In December 2015, the president of Trent University, Leo Groarke, asked Livia E. Castellanos, then-AVP International at the University of Regina, to perform an external review of Trent’s International Program (TIP). 

In January 2016, MyKawartha published a photo of President Groarke and Glennice Burns at the Mayor’s Giving Gala. The caption reads, “Trent University president Leo Groarke and his fiancée Glennice Burns at the Mayor’s Giving Gala 2016.”

The internationalization review, submitted by Castellanos to the President in April 2016, recommends that Trent hire ‘a senior executive leader’ to oversee the restructuring of Trent’s international operations. 

In July 2017, Glennice Burns began working at Trent in the newly-minted position, Associate Vice-President, International.

To my knowledge, nothing has ever been published regarding Trent University’s hiring of the President’s partner to a senior administrative role, and I believe there is a need for transparency in Trent’s administrative conduct, particularly when it involves the expenditure of public money. What follows is an attempt to contextualize these events and locate them within broader trends in postsecondary education and the experiences of international students at Trent University. 

Reviewing the Review and the Response: 

At the time of the review, Trent was looking to ‘internationalize’ – a strategy that became popular amongst post-secondary institutions under neoliberal austerity, whereby schools seek to rapidly increase international student enrolment as a means of bolstering tuition revenue. International student tuition has been unregulated in the province of Ontario since 1996, which allows universities to charge international students three or four times that of their ‘domestic’ counterparts, sometimes more. The impetus to internationalize is clear and economic, and the external review offers a roadmap for this mandate. 

Castellanos’ findings would be based on several documents presented to her, as well as interviews conducted with ‘a wide range of stakeholders’ over the course of three days in February 2016. 

In the February 29, 2016 Issue of Arthur, Adriana Sierra describes the review as “one conducted by an external reviewer, [that] had limited student input, was poorly publicized and occurred over the span of less than one week.” Her article goes on to detail international student leader concerns about the review, with then-TCSA International Students Commissioner, Boykin Smith, lamenting that “[the review] was very rushed, secretive and exclusive” and “many international students were not made aware of it.” 

“[The review] should be open to acknowledging and addressing the hard-hitting challenges that international students face such as discrimination, financial barriers to education, unemployment, mental and physical health and immigration.” Smith expressed intentions for the TCSA to “conduct a student-led ‘internationalization’ review of [their] own” that would be “more inclusive and transparent to the entire student body.” 

Ana Paulina Leal, then-VP of the Trent International Students Association (TISA) expressed concerns over whether ‘inadequate policy formulation’ might result from a review that failed to meaningfully consult the international student body. Some students pointed out that the University had done more to publicize a concurrent review of Traill College, while others expressed dismay at the jargon-laden use of ‘internationalization,’ arguing that its ambiguity would alienate students, who had already been largely left out of the conversation. 

Juan Pablo Urza Perez, then-First Year Representative of Trent’s Organization for Latin Awareness made a particularly incisive observation: “Internationalization shouldn’t be seen as how many international students we can fit in the university, but instead, as how well are the needs of international students [being] recognized.” He went on to suggest that the most pervasive issues affecting international students are fiscal, and that if the review really wanted to ‘internationalize’ it would need to address the weighty financial barriers international students face. 

Just weeks before Castellanos’s review was submitted to the President, Boykin Smith and his peers went ahead with their plans to hold their own student-led internationalization review. There was a wide breadth of students, with representatives from every regional group in attendance, as well as Dr. Michael Allcott, who had led Trent International as Director for 13 years. 

I was curious about what it would have been like for an administrator to engage so directly with student dissent, so I asked Boykin Smith what Allcott’s presence meant for student leaders: 

“[Allcott] was a part of it – not to really speak for the university, or to hinder us. He was actually just there to help facilitate and encourage what we wanted to do as international students… which was to talk about international students issues.”

In their discussion of the most urgent issues at hand, students identified a need for regulated international tuition fees, more job opportunities, and recruitment efforts in low and middle income countries as opposed to wealthier ones, to ensure real diversity on campus. 

