Editorial: Concordia has chosen the wrong sacrifice; we will not let it

OpinionsThe Link — Published November 18, 2025 0 minutes

In response, we at The Link have reckoned with our own outrage, not only as advocacy reporters, but also as undergraduate students.

To hear that our beloved professors feel they are being thrown out “like garbage” saddens us. To learn that these LTA professors have been carrying a large brunt of the university’s teaching load across several departments, for years, on relatively low salaries, unnerves us. To know these cancellations appear incredibly unfounded, even financially speaking, confuses us.

Reporting on this story, we quickly learned just how convoluted and opaque the situation is. What initially appeared to be a cut-and-dry news piece soon turned into a long-winding investigative feature with several loose ends that, upon closer inspection, were either twisted or broken.

Let’s begin with the financial rationale, which is as weak as how it’s been communicated. The university claims it must remain within a $31.6 million deficit target for 2025-26. However, it made the LTA decision before calculating the actual savings of cancelling these contracts. 

We believe cutting teaching rather than administration―the bread and butter rather than the upper crust―shows a troubling misunderstanding of a university’s purpose. As one professor put it, it’s like a hospital saving money by no longer stocking Band-Aids.

When pressed in the university Senate on Nov. 7, president Graham Carr first offered a confident figure: roughly $6.3 million in savings. That precision quickly dissolved under scrutiny.

When asked whether these figures included the cost of hiring part-time instructors to replace LTAs, Carr admitted they did not. 

Interim provost Effrosyni Diamantoudi later supplied a more modest figure: “at least $1 million” in savings after hiring part-timers, a figure that still excludes recruitment and interview costs.

A multi-year academic restructuring that drops from over $6 million to “at least $1 million” in the space of a single meeting says less about fiscal prudence than about the university’s curious approach to numbers.

A million dollars, if that estimate holds, is trivial in a staggering university deficit, and only twice the base salary of the president himself.

A more general confusion surrounding the situation does not help the administration’s case either. The collective agreement, signed between the Concordia University Faculty Association (CUFA) and the university in 2023, was meant to offer some stability by allowing LTAs to convert into extended-term positions.

Several faculty members The Link interviewed believed next year would be the year they became eligible for conversion, while the university insists the clock began later.

We must be clear about the absurdity of this lack of clarity. For professors who have spent years in these positions, the misunderstanding can be seen as a betrayal.

It’s important to note that the situation is the result of bad decision-making by many, if not all, levels of the powers that be, both administrative and governmental.

A significant reason for Concordia’s staggering deficit is federal and provincial caps on international students, which have historically been money wells for universities. These caps have undeniably hit small-to-mid-sized universities like Concordia the hardest.

Carr said in the Senate that in 2022-23, the university received approximately 8,000 international student applications. This year, there were 2,500.

The federal government, if asked to intervene―by students writing to our members of parliament, for instance―may argue that they don’t pay for teaching but rather for research. Universities cannot support good research when their faculty is overworked, underpaid and now unwelcome―or, in the case of those with tenure, spending their days fighting for the rights of their less privileged colleagues.

Canada pursues star professors from abroad even as the foundations of its higher-education funding grow increasingly shaky. Supporting the nuts and bolts of universities like Concordia is not only more important but also much cheaper than chasing top international talent for bigger universities.

At The Link, we condemn federal and provincial student visa caps, Quebec’s failure to increase university operating grants, Quebec’s decision to eliminate the Quebec Experience Program, and Concordia’s decision to cut roughly 60 full-time positions to save what amounts to pennies on the dollar.

Students should remember that we are not powerless, especially at the university level. We can write to department chairs, deans and the provost to stress the importance of continuity in teaching. We can support union efforts and bug our student unions, as well as CUFA, to mobilize. We can ask for transparency about renewal practices and attend open meetings to press for explanations beyond platitudes.

Some of us may feel fatigued from constantly imploring those in power to act in a way that we feel is just. But student pressure cannot be ignored.

We also have questions: Why did the university make this decision before calculating how much would actually be saved? Why does it seem the university is sacrificing teaching positions before administrative positions? What is the exact administrative-staff-to-faculty ratio at the university, and how has this ratio changed over the past 20 years? What is the salary ratio, and how has it changed?

We understand we are in “the most serious [financial] challenge in Concordia's recent history,” as Carr himself said on Nov. 7. What we don’t understand is why cutting LTAs will have any real benefit to the deficit or the university. If there is financial sense in this decision, it needs to be made clearer to us.

“I have to come to you to write a story about the injustice of the administration, which has hired me to teach you, which is mistreating me,” said one limited-term professor to our journalist. “This should not be the way that it is.”

Yet here we are. The administration may hope the matter will fade, that the loss of dozens of teachers will be regrettable but manageable, and that students will adjust. They should not be so confident.

The university may remove LTA professors. It cannot so easily dispose of the students who pay their salaries and refuse to let this rest.

This article originally appeared in Volume 46, Issue 6, published November 18, 2025.