good. Well, that just is’;t the case. As Tuesday’s post showed, the government grant covers about 71% of the university’s operating revenue every year. Tuition covered about the same percentage (11%) as it did in 1977.
Taking a hard look at the current numbers showed that tuition and fees from the 18,700 graduate, undergraduate, and distance students at the university, full- and part-time brings in slightly less than $60 million annually.
What hasn’t changed, though, is the starting point of this mini series from last Friday: the university needs cash. The question is how to get it.
Memorial University’s dean of graduate studies wasn’t so keen on China as a source of students in February 2011. In a post on her blog Postcards from the edge, Noreen Golfman wrote;
The point is that Memorial, if it is to play seriously in the realm of international recruitment, cannot afford merely to be part of the bandwagon. It has to get ahead of it. China is already so yesterday.
The academics even invented a word for the trend – surprise, surprise - at universities to seek more and more of their student population from other countries. They call it “internationalization”.
The motivation is simple: money. Golfman acknowledged that point up front in the same blog post. The available pool of young people is getting smaller, thanks to the fact that birthrates are dropping off in the developed world. As a result, universities have to go on a hunt for students to keep everything operating:
And, so, yes, the motivation has been, in the first instance, largely economic.
None of that is a surprise. Nor would anyone be surprised to find that by November 2011, Golfman was in China on a student-hunting safari. She was back there again in 2012.
From Luminus Express:
The election of alumni representatives to Memorial’s Board of Regents was finalized on Aug. 4, with five new representatives and one incumbent taking the six available positions.
Rex Gibbons returns for another term on the board, while James Hickey, Pegi Earle, Luke Pike, Kimberly Keating and George Tucker will begin their first term. The six successful representatives received the most votes of the 34 candidates on the ballot in an election that saw the highest voter response to date with 8622 votes cast.
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The Newfoundland and Labrador local of the New Democratic Party wants taxpayers in her province to give Nova Scotians free tuition at Memorial University.
Sounds idiotic, doesn’t it?
But that’s exactly what she wants to do, at least if you follow the thrust of Lorraine Michael’s July 8th news release.
In the release the NDP leader said that “free tuition is essential to ensuring that all of Newfoundland and Labrador’s young people get equal access to education they will need for their own, and by extension, all our prosperity.”
Wonderful stuff.
Then she cites in study released by her party president Dale Kirby, wearing his education professor hat.
Kirby and his colleagues surveyed Memorial University students from Maritime Canada and asked them some questions about why they decided on studying at Memorial University. As the executive summary in the report notes, the number of Maritime students at Memorial went up “ten-fold’ in the past decade or so. And as the report also notes, there have been other reports, most notably by news media, in which Maritime students identified cost as one of the big reasons for them coming to Memorial. They can study at a comprehensive university that has a decent reputation overall(outstanding in some faculties) and they can do it cheaper than they could at Dalhousie or Acadia or University of New Brunswick.
They come here because the tuition is cheap, they said.
So, reasons Michael, free education for Nova Scotians will benefit Newfoundland and Labrador.
She does not explain how.
Odds are she can’t.
That’s not important, though.
In the world of Conservative-style retail politics, all a political party has to do is offer this sort of cash incentive to win votes. It’s like the one about cutting taxes on gasoline or home-heating products. None of those ideas make any sense except as a way of luring voters: give us your vote and we’ll give you cash.
The foolishness of the free tuition idea is actually right there in Michael’s release. All you have to do is think about it for a second.
You see all those Maritime students frig off back to Nova Scotia or New Brunswick or Prince Edward island once they get their Memorial University degrees. They only come here because they can get a decent university paid on the cheap. They don’t spend four years at Memorial because they plan to settle in Hibb’s Hole once the drinking…err…studying is done.
And if lower tuition is already bringing in the mainland students in droves, then odds are free tuition will attract droves more. The university will have to hire more professors and build more classrooms and laboratories.
And who will pay for this?
Why the taxpayers of Newfoundland and Labrador, of course.
Now think about that a bit more.
In a province where the government is facing a pretty severe financial problem because of foolish spending, the New Democrats want to spend millions more to make university education free. Then they’ll have to spend hundreds of millions more making the university larger to accommodate all the new students.
And where will thousands of those students come from?