They called for a budgetary review across the University, to interrogate unnecessary spending on TVs for cafeterias, or ‘excessive administrative costs.’ They also called for international and racialized perspectives – from both students and faculty – to be incorporated and valued at all levels of the University administration. 

Castellanos’ 18-page review was submitted in April 2016, and contained 36 recommendations, ranging from renaming the international program ‘Trent Global’ to ensuring the University employs staff with immigration advising certifications. 

The review claims that while Trent has a “a strong tradition for international engagement,” there is a lack of institutional priority around ‘internationalization.’ Castellanos writes that Trent’s ‘narrow focus’ on TIP as a vehicle for internationalization has “prevented the growth of international student enrolment at Trent.” 

The report lists key constraining factors that inhibit the University’s aims to internationalize: a lack of clear communication mechanisms, a lack of an institutional plan for internationalization, and insufficient training for staff who work on the international file. 

Perhaps the most discussed constraining factor though, is the absence of a ‘senior executive leader’ that is responsible for revisioning and restructuring Trent’s international operations to bolster this project of internationalization. The need for a leadership position is mentioned 13 times throughout the report, despite the fact that TIP already had a Director. 

Given the timing of the report’s submission to the University (the end of an academic year), there is no record of how its findings were received by the international student body.  

However, given that discussion of student concerns are confined to just three paragraphs in the ‘Student Services’ section, it seems that concerns about the review’s prioritization of student needs were merited. 

In this section, Castellanos reports that at the time, TIP had just one advisor “providing supports related to academic issues, cultural issues, academic withdrawal and immigration matters” for over 500 students. The review also notes that at the time, TIP had zero staff with international immigration advisor certification, pointing to a glaring flaw in TIP’s ability to meet the needs of its students. 

In June 2016, President Groarke and then-VP Academic, Jackie Muldoon, published a formal response to the review, outlining their plans to implement Castellanos’ recommendations. They respond enthusiastically to Castellanos’ interpretation of TIP’s most dire constraints, writing, “the chief concern is a lack of leadership and the need for a senior leader who will centralize and oversee most aspects of internationalization at Trent.” Groarke and Muldoon detail Trent’s commitment to “a new internationalization structure which will include a new leader of internationalization” and indicate that they will conduct a search for this position in the 2016/17 academic year. 

Dr. Michael Allcott

In the same month that Groarke and Muldoon published their response to the review and outlined their plans to restructure, Michael Allcott left his role as Director of the Trent International Program. 

Initially it was unclear to me why Allcott was ostensibly not considered for this much-discussed ‘senior executive leader’ position. According to his LinkedIn page, Allcott had been at the helm of TIP for 13 years. He was known for his contributions to fostering community and collegiality amongst international students, and the admiration – frankly, the love – students held for him reflects that. I have not spoken to anyone who has a single negative thing to say about him. 

When I interviewed Boykin Smith, he had said of Allcott that he was ‘a very special person’ who prioritized “fostering [a] dynamic space for international students” to have their perspectives listened to in a meaningful way. My interviews with international alumni identified Allcott as having embodied the legacy that founder Jack Matthews had embedded in TIP – one of creating diversity and implementing a robust scholarship program to make international education truly accessible. 

This deep and enduring reverence felt glaringly absent from the report, which made almost no mention of Allcott’s leadership, at least not explicitly. There were however, several vague statements made, that upon further examination, could be read as a denunciation of Allcott’s leadership of TIP. 

Castellanos writes, “the absence of a senior leader for the international portfolio has made the operations to be dated and not relevant to new audiences.” 

“The absence of such a champion has resulted in lack of direction, strategies, goal setting and overall accountability in the international file. The enrolment of international students, supports and international partnership outreach are not being managed in a cohesive, systematic and strategic manner.”

If it’s hard to reconcile these two conflicting views of Allcott’s leadership, that’s because the University’s pivot to ‘internationalization’ redefined the barometer of success for someone leading TIP. The alumni I interviewed spoke glowingly about Allcott’s personality, his charisma, his ability to foster community and collegiality, and the ways his leadership was emblematic of the visions that Tom Symons and Jack Matthews held for international students at Trent.

