By Maxwell Heroux & Maheeshan Sivanesan
B
udget cuts at universities have become commonplace across Canada, especially in Ontario. Carleton University is no exception, as shown in the 2025-2026 Operating Budget Report presented by the office of the Provost in April 2025. Throughout every level of the institution, there are cuts made by Carleton University that affect everyone. Some of these budget cuts have been explained publicly, while others have been poorly publicized despite impacting students directly. The university blamed the previous year’s deficit on doubleheader threats of heightened restrictions on international students and tuition freezes. While divestment grows as a prominent issue within the student community, the money troubles are an overlooked concern.
Janakan Muthukumar, a graduate student representative on the Board of Governors (BoG), was the only contacted BOG member who agreed to an interview with The Leveller. He stated that the Finance Committee has met regularly to address the budget cuts and students’ concerns about expenses. Their goal is to maintain and improve services to “provide the best education we can,” despite the circumstances, with Muthukumar saying “the university is welcoming everyone to have collective action with empathy and understanding with every corner of the challenges that come in.”
As of the April presentation, “the University now presents a $32 million base operating budget deficit for 2025-26.” These cuts are felt most in library acquisitions and faculty staffing, two sections with the most room for cuts as well as the largest variance in spending within a normal school year. The new budget has been implemented through a major review of the MacOdrum Library’s collections, as well as major cuts to contract instructor-led classes.
In an update from MacOdrum library published March 20, 2025, they stated, “as part of the Financial Sustainability Framework that was announced by the university last November, the Library has been given a mandate to make significant reductions to both its collections and operating budgets.”The process began during the 2024-25 academic year, with axed spending on redundant subscriptions, where the access is already secured in other deals. This, along with other purchases the library chose not to make, resulted in cost savings of roughly $400,000.
Other spending reductions in the 2024-25 academic year included reductions in professional development, conference travel funding, staffing, events and exhibits, and by delaying renovations.
These budget cuts saw the Carleton University Research Impact Endeavour program discontinued, a fund that encouraged the open publishing of “over 400 articles authored by Carleton scholars” from 2012 to 2024. Through this program, authors would be reimbursed for making their article open access instead of locked behind paywalls.
Since the library has already reduced collections and staffing, future cost-saving tactics now focus more on the services offered. This includes possible reductions in the library’s operating hours, 3-D printing services, software support, mail delivery, and room bookings. In their budget update, the library stated, “we will be considering these and other options in the coming months.” No additional statements have come from MacOdrum Library regarding the plans for the 2025-26 academic year.
“Who’s going to teach the students?” – Ryan Conrad, CUPE 4600 President
While the cutting of contract instructors has been publicized by their union, CUPE Local 4600, the details of how it impacts students has not been laid out as clearly. To understand this The Leveller interviewed the local President, Ryan Conrad. He said the cuts will be an “average of 43% across all faculties,” with about “50% of contract instructor positions being cut overall.”
Previous staffing reductions were the result of new retirement incentives, where The Charlatan reported 154 staff opted for voluntary retirement; according to Conrad this includes 40 full-time faculty. For Conrad, this raised the question of “who’s going to teach the students?” With dozens of full-time faculty retiring early and half of the contract positions axed, there just won’t be enough teachers for the number of students.
Conrad highlighted how class sizes have fluctuated, saying a class had “30 [students] in 2022 without [a] TA [Teaching Assistant], [and] 60 this year with [a] TA,” and it’s set to be “40 [students] next [year] with no TA.” If class sizes go back down, but they lose a TA, a student position is lost in the process, and there is less teaching support for a larger class when compared to 2022 numbers.
Carleton’s Graduate Students’ Association (GSA) President Zeina Al Attar highlighted how this trickles down to the students stating, “the budget cuts mean less opportunities, not only more work for TA-ships but also less opportunities for RA [Research Assistant]-ships.” Furthermore, she pointed out how “this will affect the experiences and services that students receive,” since there will not only be less electives and courses available, but also, by extension, less opportunities for student learning and collaboration.
