From financial crisis to identity crisis: Sudbury schools still figuring out life without Laurentian

With freshly painted walls and brand-new floors, the 176-bed residence at the University of Sudbury is ready for students to move in after a $1.5-million renovation.

"There's a lot of demand and there's a lot of demand for affordable student housing," said residence general manager Joshua Dandurand-Parent, who is hosting an open house on Saturday.

"I'm quite confident we're going to have enough a healthy amount of students in this building to make it a really fun environment."

The university had hoped to have its own students moving into those residence rooms by now. 

When Laurentian University terminated the federation that had been around since its founding in the early 1960s, and cut ties with the three schools it shares a campus with, the University of Sudbury announced plans to become a standalone francophone university.

After originally hoping to hold its first classes in September 2022, president Serge Miville says they've filed accreditation papers and a business plan with the province, plus funding requests with the federal government, and are now waiting to hear back.

"We're basically a plane on the tarmac right now. Everyone's ready, the plane's gassed up, everything's ready to go, we're waiting on the control tower to tell us that the runway's clear to go and we got twitchy fingers right now," he said.

Miville says they do have plans in place for a school that is "really focused on student experience on one hand and secondly on structural partnerships" that allow students to take a variety of courses from other schools. 

While he says the university is on sound financial footing, especially with some residence revenue now coming in, they can't wait forever for a "greenlight" from the province.

"That is a concern. I'm not going to lie. We're going to have to have those discussions with the ministry when it becomes clear that we need clarity," Miville said. 

Right next door, Huntington University is also figuring out what it'll become next and is surviving thanks to the money coming in from running a residence. It no longer gets funding for teaching courses to Laurentian students. 

"It was quite a traumatic event," said Scott Darling, the vice-chair of Huntington's board of regents. 

"We had to make a decision that we needed to go forward, that we needed to re-invent the university."

He says they have signed a memorandum with a school in India that could see students come to Sudbury to study, or perhaps take Huntington courses abroad. He says they are also working with the Canadian Safety League on possible training courses for the transportation industry. 

Darling says while Huntington has shrunk from a staff of 32 to six full-time employees, it remains "economically viable," partly thanks to reserve funds saved up in years past.

"We're excited about the possibilities. We recognize it was a very significant challenge we were faced with," he said. 

"But we've looked at that challenge as an opportunity to rebuild and re-establish ourselves."

Thorneloe University has gone from 40 employees to four, but still has money coming in from its 58-bed residence. President John Gibaut says now that the school is renting out its theatre it's "getting more use right now than perhaps it ever did."

The school, which is tied to the Anglican church, has always run a small theology program in the background and now that has been expanded to 75 students; most of them studying online. 

"I think we could go a lot further with the school of theology. That's what we've got and that's what we're going to focus on at the moment," said Gibaut.

He is set to retire at the end of May 2024 and hopes to leave the next president of Thorneloe with a road map for what the university will become next.

"We're still dealing with defederation. Every week something new comes up," Gibaut said. 

"It's in motion. It'll take years I think to figure out who are we now and living in this very different reality."