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Abstract
It is widely known that universities can be significant players in urban development and, to fund development, some universities have become players in the new financial markets of interest-rate swaps and similar securities. Even in these studies, however, it is rare for university governance to be studied systematically. This article analyzes the capital projects processes of public universities in Toronto, Ontario, Canada to shed light on the political effects—on both internal governance and the public interest—of techniques used to plan, approve, and especially to fund capital projects. A key finding is that the scale at which projects are planned, described, financed, and authorized—the scale of the isolated “deal”—has negative effects on both intra-university inequities and intergenerational justice, but these effects are difficult to see precisely because of the built-in features of “the art of the deal.”
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Ascher, The Portfolio Society; Farmer, “Cities as Risk Managers.”
2 Peck and Whiteside, “Financializing Detroit”; Loxley and Hajer, “Public-Private Partnerships”; Valverde and Moore, “The Performance of Transparency”; Whiteside, “The Canada Infrastructure Bank”; Whiteside, “Public Works: Better, Faster, Cheaper Infrastructure?”
3 Banerji et al. (Roosevelt Institute), “It’s Time for Our Universities to Pick Students Over Swaps.”
4 Eaton et al., “Bankers in the Ivory Tower”; Etienne, Pushing Back the Gates; Gilderloom and Mullins, Promise and Betrayal; Glasson, “The Widening Local and Regional Impacts of the Modern Universities”; Perry and Wiewel, eds. The University as Urban Developer; Banjeri et al., (Roosevelt Institute), “It’s Time for Our Universities to Pick Students Over Swaps”; Bose, “Universities and the Redevelopment Politics of the Neoliberal City.”
5 Gregory, “The Radiant University.”
6 Re. real estate deals, see Etienne, Pushing Back the Gates. For Canadian private donations to universities, see CAUT, “Open for Business.”
7 CAUT, “Open for Business; Newson et al., “Toward an Alternative Future for Canada's Corporatized Universities”; Stone, “The Corporate University in Canada and the US.”
8 Engelen et al., “How Finance Penetrates Its Other.”
9 Marcus, “The Paradox of New Buildings on Campus.”
10 Valverde, Johns, and Raso, “Governing Infrastructure”; Valverde and Moore, “The Performance of Transparency.”
11 In describing the art of the deal as a style of governing, we rely on the ontologically and politically agnostic methodologies developed within governmentality studies (e.g. Rose, O’Malley, and Valverde, “Governmentality”).
12 The University of Toronto is often cited as Canada’s most research-intensive university; York University has a law school and a large business school but lacks a medical school, and it relies more heavily on undergraduate enrolment than the University of Toronto. Ryerson, for its part, grew out of a polytechnic, and although it is now a medium-sized university with some professional faculties and a good number of Master’s degrees, it continues to focus on more “applied” research and teaching. The three universities, while not selected as a scientific sample, are thus significantly different from one another, but share the same general location.
13 We have chosen to focus on capital projects in Toronto’s three universities (Toronto, York, and Ryerson) to demonstrate the variety of legal and governance techniques employed by each one. The focus on athletic facilities is largely an artefact of the contingent fact that the aquatic centre at Scarborough was by far the most expensive project in the study period (2010–2015), but focusing on nonacademic buildings, especially those requiring a special student levy, sheds particular light on internal governance processes.
14 Ascher, The Portfolio Society; Farmer, “Cities as Risk Managers.”
15 Seven interviews were conducted at the University of Toronto, pursuant to an ethics protocol approved by the Research Ethics Board. One interview was with a former student leader and the rest were with administrators. For the University of Toronto, all capital projects that were started or ongoing from 2010 to 2015 inclusive were followed through the agendas and minutes of the Planning and Budget Committee of Governing Council, Business Board, the full Governing Council, and some selected meetings of Academic Board (note that the University of Toronto does not have a senate). The paper is also informed by observations made by the first author, in her capacity as the Director of the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies for seven years, of how senior administrators make decisions. For Ryerson and York, the small amount of information about capital projects that was available on the respective university websites in 2015 and 2016 was gathered and analyzed. The York University Development Corporation does not make its minutes or other materials public.
16 Valverde and Moore, “The Performance of Transparency.” The total aggregate debt is not secret in public institutions, but appears only in annual financial statements. These are presented for approval to the same governing bodies that approve building projects, but at a different time and by a different administrator.
17 Marcus, “The Paradox of New Buildings on Campus.”
18 Inter alia, Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason.
19 Valverde, Johns, and Raso, “Governing Infrastructure”; Valverde and Moore, “The Performance of Transparency.”
20 Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 302.
21 Maitland, State, Trust, and Corporation; Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Ages.
22 Novak, “The American Law of Association.”
23 Hartog, Public Property and Private Power.
24 Perry and Wiewel, eds. The University as Urban Developer.
25 The process by which universities ask government officials for matching or other funds towards capital projects is shrouded in secrecy but two informants were willing to give a general picture of the process. It was intimated that personal and political-party connections between senior university administrators and elected politicians are useful capital in this game, a suggestion corroborated by the backgrounds of “government relations” university personnel.
26 For the University of Toronto, see the 2012 “Debt Strategy” paper, available on the website of Governing Council, a thoughtful document that resulted in a somewhat higher debt ceiling and debt policy being adopted by Governing Council. https://governingcouncil.utoronto.ca/secretariat/policies/debt-strategy-december-13-2012.
