The Dizzying Feats of University Mismanagement

Ideological capture, ineptocracy, kleptocracy — this was how entrepreneur Rob Hersov diagnosed his homeland, South Africa, in reaction to last year’s disastrous visit to the White House by the country’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa. President Donald Trump took that opportunity to spotlight the killings of hundreds of white Afrikaner farmers, many of them tortured and brutally murdered in their own homes against the backdrop of stadium-wide rallying cries “Kill the Boer, kill the farmer.”

It’s futile to deny that Ramaphosa’s legacy is the brainchild of Soviet-style Marxism, chiselled from economic and cultural incompetence, and plagued by a thieving elite class. But, today, these three distinct badges of failure are absolutely everywhere — even on a modern university campus — and many a leader would do well to take note.

In academia, one such doyen since her commencement in 2020 as the 10th Principal of the University of Toronto’s Mississauga (UTM) campus, is Alexandra Gillespie, a careerist who also happens to be Vice-President of UofT.

Back then, she was greeted with fanfare, described in a community email by her colleague, Lindsay Schoenbohm, the then department chair of Chemical and Physical Sciences, as “taking the place by storm”.

Schoenbohm went on to gush over Gillespie, a Rhodes scholar. “I’m not sure I’ve ever met someone with a more lively [sic] and creative mind. Alex is an out-of-the-box thinker. She is collaborative, down-to-earth, reflective, generous and kind.”

Such adjectives are the red flags we’ve come to expect from those who’ve succumbed to the malaise of social justice ideology and are motivated by an over-arching desire “to be kind”.

While clearing out my university office in the weeks before my early retirement at the end of last year, I came across a presentation by Gillespie dating back to 2016 on the topic of “unconscious bias”, one of the totems of the insipid ideology that has spawned the cult of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) across every academic department. They say hindsight is twenty-twenty.

A decade on, our universities languish in a mess so big it can practically be seen from space. These institutions face a moral reckoning after years of squandering funds on a toxic political agenda that shoves DEI down everyone’s throats. Across the border, a high stakes battle is ongoing between Harvard University and the Trump administration, underwritten by threats to funding.

Meanwhile, in Canada, a similar cocktail of imprudent spending, widespread mismanagement, and an over-reliance on foreign students whose visas are now capped by the Liberals promises an almighty hangover. Most of Ontario’s universities are posting deficits and swingeing cuts have followed. York University has slashed 18 programs, 10 of them arguably useless “studies” subjects. At McGill, Canada’s leading medical school — now long on probation by accreditors for being insufficiently diverse — catalysed administrators to shutter its DEI office and lay off staff.

Everywhere, belts are being tightened. Bloated DEI bureaucracies have failed to enhance students’ satisfaction or achieve enrolment targets. The University of Michigan sank $250 million into DEI initiatives, only to divide the campus and then be quashed by the Trump administration.

We wondered how much waste was going on in Canadian universities. Then, a series of emails among staffers at UTM was leaked to us that effectively torpedoed the idea that Canadian universities resemble well-oiled machines in the marketplace of higher education.

Several improprieties at UTM emerged. Hiring practices were especially suspect, inviting accusations of nepotism. Following her ascendancy, Principal Gillespie replaced her chief administrative officer (CAO) for an interim incumbent: one-time campus librarian, Susan Senese, who rose to become an influential advisor. She also presided over the promotion of former head of campus IT, Luke Barber, to become “Executive Director of Digital and Physical Infrastructure” — conveniently conflating the virtual and the real. For an institution whose lifeblood is credentialism, this sort of behaviour bears all the hallmarks of major decision-making authority being placed in the hands of individuals lacking, at least on first inspection, the relevant expertise. But that, of course, is just a matter of opinion.

The email trail shows that Senese and Barber soon collaborated and signed off on major disbursements that benefited the principal and her team. They also enjoyed 60% salary hikes according to Ontario’s Sunshine List. A third senior bureaucrat, Anuar Rodrigues, scored a 75% pay increase under Gillespie’s reign.

In 2021, Barber wrote to Senese approving a $50,000 spending top-up on an already sprawling $1.2M administrative office suite housing the principal’s 7-person support team — an entourage that has ballooned in recent years from one employee under the preceding principal, Ulli Krull.

In early 2022, keen to impress potential donors, Gillespie availed herself of a budget set aside by Senese to upgrade furnishings for Lislehurst, the UTM principal’s residence, including a $5,600 Saarinen dining table she described as “classic” in an email. “I know I want ebonized walnut”, she marvelled. Later, as part of the Lislehurst project, UTM took delivery of a mid-19th Century antique oriental carpet bemusingly tagged “rug for principal’s office” and priced at more than $19,000 — one that for that price is presumably magical and enables UTM’s principals to fly between international conferences.

