“They’re turning off the heat before some classes finish”: Professor Frances Latchford on York University’s dramatic cuts to liberal arts programs

In February, York University announced its decision to suspend admission to 18 undergraduate programs, most of which are in the faculty of liberal arts—including Indigenous studies, gender and women’s studies, and sexuality studies. Ontario’s post-secondary education system is in crisis, and these programs are among the most recent losses in a cascade of academic cutbacks across the province. Frances Latchford has taught at York for more than two decades and now chairs the department of gender, sexuality and women’s studies. Here, Latchford explains the austerity measures and anti–diversity, equity and inclusion onslaught that pushed York to its tipping point, and why a liberal arts education is more valuable now than ever.

The university announced these cuts on Valentine’s Day. What was your initial reaction? The day before, staff had heard at a meeting that cuts were coming. The next morning, the first thing my partner said to me after we woke up was, “Happy Valentine’s Day, honey,” and I burst into tears. The memo came out later that day—it was an email at 4:56 p.m. on a Friday.

What have the past few weeks looked like for you? There’s been great goodwill among my colleagues. Many of the people who make up our school experience marginalization—that’s partly why we’re experts on it. So we’re very community-oriented. We rolled up our sleeves and got to work, strategizing and figuring out how we were going to respond. Our department published a statement. There’s been a significant letter-writing campaign. We’re working with our union to see what else can be done. We are committed to ensuring that York stays true to the purported values and principles on which it has built its reputation. We are going to fight this at whatever cost.

There’s also been a lot of panic. We’re getting people asking, “Is the school closing down?” We had students rushing to the office on reading week. There was a great public outcry too. The university president and our faculty dean are receiving letters from alumni, academics and activists all across Canada and the US and from as far as Italy and Ireland.

Eighteen programs is a startling number of cuts. How did the university end up in such a dire situation? With the federal government’s cap on international students, the underfunding of education by the provincial government and the tuition freeze, it was a perfect storm. Ontario has the lowest per-student provincial funding in the country. In 2019, Doug Ford cut domestic tuition by 10 per cent, then froze it there. So universities and colleges have relied increasingly on international student tuition. When the federal government capped international student enrolment last year, schools like York faced hard decisions.

On top of all that, the York administration hasn’t calculated well. They’ve invested in massive projects that are not paying off, like a Markham campus that opened last year. There’s also administrative bloat. From 2018 to 2023, the size of York’s senior administration team expanded by 37 per cent, and their compensation increased by 47 per cent, despite a 0.3 per cent increase in enrolment and a three per cent increase in total revenue.

That said, I can’t blame everything on the university administration—they’re operating in a context created by a succession of governments that have dismantled what a university is supposed to be. Historically, the provincial government funded universities at a much higher level. When I went to university back in the ’80s, a post-secondary education was considered a social good in and of itself—not just something that will help you get a job.

Related: “Since the federal government capped international student enrolment, many of us haven’t felt welcome in Canada”

Tell me more about how the international student enrolment cap is factoring into this. The province has basically been instructing universities and colleges to make up the deficit in funding by bringing in international students, who pay much more. Now, about 40 per cent of that money is gone. In my faculty, 61 per cent of tuition revenue came from international students in 2022 and 2023, before the enrolment cap.

You mentioned the Ford government’s domestic tuition freeze. On paper, that sounds like a good thing for students. What went wrong? On the one hand, Ford froze domestic tuition, and it appeared to be this great generous gift to students. But, on the other hand, he took away OSAP grants and eliminated the six-month interest-free grace period for graduates paying back OSAP loans.

How do these budget cuts play out on campus? There are so many ways, big and small, that the student experience is affected. I know one prof who’s having the heat turned off in their classroom at 4:30 p.m. every day, an hour before the class ends. Then there’s the ongoing neglect of campus maintenance, the bare-bones student events, the increasing class sizes. Our department’s curriculum committee was asked to run online first-year courses with 500 students. We pushed back and said no. First year is so important for students to make friends and build community. That doesn’t happen online.

The university has also been trying to reduce staff costs. Faculty are paying for things like staff appreciation out of pocket. It’s a small thing, but it matters. Our staff are the backbone of the university. They’re the ones on the front lines when students come in panicked. They’re the first warm face when a student enters a unit. Now, students are increasingly finding empty desks in the front office.

