A tense senate meeting at Vancouver Island University (VIU) on Wednesday led to the approval of program cancellations at the school, but the withdrawal of a suite of program suspensions means the university won’t reach its financial target this year.
“By not moving those suspensions forward right now, academics will not be able to meet the deficit mitigation target in 2025-2026. That means, as acting president, I have to tell the minister that,” said VIU acting president Emily Huner at the senate meeting. “That is going to be hard news for the ministry to hear, as I’ve shared in my presidential updates to the community, they’re not budging.”
The university is in a financial crisis, being one of only two post-secondary schools in Canada to run a deficit for each of the past five years. With a plan to reduce expenses by $18 million the university has already cut $6.2 million from its bottom line, leaving $11.8 million in savings that the university still has to find.
A message to the board of governors from Huner in November 2024 said VIU needs to cut $7 million from this year’s budget as spending in 2023-24 exceeded the budgeted amount by $1.3 million.
An analysis by Alex Usher of Higher Education Strategy found that VIU’s enrollment has fallen sharply twice in the recent past, once as part of a general downward trend in the early 2010s due to fewer domestic students being of university age, and again in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Usher’s analysis shows that VIU has spent more than $34 million more than it earned in the past five years and has drawn down over half of its accumulated surplus from previous years.
“That strategy doesn’t really have any more room to run,” Usher wrote.
A report by Huner to the board of governors in April said that despite a nine per cent reduction in employees, “VIU is still not on track to achieve a balanced budget,” flagging decreased international enrolment, “outdated enterprise systems”, fluctuations in the dollar and rising inflation.
A statement from the Ministry of Post-Secondary Education and Future Skills said VIU is responsible for its financial decision making and the university “has informed us that they have a board-approved deficit mitigation plan in place, and they are working toward its achievement.”
The ministry also said it appreciates the difficult situation that post-secondary schools such as VIU are facing “due to the federal government’s unilateral changes to study permits for international students” and is raising concerns with the federal government about the impact it is having on schools.
Faculty, students and dentists call on the senate to reconsider proposed program cancellations and suspensions
During the senate meeting, faculty, students and local professionals testified about their programs that were slated for cancellation and suspension and the impact it would have.
David Livingstone, chair of the Liberal Studies program, said graduates from the program have gone on to careers in law, politics and education.
“Our suspension is, I believe, unnecessary and will only make our work more difficult. It will be driving enrollment down in a time when we need to be increasing enrollment.”
Livingstone said that the department will have new plans for the program in January and hopes that the senate will ensure procedural fairness when it is presented.
“Our previous efforts have not led us to have great trust in the processes,” he said.
Claudia Huf, a student in the political studies program, spoke in defense of the liberal studies program.
“We should not be suspending programs that create critics, thinkers and good citizens,” she said. “We should be protecting them at all costs.”
Dr. Robert Wolanski, a dentist in Nanaimo and past president of the BC Dental Association, told the senate that he spent the past two and a half years speaking with the federal government on creating the Canadian Dental Care Plan. He said that dentists across the country are watching the situation at VIU as staff shortages have impacted the health-care profession.
“I always say that everybody has teeth, or knows someone who does,” he said. “This decision affects the community at large.”
Wolanski called the decision to cancel the dental assistant program “lazy” and said it was “done without real insight” into the profession. He suggested that local dental professionals could work with VIU to help create a program that “could still graduate the people we need to serve our community.”
A representative from the VIU Foundation at the meeting said an $11 million endowment would be required in order to fund the dental assistant program.
Programs cancelled as vice president academic says “we are out of time”
A motion to vote on the proposed cancellations of the masters of community planning, dental assistant, global studies, philosophy and liberal studies programs separately resulted in a procedural debate on whether or not such a division was allowed. Huner, who chairs the senate meetings, ruled that it was out of order and all programs on the list were to be considered together.
Huner said that changing the motion would frustrate the “very detailed analysis of each program” that the planning and priorities committee did and its advice to the senate.
An appeal of the chair’s decision was rejected by the vote of the senate.
“We are, fingers crossed, suggesting this omnibus package of cancellations and suspensions, on top of all the other things we’ve been doing for two years will buy us some time,” said Claire Grogan, interim provost and vice-president academic, who added that the academic side was supposed to hit $4.1 million in reductions this year and secure an additional year of support from the government. “It’s not a clear road. We are out of time.”
A number of the programs that will be cancelled are graduate programs, which VIU does not receive any base funding for, including the masters of community planning. In total, 10 of the 13 programs that were cancelled were graduate programs.
Another factor in the cancellation of those programs was falling international enrollment. A memorandum from Grogan said there was a 60 per cent decrease in international student enrolment at VIU. At the same time, domestic tuition could only be increased by two per cent a year.
“VIU ‘overspent our operating grant and yet still fell well short of achieving our government stipulated student [full time enrolment] target,” the memo said.
VIU said cancelling some graduate programs will help it focus on its core mandate of delivering undergraduate education.
After a discussion, the senate voted to recommend the program cancellations to the VIU board of governors in a vote by secret ballot that had 21 senators voting for the cancellations and seven voting against the motion.
These program cancellations come one year after VIU cancelled two geographic information systems programs, three music programs, the integrated engineering technologist program and an online learning and teaching graduate diploma.
Program suspensions withdrawn after errors in report to senate
Program suspensions were also up for discussion and a vote in addition to the program cancellations.
A letter to the senate by Carolyn Swanson said there were “inaccurate or misleading statements” about the philosophy program in the proposal to suspend it. In the report, Swanson said the report misquoted then-provost Carol Stuart and used her recommendations for the liberal studies program as though they were for the philosophy program.
The proposed suspensions of the other programs was then put forward and immediately, a motion to separate the philosophy program from the list of program suspensions was made.
After a short break, the deans made the decision to withdraw the motion for program suspensions entirely and return to senate with it at a later date.
“As we said from the beginning, it’s all or nothing,” Grogan said.
Asked if students would be able to enrol in the programs in the fall, Grogan said the deans would have to talk with the registrar to see if a decision was already made, but it would not be an official suspension.
A statement from the university said no final decisions have been made about the program cancellation and suspension packages as they are still in the governance process. The university declined a request for an interview and said that no further comment would be made until after the board of governors meeting on June 3.
A request for an interview with the VIU Faculty Association was not responded to by publication time.
Cowichan Trades Centre to close
In an update to the community on Thursday, Huner said the program cancellations and other decisions that are part of the university’s deficit mitigation plan “weigh heavily on all of us.”
“I want to acknowledge the uncertainty, grief and frustration many are feeling, and I recognize these impacts may feel personal for those within our campus community who have built deep connections to these programs and to each other,” she said.
Huner also announced that the university will be closing its Cowichan Trades Centre and will be moving the three trades programs that operate out of it — refrigeration and air conditioning mechanic, carpentry and hairdressing — to the Nanaimo campus.
Huner said the university will introduce a new centralized continuing education unit at VIU Cowichan “that will coordinate and expand VIU’s non-credit and lifelong learning offerings across the region.”
