Opinion | Rhonda McEwen on the ‘wicked problems’ she faced as president of U of T’s Victoria University

Rhonda McEwen has always been a pioneer in the Canadian post-secondary world. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, she earned degrees from four different universities in four different countries, while becoming an expert in the field of new technology, particularly communication through mobile devices and tablets. She also became the first Black woman in Canadian history to lead a university when she was named president of Victoria University in the University of Toronto four years ago. Now, at 55, she’s leaving that job to take on the same role at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. From Vic to Vic, so to speak.

Steve Paikin: Have the last four years been a particularly difficult time to be a university president?

Rhonda McEwen: On top of the financial pressures, we’ve had to deal with a lot of complex geopolitical issues that have made their way onto campuses. And tech is another one. It’s a challenging job. Back in the ‘80s, it could have been any one of those things. Now, it’s all of them at the same time.

Which makes it crazy, or fun, or both, or what?

For me, a really interesting challenge. So, it is difficult, but I actually quite enjoy these kinds of wicked problems. This is not the caretaking time for a university president. There are times where you could just hold the wheel and keep it moving in one direction. That’s not this time.

How helpful or unhelpful have current governments been to the post-secondary system?

I see a system of public sector governance that is not designed for this moment. In Australia, the federal government looks after universities. In Canada, it’s the provinces. And what makes things trickier is that decisions made on one level of government are rarely made in partnership with the next level.

Are you referring to the foreign student visa situation?

Exactly. We have governments making decisions based on their own interests and their own priorities. It’s not co-ordinated. So, if I decide, I’m going to help our students and create better and more affordable housing,  my provincial metrics will show a deficit for a little while because I’m now spending money. But then the province will say, your university is in the red and you need to take certain actions to get out of the red. Meanwhile, the federal government is saying, you don’t have enough housing, so we’re going to cut your visas. And so, the university is stuck between them.

Surely you explain that to them.

We have met with various provincial ministers and deputies. They all say they’re trying to make sure that the sector is viable and healthy. What they say makes sense when you listen to it. Then when you talk to the federal ministers that’s not their concern. They don’t deal with the funding. They’re thinking about it from an immigration perspective only. And therefore, these two conversations are not in sync.

In your travels, all over the world, how well is the post-secondary sector doing?

This sector is under pressure internationally. That is the reality. There’s no country where right now people are in that calm mode. Some of the biggest name universities in the U.K. are having a hard time. I remember when we talked about online universities to try to save money. That was a bit of a trend. And what we realized is in-person education has a major role to play. And so even after the pandemic, when the lockdowns were released and people thought, well, we could continue doing a lot of this remotely, I thought, no. We know the price is too steep, especially for an undergraduate. This romanticized idea that we can just keep everyone off the campus and do things much more inexpensively, I think, is an error.

You lose too much.

One of the things that is not on the curriculum is that university life is a wild experiment. You put together people from all different walks of life, different experiences, different parts of the country, different parts of the world. And you put them into one room, managed by an expert in a field, and the experiment here is that they’re going to be able to work together. To figure it out. To have difficult conversations. If you educate people remotely for a number of years and then bring them back, they lose their ability to tolerate and accept and be open and willing to meet a challenging person.

When you found out that a group of students had taken over your main building on campus because they wanted VIC to divest its investments in fossil fuels, how did you handle that?

The students did actually encamp on the ground floor. There were, at any given point, three to four tents inside. Right away, we realized we had an issue. The first thing we had to do was figure out who are we talking to? I went in every day to meet them. My one goal was to maintain communication. The instinct is to get the police involved but I wanted to understand what we were dealing with. We discovered that the protests were being led by external groups that had nothing to do with the university.

So, why not bring in the cops and have them removed?

Because what happens then is you don’t actually remove the issue, you just move it somewhere else.  To solve this problem, I need to know what the problem is and who I am speaking to. If you escalate it into a removal from the first moment, all you’re going to do is exacerbate the issue. However, we’ve got a bunch of problems. We would normally lock the doors in the evenings. Now we can’t lock them in. That’s a safety issue. We also had to look at fire safety —  they were blocking entrances and exits. Workplace hazards — this is not a place where people are supposed to be sleeping. So, fire becomes an issue. And there was an issue I didn’t anticipate — the Indigenous students came to me and said, “This is actually very triggering for us, because now here’s a group of people who have taken property that does not belong to them and have now made it theirs, and other people don’t have access.” Wow. This is now even more interesting and complex.

It went on for 18 days. How did you resolve it?

The board was already working on this issue before I even got there. And in the end, we divested. Vic only ever had a maximum of like 3.2 per cent investment in fossil fuel. It’s negligible. But we created a “principles for responsible investing” policy. We’ve signed on to quite a few of these global arrangements because universities do need to lead the way.

So, can the students say that they won?

I think everybody’s saying that they won, which maybe is the best answer. That’s the long game. Universities are in the hundreds of years game. 

Here’s another controversy. Vic’s founding president was Egerton Ryerson back in 1836. Another institution removed took his name off and it’s now Toronto Metropolitan University. You had his portrait up. You had a residence named Ryerson House. How did you handle all that? 

Before I arrived, a committee was struck that wrote a report and came up with recommendations — longgame recommendations — which I really appreciated. It wasn’t like, let’s take down the portrait and it’s over. Some things were changed. Instead of Ryerson House, the residence is called First House. But it’s also making sure the fullest story can be told: the good, the bad, and the ugly. For example, there were Indigenous students who attended Vic in the 1800s! That gets thrown out if you only focus on the ugly. As for Ryerson’s portrait, one of our students who was on the committee suggested something brilliant: put up the empty frame and a QR code to engage the community. And last year, we put the portrait back in the frame and it is now in the library, where you can actually engage with not just the portrait, but a lot more information that has been gathered. So, we don’t delete the issue. It remains something that can be discussed.

You are the first Black woman to lead a university in Canadian history. Does that matter to you?

Within university senior circles, I have not felt I’ve been treated in any different way. It’s about skill at this stage. But what matters most is the mesage it sends to students, our staff, our faculty, and the broader community. That this is actually possible in Canada. That matters a lot to me. I’ve come up in a space where I’m used to being the other person. Throughout my career, I’ve always been in a club of one. But the most important thing to me is that I’m not the last. 

Why are you going from Vic to Vic?

I’ve been at the University of Toronto for 21 years, which is a long time, even as a second career. (McEwen worked as a consultant on business development for information technology management at Deloitte and IBM). I had to say to myself, it’s never going to be easy, walking away from this amazing place. The only way I can walk away is if there is a greater need somewhere else. So, at some point, I realized my experiences and my history in Canada has led me to this moment.