The new terms of success would be quantitative, not qualitative – Trent International would have to perform numbers-wise: in recruitment, enrolment, retention, and of course, student tuition dollars. In this sense, one can read ‘internationalization’ as a placeholder for ‘corporatization.’

This quantitative, financialized approach is clearly demonstrated in Castellanos’ claim that “Trent University has experienced an insufficient and static international student enrollment in credit programs, particularly from the international undergraduate fee paying student cohort.”

For reasons he did not divulge, Dr. Michael Allcott declined to be interviewed for this story, but he did offer a statement regarding his departure from Trent University: “I have the fondest memories of my time as TIP Director. It was an honour to hold the title that was first held by the legendary Jack Matthews. He and people like Professor THB Symons led the way in building Canadian ideals of global citizenship and commitment to intercultural and international understanding.”

“Those ideals evolved as Trent did in the decade+ I spent there. But the core belief in the transformative potential of friendships across cultures was always central. As TIP Director and as Head of Champlain College, I was deeply inspired by hundreds of students who learned, lived, and integrated those ideals into our learning community. I continue to be motivated by the accomplishments of many alumni as they share those values around the world.” 

This statement definitely reflects the stature of Allcott’s leadership, and the values he brought to this role. It tells us why he loved the position, but it doesn’t tell us why he left it when he did. When I followed up about that specifically, Allcott said, “It was time. There’s a whole world of opportunities beyond Trent. I am now working for Canada’s fastest growing edtech company, which is led by the kind of outstanding international students I once mentored at Trent.” 

Before working for the aforementioned edtech company, ApplyProof,  Allcott took a position at Sheridan College as Dean of International Students, where he would work from February 2017 to August 2019. 

Glennice Burns

In July 2017, over a year after Allcott’s departure, Glennice Burns began her work as Associate Vice-President of Trent International – a position that she holds to this day. 

I reached out directly to Burns to ask about the circumstances around her hiring, but the response to my inquiry came from Trent’s Human Resources Office, explaining that the University’s Conflict of Interest Policy had been followed during the AVP International hiring process. They added that “when it became clear that Glennice Burns would be applying for the position of AVP International, Dr. Groarke played no role in the search process or the hiring committee.” 

Groarke confirmed this in a statement to Arthur, explaining that “because Glennice Burns chose to apply for the position of [AVP] International, the search was chaired and overseen by then Provost, Dr. Jackie Muldoon.” The President went on to affirm that he “did not play a role in the decision to appoint [Burns] (or in any other personnel decisions about her employment at Trent).”

Before Glennice Burns took up the AVP role at Trent, she had worked at Wilfrid Laurier University as a Recruitment and Admissions Manager, also holding positions as Acting Registrar and Director of International. 

In a statement to Arthur about Burns’ international experience, the Human Resources Office explained that, “As Manager of Recruitment and Admissions at Laurier, [Burns] established pathways and partnerships in Singapore, India, China, the United States and Malaysia, working with students from these countries as well as Saudi Arabia, Korea, Africa and Brazil, and other regions globally.” She had 14 years of experience “developing, managing and leading domestic, national and international recruitment, admissions and retention.”

There is no question that in many ways, Glennice Burns is deeply qualified for this role. In my experience, Glennice Burns has been nothing but kind and personable, and I am certain that she is a formidable administrator.

None of this changes the fact that Leo Groake and Glennice Burns are romantic partners, and that this detail was not a disqualifying one in the eyes of Trent’s Human Resources Office. In their statement to Arthur, they wrote, “Like other universities attracting talent, it is not unusual that a spouse or partner will seek employment in the community and there are many cases where both spouses are working at the University.” 