“… students are the biggest stakeholders” – Janakan Muthukumar, Graduate Student Representative on the Board of Governors
But this is not the full picture; it goes far beyond classes being cut, a myriad of programs being shrunk in scope, unfair negotiations, and the ending of student-led study sessions.
One major change to come on the technology side was the OneDrive storage being reduced from 5TB (5000GB) to 10GB, in an announcement from Carleton’s Information Technology Services. The university cited changes to Microsoft’s university plans. While these changes are real, Microsoft recommended 50GB per regular member and Carleton cut it to 10GB per student. Other universities, including the University of Ottawa, followed Microsoft’s recommendation.
The CUPE 4600 Unit 2 (Contract Instructor) Collective Agreement, sections 16.5–16.9 detail seniority points, which allow Contract Instructors who have taught longest to have higher priority to teach another class. These points expire if an instructor doesn’t teach for a span of 36 months. With the established cuts to contact instructors, a lot of these points are at risk of expiring due to contract instructors being unable to get jobs. A freeze of points would prevent a mass reset of seniority points during a period of financial unrest for the university. This freeze would allow contract instructors to resume picking up classes without penalty when the financial woes ideally subside.
The union has tried to negotiate such a freeze, as shown in a draft Letter of Understanding between CUPE 4600 and Carleton University, obtained by The Leveller. In this letter, the union asked that “every Contract Instructor who has any active seniority points as of April 30, 2025, shall retain them, undiminished, until April 30, 2028,” with favourable terms like “the University may, after presenting evidence of such improved circumstances, request to end this agreement” and that “such a request will not be unreasonably denied by the Union.” Despite its polite appeal, the university declined the proposed freeze.
“I still don’t feel like the students who did use it as a resource deserve to be left behind just because other people chose not to use that resource” – Makayla Windross, PASS Faciliator
As per The Charlatan’s description, Peer Assisted Study Sessions (PASS) was an initiative wherein students in select first- and second-year classes often seen as difficult could get support from an upper-year student who got an A-minus grade or higher. The first public news of this came in the form of a post on Reddit from an impacted student about an email sent out on April 10, 2025. While the official page describing the program was silently removed from the Carleton website sometime after March 20, it was saved on The Internet Archive.
These PASS facilitators included Makayla Windross, who led PASS sessions for ECOR 1045 and 1046. When interviewed by The Leveller, Windross described how the fall semester brought relatively high attendance of 15 to 25 students per session on average, out of the nearly 200 registered in the class.
Windross said the facilitators “were informed via email in about early April that it would be suspended as of May 1st” and that there were only rumours prior. Muthukumar stated the university is “using every tool to ensure the information is shared” but also working on “not creating certain panic in stakeholders,” hence the usage of internal memos on occasion.
The lack of a public release about the termination of PASS from the university raises the question: of if it was PASS given fair consideration? Windross suggested that the question should have been “how can we improve this program?” Muthukumar commented in a similar vein, that “if there will be a cut, it should be in a way that least impacts students… our strongest stakeholders are the students.”
Steven Reid, Media Relations Officer for Carleton University, told The Leveller that “Carleton continues to actively explore new programming opportunities to enhance the academic experience of our students,” indicating that while PASS was cut, the Centre for Student Academic Support may have more in store for the future.
Due to the less structured style of PASS, Windross emphasizes how it allowed for networking, and students to make mistakes in ways they may not be able to in TA-led tutorials or instructor-led classes. It offered another environment for students to learn outside the traditional classroom for those without access or funds for a tutor.
Windross stated that “even though it might not have the largest attendance in comparison to how many people were in the lectures… the students who did use it as a resource [don’t] deserve to be left behind just because other people chose not to use that resource,” citing as an example that even if only 10% attended, “those 10% still matter and deserve to be set up for the most success that they can have.”
“… any violation of human rights should not be tolerated” – Zeina Al Attar, GSA President
The budget cuts and the subsequent questions they created brought into question Carleton’s finances as a whole. Lately, divestment from the State of Israel has been at the forefront. An Instagram post by Carleton4Palestine on April 25, 2025 revealed that over $34 million is being invested by Carleton University into corporations enabling brutal violence and oppression in the world. These companies include ones related to the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the ongoing ICE raids and detentions in the United States.
