Nous Group, an Australian-based consulting firm with McKinsey roots among some of its leadership, is “renewing” Canadian universities. Since 2020, having done considerable damage to Australian universities, Nous (rhymes with “mouse”) has been capitalizing on the chronically underfunded higher education system in Canada. As universities struggle to reshape themselves in an era of perpetually low government funding (and more recently, decreased numbers of international students), many are looking to review their governance structures and operations. Hiring an external consultant is the usual method, since presumably internal expertise might be seen as biased–but Nous has left a trail of carnage across multiple continents. Joseph Brean at the National Post, noting the company’s nickname “Nousferatu”, writes that its adoption by Canadian universities is “about vice-chancellors being promised new life indefinitely, endless renewal, in exchange for blood.” (“How to fix Canada’s universities? Outsource it to this management consultant firm“, August 28, 2025).
Nous has five areas of focus: resetting external spending; streamlining professional services; rationalizing courses and program architecture; incentivizing research productivity; and better utilizing existing space. They use UniForum, a survey product developed in Australia to benchmark universities, now owned by Nous. It does not differentiate between university types (e.g. small local, large research-based) or account for different institutional priorities (e.g. a focus on undergraduate teaching, bilingual education). Instead, Nous Group uses metrics it created to compare all its clients and makes recommendations that generally reflect the governance situations of Australian universities. The Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations noted that Nous is “remarkably incurious” about higher education and that it encourages its consultants to avoid extensive research. They note that Nous Group does not include campus stakeholders in their assessment and development of solutions, they bypass campus representatives of faculty students and staff, instead making the same recommendations at each university.
In Ontario, where Nous was hired by Laurentian, York, University of Ottawa, and Queen’s, the stories are similar: the company wants to reform universities using a slash-and-burn approach. In Sudbury, Nous Group’s review was completed after Laurentian became the first university in Canadian history to file for creditor protection in 2021. Auditor general Bonnie Lysyk’s report indicated that unsustainable capital spending and very high administrative salaries led to Laurentian’s financial crisis. But in its governance review, Nous recommended circumscribing the power of Laurentian’s Senate, allowing it to only make recommendations on individual programs but not make recommendations about the academic direction of the institution, and recommended subjecting the Senate to performance reviews. The OCUFA noted that Nous’ governance review demonstrated little regard for collegial governance at Laurentian and that an anti-labour attitude permeates the organization. At the University of Ottawa, Nous Group’s results from its 2022 UniForum survey were never shared despited repeated requests from the faculty association, but a restructuring based on the survey results was scheduled to go ahead anyway.
At the University of Alberta, Nous Group recommended reorganizing faculties into three colleges, adding another layer of bureaucracy (college deans/vice-provosts)–a move opposed by the General Faculties Council but approved by U of A’s Board of Governors in 2021. Two years later, both faculty and students reported a decrease in the quality of services, which had been centralized and greatly reduced, since about 1,000 full-time staff had been laid off or encouraged to retire. The remaining staff had greatly increased workloads and completely new tasks to try to learn, and some tasks like payroll and contracts were completely relocated to a Shared Services unit, launched in 2021. Staff in Shared Services reported working weekends and evenings to try to keep up with the work, and both students and faculty spoke out about the issues–while the university gleefully reported a permanent $100 M savings in administrative costs. The U of A followed a similar direction to the University of Sydney, also restructured by Nous. At U of S, their faculty union noted “their restructuring has significantly and negatively impacted academic freedom, collegiality, and academic quality.” The National University of Australia faculty also reported increased stress and poor mental health as Nous’ recommendations took effect.