Why Nova Scotia, of course, the most populous province in Atlantic Canada.
Now where else has Nova scotia cropped up lately?
Yes.
Of course.
Lorraine Michael, Kathy Dunderdale, and Yvonne Jones want to spend billions on this Muskrat Falls project so they can ship cheap electrical power to Nova Scotians. Newfoundlanders and Labradorians will pay the full cost of the power plus a profit for Nalcor and Nova Scotia-based Emera so that Nova Scotians get a break.
And this is how Newfoundlanders and Labradorians will gain a long-term benefit from their natural resources: by selling discount electricity to Nova Scotians.
That sounds an awful lot like this education scheme Lorraine and Dale have cooked up.
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The Government of Ontario is creating 75 scholarships aimed at attracting top graduate students to Ontario universities.
Meanwhile, in another province, the university not only faces declining enrolment but also a freeze on funding for graduate students thanks - apparently - to some management cock-ups rather clumsily spun as a good thing.
On the upside, the provincial government’s research and development corporation announced on Wednesday it would provide funding over three years to support work by eight doctoral, 12 masters and two bachelors students at Memorial University.
“World-class research is at the heart of Memorial University and I’m delighted that 22 of our students have received RDC’s Ocean Industries Student Research Awards,” said Dr. Christopher Loomis, Vice-President (Research), Memorial University. “Graduate students are an essential part of Memorial’s research success. The competitive funding provided by this scholarship program will enable them to conduct research that is important to Memorial University and critical to the future prosperity of the province.”
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This past week, CBC Radio’s Morning Show interviewed Reeta Tremblay, Memorial University vice president (academic) about a Statistics Canada report on university enrolment for the period 2005-06 to 2008-09.
They did the interview – as host Jeff Gilhooley said in the introduction – based on CBC’s belief that enrolment was going up.
Now where they got that idea is a mystery since the Statistics Canada figures – taken directly from enrolment figures at the province’s only university – have shown the trending consistently in every annual report they’ve delivered for the past three or four years. The trend is unmistakeable: enrolment at Memorial University declined in the period.
In fact, the trending was so clear and undeniable that some of us wondered how the two foreign experts who delivered the report on Grenfell autonomy could have possible come up with their bullshit ideas about increasing enrolment when the trends (and the potential student population) were headed downward).
Turns out, those of us who questioned their report were right since even the Old Man himself had to abandon his 2007 election commitment in light of the facts.
But that’s another story.
The crowd at CBC must have been a bit surprised that Reeta Tremblay didn’t actually dispute the Statistics Canada numbers. The CBC web story has a lede saying Tremblay contradicted Statistics Canada but the fact is she didn’t. Tremblay just said that the more recent figure for 2009/10 would show a small increase in enrolment.
What Tremblay did do, though, is give credit to aggressive recruiting both at the graduate and undergraduate level for the change in direction. Where to begin untangling that foolishness?
Well, firstly, Tremblay might want to credit the recession with the uptick. Once the rest of us see the full set of numbers, it might confirm a usual trend, namely that some people who get laid off go back to school. If there is an uptick in Memorial’s enrolment, the recession might have helped a wee bit.
Secondly, and more importantly, that increase in graduate enrolment actually is a mess in and of itself, as Reeta well knows.
Bond Papers readers will recall the sorry tale last March of grad studies dean Noreen Golfman trying desperately to paint lipstick on the pig of a problem she has with fellowships for her academic charges.
Beginning in the fall of 2010 – a period neither Reeta nor the crowd at Stats Can yet has figures for – new grad students won’t be getting any financial help from the university in the form of fellowships valued at $12,000 to $15,000.
The won’t be getting the cash because the senior administration at the university - including coughreetacough – were forced to freeze the budget on financial assistance to masters and doctoral students in order to cope with a $2.0 million shortfall in the budget for that financial aid.
The budget is short because someone or some group of someones allowed grad school enrolment to balloon by 60% in a single year. Interestingly that balloon came in the year Reeta cited as one that shows the university enrolment is up.
But anyway, as your humble e-scribbler put it in March,
Freezing spending is not, as Golfman claimed, “sending the right signal about being fiscally responsible.” Rather it sends a signal that someone or some group of someones was so utterly incompetent that they let the situation develop in the first place. The university administration had to freeze the thing in place or face catastrophe.