These investments include over $16 million into companies that arm the Israeli military and profit from illegal infrastructure and settlements. These illegal settlements, and the companies within them, have contributed to the continuous killings of tens of thousands of Palestinans since October 2023 as reported by PBS, and tens of thousands more through the seven decades since the State of Israel was established, as discussed by the United Nations. Another $16 million is invested in corporations that separate families, including nearly $2 million in Thomson Reuters – a Canadian company that “provides ICE with data systems to surveil, target, and detain migrants,” according to the Instagram post.
The leaks of these complicit investments have resulted in increasing calls for divestment by student groups and activists at the university. The Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA), which is the undergraduate student government at the university, is an example of a prominent group that has formally supported divestment efforts. One such way is through its creation and publication of a Divestment Policy in April 2024.
“One thing that we’re really working on this year with CUSA and the University is increased collaboration” – Sean Joe-Ezigbo, CUSA President
Part of the problem of Carleton University not addressing divestment calls from the students, CUSA President Sean Joe-Ezigbo attributes to the organization itself. Speaking to The Leveller, Joe-Ezigbo said, “I think one of the main reasons why the university hasn’t really included us in a lot of conversations is because we at CUSA have been a bit unstable through the past, so when they look at us, they don’t really see a [unified student] body.”
Joe-Ezigbo reiterated CUSA’s dedication to divestment, including its divestment subcommittee and by working with the university. Despite this, the last meeting of CUSA’s divestment subcommittee was March 21, 2025 with no indication at the time of publication of the subcommittee forming for the 2025/2026 CUSA Council year. This lack of meetings is counterintuitive, as Council referred a motion to the divestment subcommittee at the 1st Regular Meeting of the 2025/2026 CUSA Council.
CUSA formed the divestment subcommittee last year with the goal of advocating for students’ concerns about the university’s investments, as reported by The Charlatan. The divestment subcommittee of CUSA was responsible for the Anti-Arab and Palestinian Discrimination Report, as well as helping to expand the definitions within CUSA’s Discrimination, Harassment and Violence Prevention Policy. This consistent commitment to divestment should see similar policy and research coming out of CUSA in the coming year.
Similarly, the GSA has recently reiterated its 2012 divestment stance by passing a divestment policy at their April 10, 2024 Council meeting. When The Leveller asked about the GSA’s divestment stance, Al Attar said, “put[ting] all politics aside… I believe any violation of human rights, as stated by international law, by the United Nations, even by our own mission statement at Carleton, any violation of human rights should not be tolerated.”
Al Attar reiterated that transparency is key, and for true dialogue we need student participation. She said that to be able to raise these questions, “for me, it’s not about political stance… the first thing we learn when you are [an] anthropologist, you go to the field, you observe people. The first thing we learn at Carleton is [to] do no harm.” For Al Attar, the biggest question Carleton must ask is “are we doing any harm?” And through the students that question should be raised.
The divestment from fossil fuels is a successful example as Carleton did in response to campus protests in 2022, as reported in The Charlatan. The university has demonstrated the ability and willingness to listen to students on matters of divestment before.
Former president of Carleton’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, Bessan Amer, defined the organization’s goal in an interview for a previous Leveller article as “educating, raising awareness, and mobilizing our student body to advocate for Palestinians… and help the movement for the liberation of Palestine.” Since the latest escalation of the genocide in Gaza began in 2023, the group has organized various demonstrations and protests on campus to call on the university to divest and cut ties with Israel. The university has responded to this activism with double standards when compared to other demonstrations on campus, in addition to campus security aggression at recent protests.
At a BoG meeting on April 29, 2025, protesters were met with aggressive campus security intervention in addition to Ottawa Police presence, as recorded in a video published on Carleton4Palestine’s Instagram page. The goal of this protest, as Amer put it, was to put pressure on the university to “put divestment back on the table,” after it has not considered divestment in recent meetings. Carleton’s VP Finance and Administration, Duane McNair called these investments “fiduciary obligations” in an email obtained by the group.
