I hate UofT, the institution. There are a lot of great things about UofT, the campus, the location, the students, ... some of the professors, most of the staff. But the larger institution is a callous unfeeling machine, that runs mostly on inertia, ignorance, and infirmity. Good people who are motivated to actually reform things and make them better are driven out or are reshaped into "yes"-drones just concerned about protecting their own fiefdoms and their own reputations. There is no accountability from anybody high up the institutional ladder to anybody below them, and none of them, as individual professionals, have demonstrated any serious leadership in moving the university into the 21st century. Most improvement at the university is driven at the local level, by key driven individuals who take initiatives of their own accord but don't have the ability to spread those innovative ideas further out to the university at large. Even good, well-intentioned innovations driven by those in charge usually end up getting smothered by politics and a lack of resources, like FLC, WIT, the Sexual Harassment Office, MOOCs, etc, etc.,

Here's an example: Meric Gertler used to be dean of A&S, starting in 2008. When he was the dean, A&S came under significant financial pressures, partially due to massive financial losses by UofT's endowment fund and funding cuts from the provincial and federal governments, due to the financial crisis. His response was, at least in part, to try and cut administrative costs; in particular, he tried to merge the various modern language departments into a single department. He also, laudably in my mind, wanted to re-invest what resources there were in future areas of growth, such as computer science*.

But the modern language departments revolted, because really, duh, his efforts were rolled back, Gertler became President in 2013, and now we have David Cameron who... yeah, A&S is something like $60M in debt and cutting back everywhere, and Gertler's been busy hiding from a TA strike and thanking Stephen Harper for investing $150M in research, but after having slashed TriCouncil research budgets by even more. Oh, and the CS department is bursting to the seams with undergraduates and is bleeding faculty so badly that it's trying to hire 8.5 new professors this year**. Oh, and tuition rates keep increasing at the maximum legally allowed year-after-year.

So, I don't know. Maybe you didn't like Gertler as a dean and think his plans were wrong. But I look at it and I see someone who wanted to make things better, then had all his work and effort blown up by politics and conservatism, and hasn't, as far as I can tell, made any real significant action to address the challenges that UofT is facing now in 2015, and I can't help but think that I've seen this story before over and over, at different levels and in different places at UofT.

* Bias warning, I'm a graduate student in CS.

** Should actually be 9, but hiring for the joint CCBR-DCS position was suspended.