Colleges across the province—including Centennial, Sheridan and Seneca—are shuttering programs by the dozens, but York is the first university to make such substantial cuts. Was the writing on the wall? It did come as quite a shock, but we’ve known about York’s financial crisis for quite some time. This was indicated in the 2023 auditor general’s report, and the cracks have been showing. What we weren’t expecting was such a blunt instrument to potentially solve these problems.

Diversity, equity and inclusion have become a scapegoat for any number of economic and social issues and anxieties. Is the anti-DEI fervour at play here? Absolutely—I think a significant part of this is a backlash. Our provincial government is not sensitive to issues of equity. Ford is one of these politicians who will do whatever he can get away with.

Ford has referred to affected programs as “basket-weaving” courses and said that students should focus on STEM in preparation for “the jobs of the future.” If ever there were a future-proof degree, it would be a liberal arts degree, because it teaches you how to think. We teach problem-solving skills. We teach social responsibility. In the coming decades, many of the jobs that people are currently working won’t even exist. When one door closes, you have to ask yourself, “How do I refashion my skill set and direct it toward something else?” A liberal arts education allows you to do that. My degrees are in philosophy, but while I was in school, I did all kinds of jobs because I can think my way through a problem. I’ve been a courier. I’ve been a carpenter. Business leaders frequently say that they would rather hire somebody with a liberal arts degree than a very specific training degree.

According to York administrators, affected programs have low or declining enrolment. Even if you value a liberal arts education, how do you make a business case for continuing to run these programs? In the past, enrolment was determined by bums in seats. A decade ago, York introduced the Shared Accountability and Resource Planning budget model. Now, the only metric that counts is majors. They’re saying we have fewer than 50 students who have declared gender and women’s studies or sexuality studies as their first major, but that does not account for double majors, minors, certificates or electives. So there is a misrepresentation with respect to whether our programs are viable—because our courses do fill up. Many of our courses have wait lists at the start of the year. I’m not saying every single course is full every term, but they don’t run unless they’re at the viable threshold. The majority of students in our first-year classes haven’t declared one of our programs as their first major—some are undeclared and some are taking the course as an elective—meaning they’re not counted toward enrolment for our department.

A York spokesperson said that current students “can complete their degree on track with minimal disruption.” It’s inaccurate to say that the disruption is minimal. The aim is for us to revise the program—and we are happy to do that. We regularly review our curriculum and course offerings. We care about this school. But we’re lacking support from leadership and financial resources. So there’s now a lot of work to be done in a short amount of time, which is going to demand the attention of faculty, and that will come at a cost in terms of students’ access to us.

But let’s say that, after this revisioning process, in the worst-case scenario, we’re on a path to closing down the programs. Technically, academic matters like the closure of programs are supposed to go through the university’s senate. But the administration can circumvent this by suspending admissions, which is a financial matter, not an academic one. So the administration is allowed to starve the program slowly. What will happen is this: as students move through their degrees, there will be fewer and fewer course offerings. The administration will start to shut down courses in the first year, then the second. By the end, we will be left with a handful of courses that will maybe become electives. And then the administration can turn around and say, “Well, there are no students, so why would we be funding this?” There’s no guarantee that our program will remain intact over time.

What are the consequences if programs like gender studies and Indigenous studies are lost? It’s a profound loss. In programs like these, people study how to change the world. We do specialized research and disseminate it for the greater good of the community—affecting policy, bringing it into workplaces. Our graduates are running programs in communities and institutions around the world. All of this is at risk. At this time in the world when there is so much ignorance and hatred, it’s important that we make it a social value to educate students on the issues that our programs address. If you have people you care about in your life who are affected by forces like racism, heterosexism and ableism, then you should care about these programs.

I imagine that, back when they were first introduced, there was a lot of pushback against gender and women’s studies programs. Did you think those days were behind you? We actually had one of the very first women’s studies programs in Canada. The program started at Atkinson College, which was for mature students, many of whom were women. So we’ve always been committed to ensuring that people who’ve been left in the margins can get access to a proper education. That’s come from a lot of work by our elders—people who fought for feminism, LGBTQ rights, decolonization and anti-racism.

Homophobia, heterosexism and racism never went away, they just became less explicit for a while. I wouldn’t have anticipated the intensity of the backlash that is appearing in the US. My friends and colleagues in the States who are LGBTQ, racialized or disabled are living in a constant state of fear. And that’s spilling over across the border. Where the US goes, Canada often follows.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.