Seriously CBU, Stop

CBU President and Vice-Chancellor David Dingwall has issued ANOTHER open letter “to the Cape Breton Community,” this one occupying three full (expensive) pages in last Saturday’s Cape Breton Post, and it is another absolute dud of a PR exercise.

It states:

I want to assure you that I, as President and Vice-Chancellor, take full responsibility for the increasing pressures on the housing system due to our student enrolment.

Before laying the blame for the situation squarely on the students:

On the issue of housing, we have always stressed to students the importance of securing accommodations before arriving in Canada and strongly suggest on-campus housing to new students.

An entire page of this production, labelled “Background Information on Housing,” is presented as six separate points but is really the same point made six different ways and that point is: it’s the students’ fault for believing that just because we’ve accepted them means we can accommodate them.

I could go through it point by point (like, how can you provide a list of reasons for CBU’s unprecedented growth that doesn’t include “aggressive recruitment” and how does one conduct a housing search on another continent and why, if you have 50 empty residence rooms in a housing crisis, are you not doing whatever it takes to fill them?) but I feel that would be giving this document more attention than it deserves.

I will say, though, that I cannot believe a group of educated adults read the finished product and thought: “Nailed it”:

 

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