Oversight: Board Governance at Laurentian University Between 2009 and 2021
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On February 1, 2021, Laurentian University declared insolvency. In the months that followed, Laurentian unilaterally ended its affiliation agreements with its federated universities. More than 200 faculty and staff lost their jobs and Laurentian cut 69 programs. Laurentian imposed a new collective agreement on its faculty union which included salary cuts, increased teaching loads, mandatory unpaid leave for some employees, reductions to the faculty retirement plan and provisions for expanding the powers of university administration (Cayouette, 2022). Laurentian spent nearly $30 million on its restructuring (Office of the Auditor General of Ontario, 2022a). Laurentian’s financial challenges suggest that the provincial and institutional governance systems which oversee universities may not be able to adequately respond to increasing pressures facing universities and appropriately control complex internal operations. Scholars have written extensively on the province’s role in overseeing universities and university boards’ roles in overseeing university administration (Antonowicz & Jones, 2023; Eastman et al., 2022). Yet, little is known about how effectively these structures oversee individual institutions. There is a lack of detailed case studies that might illuminate the ways in which some of these issues are taken-up at specific institutions. Using a conceptual framework that combines agency theory and management hegemony as well as Leblanc’s concept of what makes an effective board, the problem this study seeks to address is the challenges that university boards face in identifying, preventing, and responding to sustained financial challenges. The Laurentian case offers a unique opportunity to explore university governance in the context of a crisis and to understand the nuances of how a university board chose to address, or not, those challenges over time before taking the dramatic step of declaring insolvency. This thesis offers a unique contribution on this important case by focusing on board governance, examining the case over an extended period, and through interviews with key observers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".