And this is unequivocally true – it’s common for people to find love in their field, and university administrators are no exception, especially at Trent, where this phenomena feels uniquely prevalent. Tariq Al-Idrissi, VP Finance and Administration is married to Tracy Al-Idrissi, who until May 2022, had served as University Registrar for over seven years. (Tracy Al-Idrissi is currently the University Registrar for Queens University.) Together the Al-Idrissi’s 2021 salaries total $347,111.24. 

Up until just a few years ago, Trent’s administration was also home to another power couple, Jackie and Joe Muldoon, who served as VP Academic and head of Trent University Durham GTA, respectively. Positions like the Al-Idrissi’s, the Muldoon’s, and Groarke and Burns’ are some of the highest earning at Trent University. 

Of course, there is nothing inherently unethical about working alongside your spouse, but in a university where romantic relationships amongst administrators are this prevalent, eyebrows may edge upwards for some. 

When it comes to Glennice Burns, Trent insists that they hired the best person for the job, and it is mere coincidence that the person they hired is partnered to the President of the University. As stated above, at Trent, these sorts of coincidences are not uncommon. 

By Trent’s internal standards, the hiring of Glennice Burns was above board, but I would suggest that some transparency is owed to the Trent community, given that a consequence of this coincidence is that the President and the AVP International, at times, travel the world together as part of their work. 

In Castellanos’ review, she includes an entire section on ‘International Outreach (Partnerships and Agreements)’, which outlines where she believes TIP is falling short, citing ‘poor coordination between stakeholders’ and a ‘lack of formal institutional memory.’ She identifies a gap in supports for faculty trying to facilitate international visits to the campus, or represent the university abroad. 

The report recommends that the University “create a position that is responsible for the international partnership and agreement management for the University.” In the years following the review, Trent has announced countless new partnerships and agreements with post-secondary institutions around the world, which can certainly be owed to all the fairs, galas, dinners, and other networking opportunities attended by Glennice Burns and Leo Groarke abroad. 

All told, Trent spent $373,029 on international travel for staff and administration from 2016/17 to 2019/20, when travel became untenable due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Of course, there are other members of the administration who take part in this global recruitment campaign, including Vice-President Communications & Enrolment, Marilyn Burns (no known relation to Glennice Burns), and International Director Cath D’Amico. Last winter, Tariq and Tracy Al-Idrissi hosted a reception together in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, for prospective students to learn about Trent over appetizers and refreshments. 

When it came time to post a job description for the role of AVP International in September 2016, responsibilities included developing international partnerships and facilitating trips abroad. Under ‘Key Competencies’ the posting includes the following: “international travel experience, and proven networking skills both domestically and internationally,” and “solid understanding of immigration as it relates to international student interest in Canada.”

The job description states that candidates should possess a “demonstrated understanding of the concepts of world affairs and global socio-political economic influences, cultural diversity, and vast intercultural communication knowledge.” 

In October 2020, Trent University announced the formation of an Anti-Racism Task Force (ARTF), tasked with “researching and interrogating structural and individual racism at Trent,”  ‘identifying key issues,’ and developing a report with recommendations to be presented in Fall 2021. The ARTF consisted of students, faculty, and administrators, including Glennice Burns in her role as AVP International. The ARTF’s final report was published late, in February 2022.

In an interview with Arthur, one of its student members, Moriah Hillyer, details what is essentially an indictment of the administrative response to structural racism at Trent University. She describes a culture wherein white members regularly outnumbered racialized members in attendance at meetings, faculty and staff perspectives were routinely prioritized over students’, and performativity, tokenism, and microaggressions encumbered the committee’s aims. 

In her role as AVP International, Glennice Burns oversees a department that deals with predominantly racialized students, but what happens when your positionality (in Glennice’s case: white, well-paid) impedes your ability to provide effective leadership in tackling anti-racism? 

I spoke with someone who sat alongside Ms. Burns on the Anti-Racism Task Force (ARTF), and had some insight into whether her skillset matched the language in the aforementioned AVP International job posting. My source wanted to remain anonymous, but had this to say, “I do not think [Glennice Burns] has displayed a deep understanding of cultural diversity, intercultural communication knowledge, and anti-racism knowledge in her work through the task force.”

