$1.8 million deficit may result in salary freeze, job cuts at King’s

While Dalhousie University faculty are getting a pay raise, faculty and staff around the corner, at the University of King’s College, are facing a hiring freeze and potential salary freeze as the school faces a projected deficit of $1.8 million.

In a draft report to the King’s board of governors obtained by the Dalhousie Gazette, King’s president William Lahey reviewed potential solutions to address the deficit. The university’s board of governors will hold an emergency meeting to discuss the report on Monday. 

“A faculty salary freeze will not solve the College’s financial difficulties,” Lahey wrote in the report. He indicated that a “more comprehensive plan” to reduce expenditures and increase revenues would be needed.

In June, the board approved a $750,000 deficit for the 2025-2026 fiscal year and directed the university’s president to prepare a report by Oct. 1 on potential salary freezes to reduce costs. The new report projects the deficit at $1.8 million. 

King’s forecasted a $1.7 million deficit in the 2024-25 operating budget. The university’s operating costs have increased by 28.5 per cent since 2017. 

Simon Kow, a King’s professor and director of the early modern studies program, said while a salary freeze may be necessary, it could disproportionately affect junior faculty.

“It’s not an adequate long-term response,” Kow said. 

The report outlines several options to cut costs based on projected enrolment rates, including freezing salaries for both staff and faculty, freezing faculty salaries alone or cutting jobs across both groups. 

Projected enrolment rates in the draft report range from 1,100 to 1,300 students over the next five years. Only a total salary and faculty freeze would eliminate the deficit under all enrolment projections, according to the report. 

As of Oct. 1, there are 1,001 students enrolled at the university, according to the Association of Atlantic Universities preliminary enrolment survey. 

In 2024-25, King’s employed just under 120 people, about half of whom held faculty and academic support positions. 

On Aug. 29, Lahey sent an email to King’s faculty alerting them of the hiring freeze, but provided no date for when the freeze came into effect. 

He said the only way to resolve the deficit is to increase student enrolment and reduce costs. 

“Those are the two big categories of things that have to be done,” Lahey said. “It’s impossible to say in advance what exactly you need to do in both those things because it’s the cumulative effect of doing both those things [that] will hopefully get us to a place where we’re once again financially stable.”

In the draft report, Lahey recommended against a salary freeze for non-faculty staff and any employees earning less than $60,000. He also recommended that his salary be frozen immediately. 

Lahey, who has been the president of King’s since 2016, earned just over $275,000 in the last academic year, according to the university’s 2025 Public Sector Compensation Disclosure report.

He wrote that King’s spent 51 per cent of its operating costs on employees in 2024-25, which is much lower than the average spending of 75 per cent at other Canadian institutions.

Olivia Chaput, financial vice-president for the King’s Students’ Union, doesn’t like the idea of job cuts. 

“You’re not necessarily going to be ending up with 50 per cent of the output, you’re going to be putting two times as much work onto one person, and that’s going to cause a lot of strain,” she said. 

In the last five years, King’s has added several support positions, including an accessibility officer, social worker, sexual health and safety officer and director of equity and community support.

She said the creation of these positions has only scratched the surface of what the university needs. 

“There’s been an increase in positions, not because we have too many, but because we had too few before,” said Chaput.

King’s faculty has long maintained pay parity with Dalhousie faculty, under the Articles of Association with Dalhousie University. A salary freeze would violate these agreements. 

In the draft report, however, Lahey questioned whether pay parity for all faculty is required by the articles, citing a complex history between Dalhousie and King’s.

The possibility of a salary freeze is cold comfort for some faculty at the university.

Neil Robertson, a King’s humanities professor and director of the foundation year program, has taught at the school for 36 years. 

“A fundamental aspect of King’s is this relationship to Dalhousie, and, at the level of faculty, that relationship is secured through the parity clause.”

At King’s, only the Foundation Year Program fellows are unionized; all other faculty members are not.

“The moment you actually have a reneging of the parity clause, there has to be unionization,” said Robertson.