Now this isn’t a big issue because you read it here. It’s a big issue. It’s such a big issue that…well… let’s let the head of the university professors association tell you, as he told people back in March:
"It means that it will be very difficult to attract graduate students to the university this coming year because when you're a graduate student you apply to different universities and see who is going to offer you the best package," [faculty association president Ross] Klein says. "It affects the stature of the university because the graduate programs are one of the things that raise the stature."
So while the issue about enrolment trends at the province’s only university may show an uptick in 2009/10, we do know that one of the causes for that increase produced a corresponding freeze in financial support for graduate students.
That is a much bigger story than the one CBC had.
And, in case, you missed it, the deeper story is a tale of managerial incompetence, not the rosy yarn of super-effective recruiting that the academic vice-president offered up to Jeff Gilhooley one morning last week.
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“This parrot is no more. It has ceased to be. It's expired and gone to meet its maker.This is a late parrot.
It's a stiff.
Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If you hadn't nailed him to the perch he’d be pushing up the daisies.
Its metabolic processes are of interest only to historians.
It's hopped the twig.
It's shuffled off this mortal coil.
It's run down the curtain and joined the Choir Invisible!
One could pity Noreen Golfman, Ph.d.This.... is an ex-parrot.”
"It means that it will be very difficult to attract graduate students to the university this coming year because when you're a graduate student you apply to different universities and see who is going to offer you the best package," [faculty association president Ross] Klein says. "It affects the stature of the university because the graduate programs are one of the things that raise the stature."You can tell Golfman understands the magnitude of the shag up because she has been bullshitting so heavily in the Telegram and to other media like the CBC:
“We will get control of our budget and hope to move forward with more support, but we couldn't in conscience go forward at the growth rate we are without knowing if we've got the money to do it.”As Golfman knows, though, she and her colleagues did "go forward at the growth rate” knowing that they didn’t have the cash. There isn't any indication anywhere that the funding levels were cut, tightened or otherwise altered until after the enrolment part of this fiscal fiasco. Make no mistake, though: if there is a mess, Golfman made it.
A freeze by any other name would not be a freeze. That’s of course why the media love to use the word: it signals exactly what freezes are, an act that seizes everything up.She tries a minor play for sympathy:
“Forgive me, but I am somewhat preoccupied with the word freeze right now…”.She tries to obfuscate by relying on the extracts from the Standard Book of Bureaucratic Bullshit:
Our staggering growth in the last couple of years has outrun our more limited capacity to support it, and so we are doing some intense focusing on how best to move ahead while staying committed to both the university’s Strategic Plan and the many students who are currently in our programs and require reasonable, long-term funding through the healthy front ends of their programs.There is a mysteriously capitalised pair of phrases that seem as if they were cut and pasted whole from someone’s hastily typed notes on how to torque the whole shite-pile:
NOT SUCH A BIG DEAL, REALLY. IT’S CALLED GOOD FISCAL MANAGEMENT.She tries to blame the media – slow news week – and then turns the whole thing into a commentary on “how basic communication works in our society”:
In a world of tweets and twerps, you know just how quickly the facts can be distorted. Just put a few nouns and verbs out there and watch how suddenly the message gets transformed into something quite different from its original meaning and context.Ah yes, the ever popular “I was misquoted”, not by the usual culprits the news media but by the faceless crowds on facebook and other social media.
The whole world of graduate studies, as is the domain of research, is also a bit mystifying to the general public who, if they haven’t done a graduate degree, understandably find the whole notion of giving students money to study a little odd.Only someone with the unadulterated arrogance to believe that could also try the extensive line of sheer foolishness Golfman has been peddling the past day or so in an effort to deflect attention from the rather obviously unsound fiscal management that led to this fiasco in the first place.
(I am starting to feel like John Cleese defending his not-so-dead parrot, but I digress, again.)Fans of the show will appreciate that while Golfman may like to think she’s playing Cleese’s part, she’s auditioning - rather badly - to replace Michael Palin. Cleese was the customer who;d be sold a bill of goods. Michael Palin was the shopkeeper who tried every manner of deflection and bullshit to dodge responsibility for the fraud.