“While I can understand how her position required a spot on the task force, I don't believe she added much to the conversation – in some instances I can even say she took some things away.” 

This member of the committee recalled one instance wherein “[the ARTF] had used about 45 minutes of the task force time debating the acronym ‘BIPOC,’ because [Burns] assumed the acronym only encompassed Black and Indigenous folks.” 

The member recalls an instance where the ARTF read submissions from a dropbox hosted on their website, meant to consult the public. Upon reading a particularly racist submission that called the ARTF ‘a waste of time’ and ‘racist against white people,’ Burns dismissed its author as ‘just haters,’ which hadn’t sat well with the member I spoke to: “I thought it to be hazardous to simply try to dismiss it as ‘just haters’ when it was a clear act of racism. I think that comment alone encompasses the depth of her understanding of these issues and that it is shallow.”

As I spoke with more international students, the issue of representation in the TI office emerged as an undercurrent through many of these conversations. The students I spoke to felt that Trent International would be better equipped to grapple with the complex, multi-faceted barriers facing international students if there were administrators who could understand them, not just through the eyes of an administrator, but through their own lived experience. 

As fourth year social work student Theressa Saver put it, “[Trent International] is the department that represents international students from different backgrounds and social locations, so I feel like one of the changes that should be done is having people from the same background representing international students, because I feel like you'll be representing international students based on lived experiences, and I think you'll be able to understand their needs better.” 

Shane Pinto, President of TISA, echoed this concern, saying, “If we had more representation within administration… students would feel comfortable reaching out and voicing how they feel and it would give us that comfort, knowing that we have someone that can voice our opinion.” 

Here, I am reminded of what Juan Pablo Urza Perez said in Adriana Sierra’s article, that internationalization ought to be about “how well the needs of international students [are being] recognized.” In conversation with current international students, the concerns that Boykin Smith, Adriena Sierra, Ana Paulina Leal, and Juan Pablo Urza Perez raised at the time of the review echo loudly. 

Internationalization in 2022: By the Numbers

Trent’s shift towards internationalization began almost seven years ago, when President Groarke initially commissioned the external review in December 2015. I think it’s important here to explore the extent to which the University has been successful in this endeavour under Glennice Burns’ leadership. To answer this question, we have to evaluate TI on its own terms: by the numbers. So I asked the University for data on international student enrolment, scholarship funding, job subsidies, and tuition increases. 

In 2010, Trent University had 529 international students. Five years later, that number hadn’t budged much, sitting at 580. Then internationalization started. Last academic year, Trent counted 1,319 – a 127% increase in enrolment in just 6 years. 

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If internationalization is a project of increasing international student enrolment, Trent International has definitely made progress. It’s no secret that international students bring much to Trent and the wider Peterborough community, but what are they getting in return, paying almost four times as much as their ‘domestic counterparts’?

One small way the University tries to answer this question is with job subsidies. TI will subsidize 50% of international student wages, with a cap of  $1,600, for specific positions on-campus or in the community. Organizations hosting these subsidized positions apply through the TI Office, who decides which organizations to fund, and allocates this funding accordingly. Based on the data provided by the University, funding for this program hasn’t risen or fallen noticeably since internationalization began, but when you measure this data against enrolment increases, a troubling trend emerges: job subsidy funding per student is steadily dropping. 

That being said, Trent’s main mechanism for increasing the financial accessibility of an international education lies in scholarships and bursaries, and to Trent’s credit, their scholarship offerings have remained fairly stagnant, even when you factor in the enrolment increases. Below is a graph that shows the amount Trent spent on scholarships and bursaries for international students in a given academic year, divided by the number of international students Trent enrolled that year: 

Of course, $1,003 is a bit of a drop in the bucket when you’re paying $24,250 a year in tuition, (the 2021/22 rate) and international students have long-lobbied for expansions in financial support. And ultimately, while funding for scholarships and bursaries haven’t budged much since 2015, the cost of tuition has been steadily increasing over that same period. 

