By Madi Wong
The first Board of Governors (BoG) meeting of the year took place on Friday.
Ryerson University’s BoG is responsible for the governance of the university, revenue and property, as well as business and affairs. It is made up of 24 members including Ryerson president Mohamed Lachemi.
Here’s what you missed.
Enrolment and admissions expansion
The office of vice-provost, students, has established a new department that will specifically focus on international student enrolment at Ryerson.
Provost and vice-president academic Michael Benarroch said that the university is striving to increase international enrolment to 15 per cent of the university’s total enrollment by the year 2024.
“We’re about 5 per cent international students overall…our hope is to reach 15 per cent international students over the next five-year period,” he said. “These are positive numbers for us, Ryerson remains a university in high demand.”
How the university’s performance will impact funding for 2019-20 year
Benarroch said that the university is continuing to work closely with the government to establish a new five-year Strategic Mandate Agreement (SMA).
SMA agreements highlight institution priorities and focus on a number of aspects including: student success, a skilled workforce, planned enrolment and growth and financial sustainability.
The Eyeopener previously reported that changes in the 2019 provincial budget are making a large amount of post-secondary funding performance-based.
Benarroch said that funding will be built around ten metrics, such as institutional ones, that measure the university’s activity. “Our funding that will be determined on us satisfying metrics. It will be metric by metric so we must satisfy each and every one of those,” he said.
The provost also said that the government has made indications that “they’re going to freeze the allocation on a per student basis across campuses, across the whole system.”
According to Benarroch there won’t be a lot of money coming into Ryerson from the government. However, if there is something innovative, he said they would be happy to hear it out.
Welcoming new Ryerson faculty
The university has approved 103 tenure positions for the 2019-20 year—79 of which have already been filled and are currently on campus.
Of the 103 positions, eight Indigenous faculty members were welcomed, according to Benarroch.
In addition, Benarroch said that they will be working to implement 30 new faculty positions over the next two years.
The next BoG meeting is scheduled for Nov. 28, 2019.
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