Truly, things are very strange when the guy who backed a second university for the province - despite evidence at the time of declining enrolment – laces into critics who don’t like the much less ambitious version of “Grenfell autonomy” announced by the provincial government before Christmas.
For Former Williams administration employee Alex Marland, Premier Danny Williams attack on people inside the province must come as a complete shock. Anger isn’t always for reform, Alex.
But the most bizarre part of the Premier’s speech in Corner Brook on Thursday was the comparison between Grenfell College and the Sprung greenhouse fiasco over two decades ago.
“With the situation of declining enrolment, we want to make sure we don’t launch this initiative and it fails and Grenfell becomes the Sprung (Greenhouse) of the west coast,” said Williams.
For those who don’t know, Sprung was the disastrous decision that spelled the end of Brian Peckford’s third administration.
Now Sprung didn’t fail because its proponents failed to support the government decision and prove the idea could work.
Sprung failed because it was doomed from the start. Senior provincial government officials warned against the magnificent claims of the proponents, claims like growing more cucumbers in a hydroponic greenhouse in Newfoundland than could be grown with the near perpetual sunlight of a city near the Equator.
Unfortunately for the provincial treasury, that is for taxpayers, the politicians involved ignored the sound advice they got from people who warned of problems with the whole scheme and instead poured cash into the project.
In the Grenfell case, there is no sign any government officials voiced objections. Others, like your humble e-scribbler and a bunch of people at Memorial University did point out that – among other things – the whole scheme the provincial government endorsed (the Premier included) was built on a model that needed Grenfell enrolment to double in 10 years.
One of those people – one Eddie Campbell – paid a price for speaking his mind. That mess over finding a new president for the university led to a second major crisis for the university on top of the Grenfell one, both of which were driven entirely by politicians around the cabinet table.
And as for enrolment at Grenfell, it hasn’t been working its way to double in a decade. Far from it. Enrolment has been sliding steadily downward but not from lack of effort by the good people at Grenfell. Rather, there just aren’t the students or prospective students to fill the seats.
They also endorsed the whole idea based on little more, apparently, than a rather lightweight assessment of the whole idea of Uni Two concept. That study was bought and paid for by the politicians, not by the proponents of the project. And the study would also have figured out the enrolment problem since the signs were there at the time.
The consultants would have figured that out if they had actually bothered to look at the issue. Odd that they didn’t give it a thought, given that enrolment – students – is one of the big things that would drive a university’s success in the first place.
All in all, it seems to have been a very odd first speech in the New Year for the Premier in his district. It’s not odd that he chose the occasion to pick a fight with people or react negatively to anything less than an outpouring of unending support and devotion. What’s odd is that the Premier linked his own decision with one of the singularly worst decisions taken by any administration in recent times, bar none.
This speech and all its implications might wind up having some not so pleasant consequences.
Meanwhile, for those who are interested in the Sprung fiasco, just scan down the right side and check out the series of posts linked there on Great Gambols with Public Money. If that doesn’t work, just type that phrase into the search box up there on the top right.
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Memorial University Board of Regents chairman Bob Simmonds announced today that the board selected Dr. Gary Kachanoski as the new president and vice-chancellor of the university.
The experienced academic administrator and internationally renowned scientist will take up the post in July 2010.
This ends a two year search process which include an appalling level of political interference by a previous education minister in the university’s autonomy.
Changing a number of key players involved in the previous fiasco, including the appointment of Simmonds as regents chairman, got the process back on track and let it proceed with evident integrity.
The result is a solid choice well ahead of the forecast conclusion to the process in 2010.
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As of September 22, the presidential search committee at Memorial University had 40 names to review and two whole stages of sifting left before they came up with a name.
The time line in September 2009 was that the “committee and consultants plan to continue efforts in the coming months with a view to concluding a successful search by early 2010.”
Well, something shifted, big time.
According to CBC, there is an announcement scheduled for noon on Wednesday.
All things considered the sudden conclusion of the whole exercise is rather odd.
Sounds very much like a convenient fit turned up out of the blue.
Of course, this wouldn’t be the first time that organized, professional searches were interrupted by outside interference from a political source in the current administration.
Maybe Andy Wells is getting tired of the PUB.
Unconspiratorial Update: There’s an excellent chance this thing was done professionally and the choice will be very good, unlike the political mess the last time.