In 2015/16, an incoming international student would pay $18,283.28. Since then, Trent has increased international student tuition every academic year in increments ranging from 3%-8%. In some years, they increased tuition at different rates for incoming international students, so that increases would not be as jarring for returning students. For instance, this academic year, international tuition for returning students was raised by 5%, while tuition for new undergraduate students was raised by 8%. An 8% increase to $24,250, is almost $2,000. Initially, when I asked for data on international tuition increases, Trent obfuscated, providing only the percentage increases for returning students. 

In 2015/16, when Trent enrolled 580 international students paying $18,283, international student tuition revenue would total $10.6 million. In 2021/22, Trent enrolled 1,319 students paying $24, 250, which would bring international student tuition revenue to $31,985,750 – a tripling of revenue in just six years. As enrollment rises and tuition fees swell, Trent’s pockets begin to burst at the seams with international student money – a revenue stream that keeps an institution like Trent afloat amidst the torrents of governmental austerity. In Ontario, public funds for universities are dwindling, the threat of Doug Ford’s new performance-based model for post-secondary funding looms large, and institutions are increasingly looking to international students to shoulder the shortfall. 

At the same time, Peterborough’s housing crisis rages on, making it all the more difficult to find affordable housing for international students who already face discrimination in the housing market. The city’s chronically low vacancy rate has only been exacerbated by the University’s refusal to build student housing at a rate that corresponds to the increases in enrolment of both international and domestic students alike. 

It is also imperative to consider whether funding for student services – academic planning and skills, counselling, immigration resources, etc. – has expanded relative to ballooning enrolment numbers. I would recommend that further inquiries focus on the allocation of student services within Trent International, and whether services were adequately expanded during this period of ‘internationalization.’ Here, I think we can begin to answer the question Juan Pablo Urza Perez posed in the wake of the internationalization review, that question of whether international student needs are a priority.

If we are to accept enrolment data as the sole indicator of Trent International’s success, we lose sight of what Jack Matthews and Tom Symons tried to embed in the program – a sense of collegiality, the primacy of student experience, the accessibility of international education. To evaluate these intangible, unquantifiable measurements of success, there is only one source for data, and that is the lived experiences of the students who live and learn in this institution, and based on the circularity of my conversations with international students and alumni, it seems that not much has changed in this regard. 

Conclusion: 

When asked about Trent International, the University is quick to remind us that Trent has the third lowest international student tuition rates in the province, and while this remains true, it does not mean that the realities of international students here are any less precarious. The situation at Trent reminds us, however, that Canada’s system of postsecondary education as we know it today is predicated on a parasitic relationship with international students, and nothing at Trent will change until this predatory system has been dismantled. 

In recent years, journalists have gotten better at reporting on the harrowing realities of international education. Politicians have gotten better at paying lip service to the economic contributions international students make, and sometimes go as far as to almost acknowledge how much the Canadian economy relies on them. In 2021 – a pandemic year no less – international student tuition coming into Canada amounted to $5.1 billion. 

In reading the internationalization review, I was struck by how detached – how transparent – its treatment of international students can be. Castellanos writes, “It is my assessment that the current enrolment results are neither equal nor sufficient to the amount of scholarships that have been allocated to the portfolio. With the amount of resources invested in scholarships, the expected return on investment should be much greater.”

To Trent’s administration, international students represent a ‘return on investment,’ a maximization of profit. Scholarships, which can make the difference between whether a student can afford to come to Trent in the first place, are an investment. The impetus for internationalization has always been financial. When Trent looks at international students, they see revenue streams, line graphs edging upwards, dollar signs and digits. 

In the archive, and in conversation with students past and present, the same issues always arose: access to healthcare, tuition costs, racism on campus, housing and employment discrimination, culturally-informed counselling, etc. Trent goes to great lengths to ‘attract talent,’ yet the issues international students are made to grapple with, persist. Still, there is ostensibly very little being done to reduce the economic burden of a Canadian education, or alter the material realities that international students endure here. 

And so for Leo Groarke and Glennice Burns, I have one last question: what are you going to do about it?