In conversation with Graham Carr
The Link sat down with Concordia’s President to answer the student body’s pressing questions
Disclaimer: Answers have been edited for clarity.
As we enter the winter semester of Concordia University's 50-year anniversary, how are you looking to improve the university for current and future students?
For me, the big question as we enter the new year, as we enter any year, is how we can make the university better.
I think Concordia has been on a pretty good growth trajectory, but obviously, the challenges are growing for us, in part because of government policies which severely affected our recruitment from the rest of Canada and created instability with international students; and both of those communities are pretty critical to Concordia’s identity.
Unfortunately, that situation is only worsening this year because of Bill 74—which all universities in Quebec opposed—which has really put a chill on international student recruitment, not just for Concordia, but for others as well; and I think it sent an unfortunate message on behalf of Montreal.
I've been at Concordia a long time. We've been through challenging periods before. I think that we've always been an innovative university that has a very distinct place in Montreal, and a very distinct place in Quebec. We have to remember that, notwithstanding the challenges that are out there, fantastic things go on at this university all the time. And we need to continue to tell that message. Although we're going to experience a decline in international students this year, and we saw a decline in students from the rest of Canada, we need to continue to convey the message that we still want those students, and we're going to do everything possible to encourage them to come. I think that diversity has always been one of Concordia's strongest assets, and we need to keep that going forward.
Since the announcement of tuition hikes, Concordia has been forced to make cuts and limit spending, including the reduction of the shuttle bus service schedule. What would you have to say to students who are frustrated about not being able to access services that they were promised when they enrolled?
My answer is not just for students, my answer is for the whole community that uses the shuttle bus service to move back and forth between campuses. My answer to that goes beyond the specific case of the shuttle bus, because there are a lot of things that we've had to stop doing or slow down.
Obviously, a direct impact of reducing the schedule of the shuttle bus is that people need to find an alternative way to go between campuses because the shuttle is not available. But, there are a lot of indirect impacts of the budget cuts that are less visible but equally tangible within the university. We've essentially frozen hiring for the last year, both in terms of new faculty recruitment, but also in terms of staff recruitment. That means we have a lot of staff positions that are unfilled, which means that some people are being asked to try to pick up the slack and do extra work.
We are in a significant deficit situation. I know it's a cliché to say hard decisions have to be taken, but we are having to make decisions which are not about growth. There are decisions about: “Okay, can we do without this?”
What I'm heartened by is the efforts that faculty, staff, students and others have made to try to work within the new parameters that are in front of us. We're invested in this place. We know it's a great place, we want it to be even more successful, and we're going to do our part to help that happen.
I can't be naive and not say we have a vertical climb ahead of us. If we lose a cohort of students last year, we've lost that cohort of students for four years, and the same is true this year; it has a compounding effect. We need to become as creative as possible in our thinking about how we deal with the financial situation. It can't just be about where we're going to cut, it has to also be about what can we do differently, and where we can find new opportunities to generate revenue.
There have been videos circulating on social media of students being assaulted by Campus Safety and Prevention Services (CSPS) agents and SPVM officers on campus. How will you ensure, going forward, that students are kept safe while protesting?
Our duty is to keep the whole community safe: that’s students, staff and faculty. It's very painful to watch videos of conflicts and violence happening, whether it's verbal violence or physical violence. We don't want that on campus. Our campus safety officers are individuals who worked on, for the most part, the university campus for a long time. They're as committed to this place as we are, and there are limits to what they can't do. They’re a small number of individuals, they've been asked to do an awful lot over the last 16 months or so which is out of the ordinary. We need to realize that some of those CSPS agents have also been the victims of incidents. As a community, we have to say that certain things are unacceptable, and obviously, violence is one of those things. Keeping the community safe is a priority. I'm always very troubled and hurt when people say: “I don't feel safe coming to campus.” Whether that's a student, a faculty member or a staff member.
I'm really saddened by events that have happened over the last 16 months or so. I'm saddened by the vandalism that's happened at the university. I'm saddened by the fact that there have been occasions when we have called the SPVM onto campus. CSPS agents are not bouncers. This is not a nightclub. It's a last resort to call the SPVM, and the SPVM doesn't want to be on campus either. It's really concerning to me that this has become, over the last several months, a point of discussion, because it seems to me that we as a community have the capacity within ourselves to create the environment where we can express ourselves, but do so in a way that doesn't feel intimidating. We've unfortunately seen incidents that are really regrettable here.