In the fall of 2022, the office of the new CAO, Senese’s replacement, Deborah Brown, was relocated out of the principal’s suite into a separate space, costing the campus almost $1M. The total budget for all of these office reshuffles, including Gillespie’s own — efforts aimed merely at placating administrators rather than renovating teaching or research spaces on campus — culminated in the launch of UTM’s Project Management Office and amounted to a cool $2.5M.

Then, in July 2023 came Nicholas Rule, psychologist, Ignoble prize winner — he’s an expert on eyebrows and how they signal narcissism — and soon to become revolving-door dean. Gillespie slated Rule to replace retiring Professor Amrita Daniere, who had reportedly kyboshed some of the principal’s earlier projects. Soon, UTM’s communications manager Carlo DeMarco was praising Rule for his keen awareness of “personal perceptions … colouring people’s opinions” and how “this can be applied to how places are perceived, too”. Those words would prove prophetic.

In 2019, Rule gave an interview to SpeakOut describing his humble, impoverished beginnings among other personal details. The interview was more recently removed from SpeakOut’s website. Conceivably owing to the 35-minute commute from Toronto’s west end to the Mississauga campus, coupled with the university’s desire to encourage greater on-campus visibility of their new dean, Rule soon became the object of a lengthy charm offensive as UTM’s facilities team promptly set about wooing him with the prospect of refurbishing a detached house that UTM owns facing the campus, according to documents released by the University of Toronto in response to freedom of information requests.

Large sums were lavished on the 3,000-square-foot residence on Mississauga Road. Freedom of information requests reveal a roster of eye-opening procurements, from luxury furniture to artwork by noted Canadian artists. The ground floor living and dining spaces were funded on the pretext they would serve as entertainment spaces for visiting dignitaries, expenses that could be batted away as reasonable university business.

But that usage was not aligned with email exchanges that imply joint household decision-making. In April of 2024, Rule queried “when we might see a design board” and later wrote, “I should clarify, however, that we do not necessarily have a preference for lighter, more neutral-coloured palettes”. The most charitable interpretation is that Rule was adopting the royal “we” mid-sentence.

Of a $5,000 curved sectional sofa for the family room — matched with a Valerian coffee table ($3,000) that promises “a sense of opulence only a few will experience” and an Eames chair from Hermann Miller ($10,000) — Rule expressed concern that “It’s quite a nice-looking sofa but perhaps there’s something more practical for watching a movie, for example.”

We learned that the house also reportedly comes with its own sauna facilities, perfect for soothing professorial stress, although such claims were not confirmed.

The budgeted cost of the refurbishment to the campus purse was slightly less than $157,000. For a prosperous senior academic, the offer of a residence fully furnished on at least one floor — plus provision for off-site storage of personal effects not destined to be relocated to the Mississauga residence — was doubtless a welcome bonus in our current era of unaffordable housing.

Outmatching this lavish spending was the mic-drop that followed. Just as UTM’s team — after much obsequious back-and-forthing — put the finishing touches to the fancy refit in readiness for its discerning occupant, Rule suddenly declared he was leaving on November 1 to become UofT’s newest Vice-Provost, a job on the downtown St. George campus. Rule gave no hint of his intentions, beyond wishing a happy Thanksgiving, in an email dated October 12, responding to news that the Eames chair, among other items, was to be delivered on October 23. So much, then, for the costs sunk on 3338 Mississauga Road.

Drawing a line under this litany of wanton spending is the recent $1.3B commitment by the Ontario government aimed at combating deficits. Rather, the province should busy itself holding universities to account when it comes to wasteful, inappropriate or fraudulent spending — especially those with apparently wayward campuses like UTM.

Canadians, fraught by today’s cost-of-living hardships, are unlikely to approve of the largesse being showered on top-tier university mandarins. UTM’s motto is tantum nobis creditum, “so much has been entrusted to us”. Or, rather, to them.

Principal Alex Gillespie concluded her first term on December 31, 2025. She was renewed for two years, which we were informed by one insider amounts to an academic slap in the face, considering 5-year renewals are the routine. What remains is whether the University of Toronto will persist beyond 2027 with such leadership, detached as it seems from today’s reality. That signal will come down the tracks in due course; and unlike the dean’s purported sauna, we think it’s likely that UTM’s gravy train has run out of steam.

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Leigh Revers is associate professor at the Institute for Management and Innovation at the University of Toronto Mississauga and Substack writer.

Mark D’Souza is a Toronto-based physician and author of Lost and Found: How Meaningless Living is Destroying Us—and Three Keys to Fix It.