Athabasca University’s real threat
This is our Keep Athabasca in Athabasca University team response to the November 28, 2022 The Tyee article “Alberta’s ‘World Class’ University Risks Collapse, Says Expert”.
“We can understand The Tyee’s anti-UCP position, that seems to be your raison d’être, but oddly, your sentiments also fly in the face of the position of both the AU faculty association and the union representing the administrative and support staff at AU.
And the proposed Investment Management Agreement (IMA), as we understand it, doesn’t mandate that “within three years, 30 per cent of its staff, and nearly half its senior executives, must move to [Athabasca].” According to President Peter Scott in an interview with Shaye Ganam at CHED last week, “there are about 300 [employees] still there,” (in Athabasca). To reach 272 over three years won’t be much of an effort, even for President Scott. As to 44 per cent of executives moving to Athabasca, there are currently nine executives in total of which five, including the president, live in Alberta, one of those in Athabasca. So 44 per cent of nine is four, so AU has over three full years to get three executive positions moved to Athabasca. If the current members of the executive were committed to long-term careers at AU, it might be a problem for them—no one in the public sector should be forced to move to keep their jobs—but AU executives have historically had notoriously short tenures to pad their resumes until they move on to a “real" university, so these positions can be moved to Athabasca through attrition and re-hiring. In any case no one “must move to Athabasca” under the proposed IMA. No one.
The whole premise of this article, that AU faces an existential threat because hundreds of staff will be forced to move to a hillbilly backwater, is based on misinformation, a fiction President Scott and his allies are perpetuating. It distracts from the real threat to the university.
Students are voting with their feet. The number of courses students signed up for in the fiscal year ending March 2022 is down by more than 7,500 from the previous year. The number of student admissions is down by more than 5,000 in the same period. AU just lost its position as Alberta’s biggest university in terms of student numbers. Actual students enrolled dropped from more than 43,000 in the March 2021 year end to just over 38,000 in the 2022 year end, the lowest it's been since 2008, the lowest in 14 years. Stressed front-line staff working in deplorable conditions can’t give students the support they need, courses are closing or becoming outdated, students are frustrated trying to do simple things like booking exams, and they are particularly wary of spending a small fortune to get a degree from a university whose reputation has diminished to a point where their degrees might not be accepted, let alone respected. These are the very real problems that The Tyee should be addressing instead of pandering to the lifestyle of nine well-paid executives.”