27 Gray, “Toronto, Victoria University at Odds”; Kurtz, “Leasing for Profit and Control.”
28 Brenner, New State Spaces; Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights.
29 Engelen et al., “How Finance Penetrates Its Other,” 1076.
30 This will be named the Schwartz-Reisman Innovation Centre, and will house an existing Artificial Intelligence entity, the Vector Institute, which is a separate corporation with a separate board. A separate ongoing research project by some of the current study’s authors seeks to shed light on the relations between the university proper and affiliated forprofit and nonprofit commercial corporations. Be that as it may, the building is being touted as a major real estate news item: https://www.blogto.com/real-estate-toronto/2019/03/university-toronto-building-massive-new-innovation-complex/.
31 Bose, “Universities and the Redevelopment Politics of the Neoliberal City”; see www.utoronto.ca/news for a profusion of such announcements and photos.
32 These figures are estimates based on several dozen project descriptions found in minutes and agendas of university boards.
33 Information about capital project approvals is far more fulsome for the University of Toronto, but the basic elements of project approval seem similar across universities. For the University of Toronto, Governing Council minutes and documents for 2010 to 2015, as well as minutes and board packages from Business Board and selected committees were exhaustively studied. No such detailed study of York or Ryerson is possible using publicly available documents.
35 Engelen et al., “How Finance Penetrates its Other,” 1076.
36 “U of T alumnus back from New York City to lead Four Corners strategy.” U of T Bulletin, April 18, 2019. Turning some of the university’s considerable land holdings into profitmaking real estate, but without selling land, is the core of the so-called “Four Corners” current (2019) University of Toronto real estate strategy.
37 In more recent years, the rubber-stamp approach does not seem to have changed, although we have not examined all minutes from all meetings.
38 Eaton et al., “Bankers in the Ivory Tower.”
39 Valverde and Moore, “The Performance of Transparency.”
40 Amborski, “Ryerson University and Toronto’s Dundas Square Metropolis Project.”
41 The “board packages” distributed for Ryerson Board of Governor meetings are not very informative. The minutes mainly record the university president reporting on initiatives and congratulating Ryerson members for successes. Substantial items are often subject to secrecy, as meetings regularly go “in camera.” Budget documents are included in board packages, but they are not in a standard format and they often lack comparative data from other years. See https://www.ryerson.ca/governors/meetings/boardroomdocuments.
The best source of financial information for Ryerson is the annual financial statements, which can be obtained online without going through the Board of Governors site just cited.
42 CAUT, “Open for Business.”
43 Interview conducted December 2014.
44 By contrast, field hockey is a major Pan Am sport; that accidental fact underpinned a decision, made by university sports officials in the downtown campus, to rip up the “back campus” grass long used by students informally, and create instead a fenced facility for Pan Am Games field hockey and seven-a-side rugby, but one that would become permanent. A huge controversy erupted. The criticisms unfortunately replicated the logic of “art of the deal,” with critics, including alumnus Margaret Atwood, romantically praising the ripped-up traditional grass, but avoiding the larger question of how international sporting events drive local decisions with far-reaching consequences.
45 See statement by President David Naylor to the meeting of the Business Board, University of Toronto, January 31, 2011 (page 18).
46 By contrast, York University governors put a strict limit on the amount of money that York would commit to remediating the soil needed to provide a “clean” site for the Pan Am Games stadium built on the York University campus but then handed over to the university, limiting York’s costs to 20 percent of the stadium total to a maximum of $20 million (information from various York Board of Governor agenda packages, 2010–11). With equal wisdom, York’s own stadium (the York Lions stadium) is quite separate from the “high-performance,” national-level athlete stadium that is on the York campus but merely pays rent to York, without the university having responsibility for its operating costs.
47 “Were the Games Worth It?” The Globe and Mail, August 25, 2015. The copartnership agreement signed by the university and the city states that the operating costs are $14.1 million per year. No breakdown of these costs is available publicly, and we were unable to obtain reliable figures on the rent being paid to the facility by Swim Canada, Swim Ontario, and Dive Canada, the primary users of the pools.
48 The $30 million amount was taken up by media such as Kirk Makin, “U of T Students Approve Levy to Build Athletic Complex,” The Globe and Mail, March 22, 2010. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/u-of-t-students-approve-levy-to-build-athletic-complex/article4310549/.
49 See minutes: University Affairs Board, University of Toronto, February 1, 2011 (pages 2–4); and April 20, 2010, University Affairs Board, University of Toronto (page 4).
50 The co-owners’ agreement was attached to the minutes of the University of Toronto’s Governing Council for its meeting of October 20, 2013, and was thus notionally available to university members, but the division of pool time is not part of the agreement and does not seem to have been discussed at Governing Council, as far as the minutes reveal.
51 Phone calls to Ryerson Builds to ask for project information for the Mattamy Centre proved fruitless. (Further, Ryerson Builds has a Facebook page but seems to have gone out of existence, with capital projects being managed, in the spring of 2019, by the Facilities Division of the university).
52 Siemiatycki, “Mixing Public and Private Uses in the Same Building.”
53 At the Ryerson Board of Governors meeting at which the referendum for the levy was approved, questions about burdening students with a new fee were raised by at least one governor. See Board minutes, November 24, 2008 meeting.
54 Siemiatycki, "Mixing Public and Private Uses in the Same Building.”
55 Siemiatycki, "Mixing Public and Private Uses in the Same Building.”
56 Strathern, Audit Cultures.
57 Ascher, The Portfolio Society; Appadurai, Banking on Words.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Mariana Valverde
Mariana Valverde teaches in the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Jacqueline Briggs
Jacqueline Briggs is a PhD Candidate in the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Grace Tran
Grace Tran is a PhD Candidate in Criminology and Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto, and is a Visiting Scholar at Rice University in Houston, Texas, USA.
Matthew Montevirgen
Matthew Montevirgen is a PhD Candidate in Socio-Legal Studies at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.