Brean reported earlier this year on Queen’s University, where the provost announced massive cuts to programs at a university “where campus tension is high, a hiring freeze is in place for the foreseeable future, government support seems variously incompetent and hostile, and tuition has been frozen by law for several years” (“Calamity at Queens: Provost’s panicked cuts consume a university older than Canada“, January 26, 2025). The Queen’s Coalition Against Austerity opposed the provost’s proposed cuts and accused the administration of exaggerating the university’s financial difficulties in order to make a case for greater efficiency. QCAA created this list of articles about Nous’ activities in university restructuring. It is worth noting that 5,000 members of Queen’s staff were on strike in January 2025 and 2,000 graduate teaching assistants, Public Service Alliance of Canada members, went on strike two months later. QCAA reported a 13% reduction in course offerings at Queen’s, layoffs and reductions to the teaching assistant budget. Brean’s exposé on Nous calls their renewal of universities “a sly branding of a corporatization mission that seeks only cost savings through blunt budget cuts justified by inflated claims of crisis based on hysterical readings of an increasingly complex table of benchmarks.” And OCUFA noted that even if universities implemented all of Nous’ recommendations, they would still operate on deficits in the future because historically well-funded public universities in Canada aren’t any longer.
Brean notes that “like their namesake vampire, someone had to let them in.” The Board of Governors of most universities are now CEOs, overpaid and overhyped, rather than people who rose up through the ranks having an understanding of the work universities do. Of course they opt to hire a foreign consulting firm with a reputation for “results.” In Nova Scotia, if Premier Tim Houston has his way, the Boards of our universities would be replaced with provincial appointees. No one is denying that universities need restructuring, more accountability and transparency in spending, and new solutions to permanently low transfers from provincial governments. Faculties need to set and meet budgets, but these should be based on their professional, research and teaching needs–which are different for each program. Public administration students don’t need the same lab facilities that biology students do, and professional programs need to be able to teach the courses required for their students to become accredited in their fields. Faculty to student ratios can’t be the same in nursing as they are in English or history.
Universities aren’t corporations and should not be run as such. The evidence is already in front of us: we have already lived through decades of neoliberal austerity measures and cutbacks. Staff and faculty are underpaid, overworked, and only stay as a last resort. Students are overcharged for decreasing levels of service, as they sit in crumbling classrooms and are taught by precariously employed faculty. Research takes a long time, highly trained individuals, research assistants, and equipment, and there are always multiple failures before success–it’s difficult to explain this to corporate overlords who want maximal results with minimal resources. Some aspects of teaching and research are not profitable, but necessary in training the workers of tomorrow. Like it or not, that includes both science and social science, both small-scale qualitative and large-scale quantitative work, both “patentable” discoveries and theoretical breakthroughs about people and societies. During COVID, vaccines were developed in record time with researchers in virology and microbiology in universities and labs all over the world. But it was historians who taught us what doctors and nurses did during the Spanish influenza epidemic. It was anthropologists, archaeologists, and librarians who took entire library and museum collections online for people to learn from. It was musicians and comedians who kept morale high, and social workers who monitored the well-being of isolated seniors. It was our staff in university Centres for Learning and Teaching that learned the online teaching tools and techniques–then taught them to us, so we could keep teaching students. And it was retail workers who kept our grocery stores open. All learning and all jobs are important and valuable to society; without all these different skills and knowledge, communities crumble.
As an urban planner, I see that Nous Group is doing exactly what governments did in the 1940s and 1950s: urban renewal. Widespread destruction of homes, particularly in low-income neighbourhoods, in favour of “new and improved” modernist architecture, massive housing projects, sterile streets, highways cutting across communities, with supposed economic benefits. The rise of “starchitects” and top-down city planners (is this any different from the Deep Sainis and Wanda Costens of the university administration, hopping from one prestigious appointment to another?) No consultation with residents. Displacement and discrimination that has harmed generations of people and entire ethnic communities. This ham-fisted approach led to the crisis in urban planning that defined it for the next 60 years, brilliantly explored by a generation of planning theorists like Jane Jacobs, Bent Flyvberg, and Susan Fainstein. Why? Because people fought back. Ordinary residents, ethnic and cultural organizations, and community leaders mobilized and demanded accountability and transparency in decision-making. They demanded to be included in meaningful consultations about projects. They shut down highway projects. They changed the entire trajectory of urban renewal, which in Canada came to an abrupt end in 1970. Communities got neighbourhood improvement grants, historic preservation, and co-operative housing. Public engagement became the legally enshrined in planning processes.
Universities, some of which are older than the cities in which they are located, will persist. After all, there are more professors and staff than upper administration, more citizens than planners. But recovery from this level of destruction takes generations, and the anger, pain, and resentment will remain.
