The Little Head and Thinking

The Ode, the President, and GCU

“Carpe Diem” by Ian Norbury

In the three-headed hellhound of Newfoundland and Labrador government bureaucracies, Memorial University is easily the littlest head.

But it is no less significant than the other two.

The university, like NALCOR/NL Hydro, holds a special place in government policy. Memorial University College opened in 1925 as a “memorial for our sailors and soldiers, in the form of an education building which shall raise to a higher level the whole status of education in Newfoundland and materially assist its young people to achieve success in life.” This developed after the Second World War into a university that would support the economic and social development of Newfoundland and Labrador through education in fields that the new province would need.

But in the 21st century, the university has drifted from its connection to Newfoundland and Labrador. What’s worse, today the university is literally crumbling as successive administrations allowed buildings to rot so they could pushed money into jobs for more top managers at ever higher salaries while at the same time coping with the shortage of money from the government-imposed tuition freeze. To offset the cash shortfalls and declining enrolment from an aging population, university administrators chased after international students and lured them initially with the promise of a Canadian university degree at an enormous discount compared to other Canadian universities.

The current state of the university is dire. It is financially strapped. It has a reputation among universities across Canada as a laggard in innovation and commercialization weighted down by bureaucratic indolence. International enrolment is falling off. As the governing board looks for a President to replace the one who was forced to resign in an international disgrace the temporary replacement president is also now embroiled in controversy involving cronyism.

Symbolic of the way the people running the university now think, they have collectively rejected the province, not merely content to sit detached from while they collect fat paycheques mostly from taxpayers cash as their incompetence wrecks ther institution itself. A group of senior administrators led by the later-disgraced president arbitrarily banished the national anthem of Newfoundland and Labrador from university proceedings on trumped up grounds. Rather than right the wrong, the university’s governing board not only covered up the disgraced presidents departure with the help of the senior managers who had been her enablers but passed off responsibility for the fate of the Ode to a committee of the university senate, which has for the past two years been carrying on a cross between a kangaroo court with a pre-determined outcome and a keystone kops farce of privilege and incompetence. None of the people responsible for abuses of authority aimed at students to protect the beleaguered and eventually disgraced president from legitimate criticism have even been call to account for their actions.

This sorry state is the result of:

• the tuition freeze, begun by Roger Grimes, continued under the Pea Seas after 2003 and the Liberals after 2015, which robbed the university of cash,

• an aging population that reduced the numbers of locally-born students,

• the decision by university administrators to chase international students to make up the enrolment and revenue shortfalls rather than re=organize the university to meet its financial reality,

• indifferent government policy that ignored the role of the university in social and economic development in the province,

• the appointment by government of weak governing boards chosen chiefly for their partisan suitability rather than their ability to govern a modern university with vision and probity,

• the political example since 2003 of unsustainable salary budgets, unsustainable spending growth, unaccountability, and abuse of of authority,

• the political example of cronyism willingly copied within the university, and

• continent-wide academic trends such as the tendency of senior administrators to be short-term careerists and the popularity of Canadian and American fads some of which are racist and most of which are antithetical to a healthy university environment.

Different. But never indifferent. Bond Papers.

The issues that are currently or have recently been in the news all relate to these. Disgraced President Vianne Timmons’ appointment and all the controversy that surrounded her even as she headed out the door with an enormous severance package, the current investigation of Neil Bose, the crumbling university physical plant, the keystone kops melodrama of the ban of the Newfoundland and Labrador national anthem from convocation, unrecognized and hence unchecked antisemitism, blatant racism of university policies particularly the Indigenization policy, the replacement of Newfoundland and Labrador history with imported colonialist tropes, the deliberate obstacles to innovation and commercialization, and the parade of senior administrators, particularly in the Provost position, are all symptoms ultimately of the lack of clear direction from the provincial government.

To be honest, there is more to it than a mere lack of direction. Since 2003, successive governments in Newfoundland and Labrador have been indifferent to the university. Indifferent to all except two things:

1. First, that the university freeze tuition, regardless of the consequences to the university’s ability to function.

2. Second, that it offer chances for photo ops such as the endless news conferences as every screw was screwed or nail driven for the new core science building.

Ah, some of you will cry. Look at the more recent changes by the Liberals that let the university raise tuition orgive members of the faculty association a seat on the Board of Regents. These are merely differently indifferent. A clear goal for the university might have been to cut it loose entirely from government control. A clear goal, alternately, might have been to give the university more money, replace the members of the Board of Regents, and tell them exactly what the government’s goals would be for it in connection with the social and economic future of the province. Simply ending the freeze policy without helping clean up the considerable mess of the tuition freeze, that is, resolving the relationship between the university and the provincial cabinet merely reflects the same lack of ideas, the lack of thought of previous administrations.

