Lynn Wells chosen as new president of Laurentian University

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Laurentian University has chosen a new president with francophone experience and a background in Indigenous education, as it seeks to rebuild after a disastrous insolvency that led to hundreds of job losses and cast the institution’s future in doubt.

The Sudbury university announced Tuesday that Lynn Wells, an English literature scholar and currently the provost and vice-president academic at Brock University, will take charge as of next April. She has the task of rehabilitating a school that became the first publicly-funded university in Canada to file for creditor protection in 2021.

In an interview, Dr. Wells said much of the hard work of putting Laurentian back on stable financial footing has already been accomplished. The university’s transformation plan, put together with outside consultants as part of the process of emerging from creditor protection, will play an important role in ensuring its sustainability, she said.

Laurentian’s enrollment has stabilized since the initial shock of insolvency, Dr. Wells said. The number of students this fall is up 19 per cent on last year, and much of the increase has come from international students, whose higher tuition fees are crucial to university funding. Laurentian is now 17 per cent international students, which is about the average among Ontario universities.

“Now it’s a matter of rebuilding confidence in the institution and making sure that the reputation is restored. People will move past the last few years. It’s a two-year blip in the history of an institution of many decades. So there’s work to be done to turn that page and to shift the narrative,” Dr. Wells said.

Meanwhile, several other universities in Ontario are facing mounting deficits and seeking immediate help from the provincial government. The Council of Ontario Universities recently called on the government to act quickly in implementing the recommendations of the blue ribbon panel on financial sustainability in the post-secondary sector.

The COU has underlined the importance of the panel’s call to lift the province’s four-year freeze on domestic tuition rates and to increase the level of per-student government funding. The council has said the tuition freeze and stagnant government funding have created a “perfect storm” of financial pressure that is no longer sustainable.

Ontario’s Minister of Colleges and Universities Jill Dunlop said through spokesperson Liz Tuomi on Tuesday that the government will continue to work with the sector to ensure it remains financially stable.

Dr. Wells said that, as she observed the turmoil at Laurentian from the outside, her concern was for the people whose lives were affected. More than 340 faculty and staff lost their jobs in the insolvency process. Ontario’s former auditor general, Bonnie Lysyk, concluded in a report last year that the insolvency was the result of years of mismanagement, poor planning and weak oversight that led to overspending on capital projects.

Dr. Wells is a scholar of English literature whose most recent book examines the work of novelist Ian McEwan. She worked with francophone students when she was at York University’s Glendon campus and has studied French literature, having written her master’s thesis on poet Guillaume Apollinaire. She has also worked at First Nations University of Canada, where she was vice-president academic in the period after the university suffered financial difficulties.

Her experience is of particular importance at Laurentian, which has a mandate to provide education in both official languages and to offer a comprehensive approach to Indigenous education.

Having spent time in Sudbury recently, Dr. Wells said she has been struck by the community’s pride in its university. She said her vision for Laurentian will stem from the community’s vision. It will be built on the idea of service to Northern Ontario, she said, with a focus on health care and mining, and paying heed to its bilingual and tricultural mandate.

“Having been involved in the recovery of First Nations University, I know that institutions can recover with the right supports and with the right leadership,” Dr. Wells said.

Fabrice Colin, president of the Laurentian University Faculty Association, said he is cautiously optimistic about the institution’s prospects. He said Dr. Wells’s background seems well-suited to Laurentian. Under interim president Sheila Embleton, the administration has been more open and respectful of the principle of collegial governance, and Prof. Colin hopes that will continue.

The university has recently hired approximately 30 new faculty, some of them tenure-track, and even recalled a handful of professors who were let go in the insolvency process, Prof. Colin said. But many faculty are still straining under increased workloads, he said.

The federal government announced in its fiscal update last month that it will amend insolvency legislation to exclude publicly funded colleges and universities, which would prevent a repeat of what happened at Laurentian.