How can you tell? Lips are zipped all over town. When it’s political, everyone knows what’s up.
Meanwhile, some eagle-eyed observer noted all the government appointees to the board of regents whose term expired in October or whose term will expire this December.
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At McMaster, they started hunted in January and 10 months later came up with a winner.
At Memorial, it has already taken almost 10 months just to go through the bullshit at the front end designed solely to get people to forget the sheer sh*t-wreck made of your humble e-scribbler’s alma mater in the first go- ‘round.
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Lower tuition is attracting Nova Scotians to do an undergraduate degree at Memorial University in large numbers.
The tuition freeze – in place since the late 1990s and carried on by the current administration – makes Memorial particularly attractive given, on top of that, the calibre of instruction.
The growth in Nova Scotian enrolment is between 800 and 900 per cent higher today than it was a decade ago.
You can get a more details from Dale Kirby through an interview he did with what sounds like Information Boring at CBC Nova Scotia.
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Eddy Campbell, acting president at Memorial University, is taking up the president’s job at University of New Brunswick.
UNB likes his unique blend of academic and administrative accomplishments.
Meanwhile, Memorial University is reportedly another three months away from starting its search for a new president.
No word on who will be replacing acting president Campbell as the acting acting president of Memorial University.
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1. Telegram editor Russell Wangersky’s Saturday column in which he suggests the court action over the government’s expropriation of assets belonging to AbitibiBowater, Fortis, CHI, Inc and Sun Life could get “tangly.”
Interpretation is always in the eye of the beholder, and in this case, the final beholder is likely to be a very senior judge.
If AbitibiBowater goes to court, it will be the nuanced interpretation - probably of the original lease document from 1905 and other similarly dated material - that will decide the day.
The province has already signalled it will argue that AbitibiBowater broke its lease by announcing the closure of the mill.
AbitibiBowater, if it fights, will argue that, if any leases have been broken, they've been broken by the province.
All in all, there's only one thing for certain: it's bound to be rich fodder for lawyers and more than enough paper for all.
Wangersky’s right. AbitibiBowater was already suing the provincial government over another unilateral change to leases, this time from 2002/2003. That lawsuit was settled – without costs –entirely arbitrarily by the provincial government. It included a line in the expropriation bill which quashes the suit.
Period.
What exactly would stop the provincial government from doing that again, with respect to any other lawsuit it doesn’t like?
The are plenty of aspects to this expropriation bill which make it far more complex than the claim that it was merely about trees and water.
2. Financial Post editor Terence Corcoran who highlights a few other issues worth pondering:
The union and the government appear to have misjudged the company’s intentions, or they are playing hard ball to force the company do what it does not want to do.
It’s a dangerous game for Mr. Williams. Newfoundland isn’t exactly a fiscal powerhouse. Its latest financial update shows that if the price of oil is at $60 a barrel, the province “could be facing a deficit of several hundred million dollars next year, and could potentially be facing deficits in the years to come.”
At the same time, the province is paying lavish wage increases to unionized civil servants of 20% over four years. This is a formula for fiscal disaster down the road. And if the province also has to pay out big dollars to settle a NAFTA case, along with suffering a hit to its reputation as the Venezuela of the North, the outlook is even bleaker.
3. The Telegram editorial on another unilateral action, this time by the provincial cabinet to replace appointees to the Memorial University board of regents with a raft of new faces. The one thing the new faces have in common: they are all close partisan and personal associates of cabinet ministers. They join another batch of appointees, all of whom have impeccable Provincial Conservative credentials. They will follow orders.
One of the regents the government removed, Mary Broderick, was on her way to a Board of Regents meeting when her cellphone rang and she was dismissed.
Wonder of wonders, Broderick was vice-chair of the board, and also sat on an ad-hoc committee of the board that was examining the government’s last gerrymandering attempt. When in doubt, fire them out.
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In a late afternoon news release, the provincial government moved to increase its political control of the Memorial University board of regents.
Bob Simmonds - Jerome Kennedy's former law partner - is the new chair. Three of the remaining five appointments, like the new chair, all have strong ties to the ruling Provincial Conservatives. The last is the wife of the late principal of Grenfell College and therefore a supporter of the government's costly "autonomy" scheme.
These moves will ensure that cabinet's will is imposed the university.
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