On December 17, a fire broke out in the Ashby neighborhood of Sydney in a Park Street duplex that was home to eight people, all international students at Cape Breton University (CBU).
One of the eight, identified by the CBC as 33-year-old business analytics student Rajesh Kumar Gollapudi, died in the fire, leaving behind a wife and daughter in India.
Rental duplex on Park Street in Sydney that was damaged by fire on Dec. 17, killing international student Rajesh Kumar Gollapudi and displacing 12 other people. (Josefa Cameron/CBC)
Twelve people, including the five who lived in the other half of the duplex, were displaced by the fire.
On December 22, CBU published an “open letter” to the “Cape Breton Community” signed by President and vice-chancellor David Dingwall. I am going to do Dingwall the favor of presuming he did not write this letter, which addressed neither the death, nor the fire, nor the over-crowded conditions in which so many CBU students find themselves living.
The giveaway that it was the work of a communications department was the use of the word “narrative” to describe what people were saying in the wake of the fire. As my sister pointed out, “narratives” are what PR crisis teams think they can “change.”
The letter offered a litany of platitudes about CBU’s “pride” in “welcoming” students to “our beautiful Island,” and the rather incredible observations that affordable housing is a “national issue” and unemployment has “always been a challenge” in Cape Breton, which I think were meant to absolve our university of blame for bringing in thousands of foreign students who struggle to find accommodations and jobs in CBRM.
I was going to play “Okay, stop” with the entire letter, but it proved too tedious, because the writer uses so very many words to say so little, so I’ll focus on what I see as the key paragraph:
All travel and government visa processing was paused due to COVID-19. This meant many students who were accepted to CBU in 2020/21 could not travel to Canada and had to defer their enrolment. When restrictions were lifted, a double cohort of students began arriving on campus.
Okay, stop.
If you knew many of your students were deferring enrollment to 2021/22, could you not have reduced the number of additional students you accepted to allow for this?
Failing that, could you not have reduced the number you accepted in fall 2022 or January 2023?
The answer is: of course you could have, and the proof is that you’re now, finally, preparing to take such action, although not in time to help any of these thousands of students:
As we at CBU work through this growth, we have begun to implement a Strategic Enrolment Management Plan. This means determining the most appropriate number of students for our campus and offering the right mix of programs based on current demand.
How a university can function as long as CBU has without, apparently, any sense of the number students it can accommodate on its campus must remain one of higher education’s little mysteries.
Double trouble
It’s not just that CBU is using international students as a cash cow. It has always used international students, who pay pay about $19,000 for 10 undergraduate courses (30 credits) where “domestic” students pay about $9,000, as a cash cow. (I would argue it uses domestic students as cash cows too, and that university education should not be this expensive for anyone, but that’s a subject for another day.)
It’s that it doesn’t even have the sense to treat them well. It sent out acceptance letters knowing full well that in addition to the usual difficulties associated with being a student and living in a strange country, members of this “double cohort” would also struggle to find employment, be poorly served by the CBRM’s transit system, attend classes in a movie theater and be forced to take whatever accommodations they could find in a housing market that was tight before CBU began recruiting in India.
And it doesn’t stop there, because as I write I’m hearing the president of the CBU Students’ Union on the radio encouraging students who have been sexually assaulted to come forward without fear of derailing their applications for residency. Damanpreet Singh is telling the CBC’s Steve Sutherland that he is not sure how widespread the problem is, but he’s heard it from enough students to think it warrants attention. And the example he is giving is of a student facing unwanted advances from the man renting her a room.
The university thinks it’s covering its butt by issuing tweets like this:
Attention incoming January students: you must secure accommodations before travelling to Canada.
If you do not have your accommodations by December 15, please defer to the next intake by following the steps at https://t.co/s6H1vBJNgr pic.twitter.com/SppKpE7hLu
— CBU (@cbuniversity) December 4, 2022
But an international student expecting to start classes in January probably already has a plane ticket they will not be able to “defer” without penalty. (I saw one student on Facebook saying he was praying his visa application would be rejected as that was the only way he’d be entitled to a refund from CBU for the tuition he’d paid in advance, something many international students must do as part of the study visa application process.)
When it does acknowledge the difficulties its students face, CBU manages to put a positive spin on them:
This year was exceptional at @cbuniversity. Leading into 2023, we’ll look back at some wonderful things that happened in 2022.
In September, despite Hurricane Fiona’s devastation, our community stepped up and raised $100,000 to support students in need.#CBUin2022 #CBUProudOn pic.twitter.com/pFxtqtk4zK
— CBUAlumni (@CBUAlumni) December 29, 2022
Three cheers for food insecurity?
‘Another profitable year’
I need to acknowledge here that when I say “CBU” I am referring to its current administration (and its comms department). I realize the university is more than these two things; in fact, I know many good people doing good work there and it would be remiss of me not to mention them.
But CBU’s comms department issued an “open letter” to the Cape Breton Community signed by its president and as a member of that community, I feel compelled to respond.
As it happens, the letter was not the only thing I have read about CBU recently.
I have read that the university enjoyed “another profitable year” in 2021/22 and that its president saw yet-another pay bump, bringing his compensation to $392,893.
I have read that it has received $35 million from the province for the construction of a “Centre for Discovery and Innovation” which will, according to President Dingwall, “further allow us to attract both Canadian and international students” but only $5 million for the construction of a housing development.
I have read that it got $500,000 from ACOA to replace its inflatable sports dome.
I have read that it has got its sights set on a medical school.
Taken all together, these various articles add up to a completely different “narrative” about our university, one in which it can not only accommodate the students it already has—it’s ready to attract even more!
But it’s not the “narrative” that needs changing here—it’s the reality. An ugly reality we’ve been forced to confront in the form of a burnt-out Park Street duplex. And the message I have heard, in conversations over the holidays with other members of our “community,” is that CBU needs to do something about this reality and it needs to do it now.