For over a year, students have been demanding that the university divest from companies funding the genocide in Palestine, including, but not limited to, BMO. This has culminated in 85,000 students going on strike in support of Palestine in November 2024. What do you have to say to students who feel that their demands are not being met or listened to by the administration?
I think two things. There's one part of it around BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions), and one part of it is around investment strategy. I'll start with the investment strategy. The investment strategy of the university refers to the investments that are made by what used to be called Concordia Foundation, and is now the Concordia University Inter-Generational Fund (CUiF). Those are funds that are raised as a result of philanthropy; there's no student funding in there. In 2019, in collaboration with the president of the then Concordia Foundation, we agreed that we would set an objective, that between 2019 and 2025 Concordia would become the first university in Canada to fully divest from fossil fuels, but also to double the investments that we were making in social equity investing, supporting educational initiatives abroad, clean water initiatives, and so on.
I think the university as a whole should be really proud of that action, because that's a differentiator for us. A lot of the pathway to get to that decision was a result of students concerned about climate change. We've just turned the page into 2025, and we're going to meet that target. The CUiF will meet its target of being 100 per cent invested in sustainable and social equity investing this year. There's no other university in Canada that can make that claim, and I think that's something that the community should be really proud of.
Somehow it isn't landing with the entire community. It's like people are still assuming that we're investing in things that we're not investing in. We have no investments in the arms industry. We have no investments in the munitions industry. That's not the pathway that we've been on. I think we as a university should be looking at our investment strategy as a point of pride for Concordia and as something which I think other universities would be envious of achieving, and other student organizations would be envious of achieving.
Based on Concordia’s ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) status, why does the university still partner with weapons manufacturing companies like Bombardier and Lockheed Martin, which have a high ESG risk rating through programs like Co-op or workshops?
One of the initiatives that has helped make Concordia a destination university for students is our commitment to experiential learning and work-integrated learning.
Last year, we had about 5,000 students who were in paid internships or Co-op programs at Concordia. That's a huge number. Those are optional for students. Nobody's forced to be in an experiential learning program. Students have the right, and should have the right, to choose where they would like to do work. I don't think it's for me, or for others within the university, to tell students that they shouldn't work for a company, because that's a field that they're interested in working in.
Being able to demonstrate the added value that students get coming to Concordia, getting a great experience in class, but also having the option to pursue work-integrated learning, is a huge advantage for us. We made the commitment two years ago, and it took a lot of work to get to this point. Every single undergraduate program in the university had to find a pathway to experiential learning for students in their program. Now, based on the success of the last two years, we'll be able to announce next year that students, if they want, can have two experiential learning opportunities within the context of their program. Students who have had the benefit of work-integrated learning experience step more quickly into better-remunerated positions after graduation.
If students are pursuing paid internships or Co-ops, two things have to happen. First of all, they have to choose where they would like to go and interview for those positions, and then they have to be successful in getting the interview. We're not the ones who are matchmaking. We're not the ones who are saying this student is going to work with this organization or that company. It's important to understand that this is about student choice and that we're simply trying to make that choice available to the widest array of students possible within the university.
Students have requested that Concordia disclose all of its investments to increase transparency between students and the administration. Is this something that the current administration would consider?
Absolutely—I'd say two things about that. One is, we have been disclosing, in the sense that CUiF has a public report that they publish every year, that information is already public. I mean, it's essential—it's important to understand that the point of the CUiF is to raise money, the vast majority of which is used to support students, to provide student scholarships, etc. We need to be sure when our fund managers are making their investments, not only that they're meeting the investment criteria that we set around sustainability, but they're also yielding a return, because we want to be able to grow that fund to be able to support more students in the future.
We also set up an informal meeting group with students from the Concordia Student Union and with the head of our fund management program to try to explain in more detail how the investment strategy and structure work. Investment at this scale for large institutions is very complex. We have a number of fund managers who manage Concordia investments, but all those fund managers are given certain parameters, and those are the parameters around sustainable and social equity investment, and that we judge their performance based on the revenue that they generate. I don't think we have any problem being transparent about this, because this is a good story for Concordia to tell. The more we can tell that story about our investment strategy, and the more widely that's circulated, I think it will be a factor that will encourage students to come to a university that's invested in sustainability and social equity.
This article originally appeared in Volume 45, Issue 7, published January 14, 2025.