Others might go back to the Pea Seas under Danny Williams who wanted to create a second university out of the Grenfell campus. Or they might defend the tuition freeze because it helped poor people go to university. Nothing could be further from the truth. The plans for Grenfell ignored the obvious trend at the time of declining enrolment caused by the aging population. It ignored the impact of the tuition freeze on revenue the university had. And, the Grenfell university plan was purely partisan and aimed at the Pea Seas short term needs. It dated from 2007, the year of the provincial election Danny Williams desperately wanted to win with a clean sweep of the House. The Grenfell plan was in line with the promise that same year to build a massive hospital in Corner Brook that far exceeded the region’s needs. The second super hospital and second university also played on the pathological Corner Brook political jealousy of St. John’s by promising to duplicate services already available at the Health Sciences Centre without the patient load or staff to sustain them.

In a broader sense, the indifference of the 21st century governments of Newfoundland and Labrador to the university reflects the shift in political, economic, and social power that took place in the late 1990s. As Jim Overton assessed it in 1979, Newfoundland nationalism represented the political aspirations of the middle and upper middle class townies of Newfoundland and Labrador and was nothing more than that. This observation explains why, with the coming of oil 20 years later, the decline of the fishery, and the attainment of so-called “have” status 30 years after Overton’s assessment of what he called neo-nationalism, all of the familiar grievances that supposedly showed the need for political change in Newfoundland and Labrador disappeared to be replaced by the management of the continued status quo. Once the townies got the power they wanted, the revolution was over and everyone else could get stuffed.

In that same sense, the university’s role in popular political thinking shifted from providing the intellectual underpinnings of the nationalist movement, supporting genuine social and economic change in rural Newfoundland and Labrador, and preserving the culture of the rapidly changing place to transferring public wealth to the middle and upper middle classes through the tuition freeze and joining in the feast of the spoils of government spending that has been the post-2003 Newfoundland and Labrador. No one was concerned, as the university coped with declining enrolments and revenues, that the move to attract students from outside the province also meant, in effect, the tuition freeze and artificially low tuition also transferred the scarce wealth of the small province derived mostly from oil and gas not only to the people in Sin Jawns who did not need it to get their kids a university education but also to the middle and upper middle classes of other provinces in Canada or from countries as diverse as those in sub-Saharan Africa or Asia, particularly China.

Nor is it a surprise in that context that both the government and its appointees on the governing board of the university have turned a blind eye to the transformation of what had been Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador to a Generic Canadian University in Newfoundland and Labrador. Likewise, it isn’t surprising to find that the temporary university president, hired to replace a president shamed out of office, is now under investigation for cronyism in one recent appointment. Even if it wanted to intervene at this point, the government would be hard-pressed to defend itself against a rejoinder from the current President that what he did was no different than the Premier making the unqualified Pat Parfrey the head of the corporation that manages all of government-delivered health care in the province. And at a phenomenal increase in salary from his old job advising Furey, everyone should note, too.

And as if to confirm this week’s series’ main theme, Parfrey made clear in media interviews on Monday and Tuesday, like this story on NTV, that the Health Accord had nothing to do with improving public access to health care. It was, in effect, a carefully constructed political fraud hiding in plain sight. We’ve already pointed out the strategic flaw in asking all the people responsible for making a mess of health care administration to fix it. The result was a plan in the Accord to increase greatly the health administrative bureaucracy at enormous added cost with no tangible improvement to care or health outcomes.

Those, as Parfrey explained are someone else’s responsibility, as the Accord trumpeted its reliance on the social determinants of health. Hardly a new idea, but also outside the bounds of what the Accord actually proposed in expanding and increasing the cost of the health services themselves. Parfrey told reporters you can spend billions and not improve health outcomes.

To get better outcomes, well, that’s something that someone else would have to worry about since Accord offers no recommendations on that, namely those so-called social determinants of health. That’s the fraud in the Accord constructed by bureaucrats who created the failing health care system Parfrey used to work in and latterly criticized: give us billions to spend but don’t expect better care or health outcomes. That will be someone else’s job in another department. Like the one that builds sports complexes, another one of which was announced Tuesday on the road to yet another election from the crowd in power who are perpetually and desperately struggling to win another one no matter the cost to the taxpayers.

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