“The aggression we saw was out of proportion” – Bessan Amer, SJP Carleton President
As reported to The Leveller, the video feed to BoG members online was cut, and the meeting effectively ended early. These protests, and the result of successfully shutting down BoG meetings, mirror those reported on by The Leveller in 2011, also calling for divestment from Israel.
At this protest, Amer said, “the aggression we saw was out of proportion,” and that it “just goes to show they do not want to divest whatsoever.” The meeting after this, which occurred on June 4, saw increased security and the preemptive blocking of each entrance to the building, according to a June 6 statement by SJP Carleton. Amer affirmed this is to be “another show that the university prioritizes certain standards [like neutrality] more than others [like complicity].”
Editor’s Note: The Leveller reached out to Brian Billings, Executive Director of Campus Safety Services — who was seen present in a video overseeing Campus Safety’s response to both the April 29 and June 4 protests — but did not receive comment in time for publication.
Nir Hagigi, President of Independent Jewish Voices’ Carleton chapter, stated that “the Board of Governors’ response to student concerns about ethical investment has been completely inadequate.”
“I wouldn’t treat the seat as symbolic or purely advisory like many of the current and former members,” Hagigi commented when asked about the student representative positions on the BoG — which he once ran for — further stating, “I would have used it to actively expose and challenge the Board’s decisions.”
The conclusion is that this is by no means is a new issue, but instead an ongoing fight for divestment, with Board meetings shut down in 2025 as they were in 2011, and divestment stances coming from the students in 2024 just as they did in 2012.
Yafet Bizuneh, an undergraduate student representative on Carleton’s BoG, declined to be interviewed, but stated, “one thing I can confidently say is that during my time serving in this role, students’ voices have been heard.”
“A student representative, backed by a strong, mobilized student movement, can absolutely make a difference…” – Nir Hagigi
Muthukumar said that he has aimed for more transparency to address divestment concerns, and that the university and BoG are aware of these concerns, with BoG members like himself receiving thousands of emails regarding divestment, calling it a “continuous challenge for both the university… and the students.” He reiterated a hope to see the conversation continuing between the GSA and the University that will lead to improved transparency and agreement on the issue.
“Particularly after a series of requests made by the GSA there [is] information to come” and that they have requested the University “bring more clear information to the Board” in order to see the whole picture, Muthukumar said.
Editor’s Note: The other student representatives on the BoG, Logan Breen and Georgette Morris, did not agree to an interview in time for publication.
While many BoG members offered little communication, Hagigi’s dedication and desire to see student roles used for more than just advisory opinions is a perfect example of how students can advocate in the future.
Although SJP’s fight is far from over, Amer is glad that the team has “opened up the conversation about Palestine to the community” and hopes the organization can “continue to grow and support more people” this upcoming year with new leaders. “With numbers you have power,” she concluded.
With a similar argument and passion for what the future holds to Amer, Hagigi said “a student representative, backed by a strong, mobilized student movement, can absolutely make a difference by refusing to be tokenized, by speaking truth to power, and by turning up the pressure until the university can no longer ignore us.”
CUSA President Joe-Ezigbo stated, “one thing that we’re really working on this year with CUSA and the university is increased collaboration, with increased collaboration, I would hope that it means having… more conversations about these things”
GSA President Al Attar outlined a strong step forward, stating their key focuses are greater transparency, more participation from Council, and creating student jobs to help offset the gap left by university budget cuts.
Together, all of these groups show how student associations, small and large, can do good and offset the university’s shortfalls, improve communication, and make a change even when it seems like everything is against us.
Muthukumar’s final thoughts for students, which he wished for us to relay, is that “the administration of the university is trying to engage with students, and the university administration is aware students are the biggest stakeholders.”
He “encourage[s] students to continue engaging with the administration in every possible way,” and he is “encouraging the administration more than ever to reach out to students,” to ensure “partnerships are well-strengthened to build a more inclusive Carleton.”
Editor’s Note: The writers will be donating their Leveller honourarium to relief for those in Gaza, and encourage readers to do the same through the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations-Canada.
