2023-09-19 04:43:29
Fourteen rooms at HEC Montréal which bore the names of large companies or donor organizations have been renamed. This is because the 20 to 25 year contracts linking them to the Montreal management school have just expired.
Published at 12:43 a.m. Updated at 5:00 a.m.
At HEC Montréal, buildings, rooms, but also lockers, classroom seats or concrete slabs can be identified in the name of donors, whether companies or patrons.
Students, make plans to find your classrooms! The names of several companies were suddenly withdrawn from premises which lost their sponsor in the HEC Montréal pavilions. Thus, the St-Hubert room becomes the Vilnius room, the Keurig Canada room becomes the Amsterdam room, the Sony room becomes Seoul, the Canadian Post Office room becomes Tkaronto (Toronto, in Mohawk), the Xerox room is renamed Accra, etc. .
Is this a sign of a slowdown in donations, on which universities rely heavily to finance themselves?
Émilie Novales, media relations advisor at HEC Montréal, replies that there is no loss of speed. For the moment, at the new Hélène-Desmarais building, for example, approximately 60% of the rooms bear the name of an organization or individual, in recognition of a donation.
Ms. Novales also points out that KPMG has two rooms in its name in the building located on Chemin de la Côte-Sainte-Catherine.
It is also possible, she specifies, that the rooms to which city names have been assigned “will change their name again in the future due to new agreements”.
Good fundraising at universities in 2022
The 2022 annual report of the HEC Montréal Foundation reports a very good harvest of donations or donation commitments, which totaled 21 million. Other large universities also report having had good collections in recent years.
For 2021-2022, for example, Laval University received 70.7 million in donations, the University of Quebec in Montreal, 20 million, McGill University, 148.8 million (2022), while the University de Montréal (for the 2022-2023 fiscal year) received 77.4 million in donations, and Concordia, 23 million (fiscal year 2022).
At the University of Sherbrooke, Isabelle Huard, media relations advisor, emphasizes that the establishment is not currently seeing a slowdown in substantial donations. “However, we anticipate that economic uncertainty, or even a recession, could influence these major donors, and will certainly impact our other categories of donors, who are very numerous and important to the achievement of our objectives. »
The University of Sherbrooke hopes that the losses of these large contributions can be compensated by testamentary donations “from boomers and the elderly”.
When it comes to naming rooms, the University of Sherbrooke says that there are few buildings in the name of donors, but rather in the name of builders (Marie-Victorin, Georges Cabana, etc.)
“Researchers go where there is funding”
Madeleine Pastinelli, president-designate of the Quebec Federation of University Professors (FQPPU), notes that when universities began to be heavily financed by businesses, public opinion, students and professors protested. .
These days, the university is so short of money and very public corporate donations are so much a part of the landscape that it rarely gets any attention.
Yet, she says, the danger is there. “In a capitalist society, it is not out of Christian charity that a company makes a donation. »
The risk, in his opinion, is not so much that companies seek to dictate course content or that they seek to influence study conclusions, but rather that companies determine the research topics.
Many chairs are funded by large companies, “and researchers go where there is funding,” argues Ms. Pastinelli.
Me Patric Besner, vice-president of the Institute on Governance – created in 2005 by HEC Montréal and Concordia University – sees things differently. In his opinion, “academic freedom” is a sacred value for professors, and he has no worries about their independence.
“Philanthropy is a principle that must be encouraged,” he believes, adding that it is good for young people to see this philanthropic spirit at work, as it is present in hospitals and universities here and there. even more so in the United States.
We must of course define the practice very closely, for example by ensuring by contract that the name of a building or a classroom can be removed from a Vincent Lacroix, he gives as an example.
For his part, he doubts that donors hope for a return.
But in this area as elsewhere, he notes with a laugh, “sometimes, moderation tastes better!” “.
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