“Deal” is in quotation marks for several reasons: because the student associations are not official bargaining agents for the students; because it’s unseemly for democratically elected governments to make formal agreements with interest groups on important matters of public policy; and, finally, because the student negotiators are very standoffish regarding the deal they’ve made. They don’t actually endorse it, though they have agreed to put it to their memberships.
If the “deal” does pass, students can get back to class after almost three months of “strike.” “Strike” has to be put in quotation marks, too, because students are not withholding a service, the normal meaning of “strike”; they are not even boycotting, that is, refusing to purchase a service; rather, they are declining to consume a service, education, that has already been bought for them by the government and to which some of them, the university students, have even made a small financial contribution.
That it has already been paid for — in the form of professors’ salaries, which were not suspended during the work interruption — raises an interesting “back-to-work” dilemma. Several institutions have indicated that in order for students not to lose their years, classes will have to extend into June or even July. Even those professors who very publicly supported the strike, some so far as to help harass students who had received injunctions from the courts to be able to go back to class, are unlikely to want to give up whatever plans they had made for their summers. So it seems inevitable that some extra salary payment will be required. This is called “Having your strike and overtime, too.”
The government is claiming victory in the standoff because it did not give in on its basic proposal to raise tuition fees by a total of $1,625, though it did ease back three weeks ago and change the phase-in from five to seven years.
But the “deal” sets up a new super-committee to find savings in university finances that will be returned to students in the form of lower add-on fees. Universities have used these add-on fees (e.g. a course photocopying charge) to get around the long-standing freeze on formal tuition. Reducing them is therefore equivalent to reducing tuition. In anticipation of savings, these fees will be reduced by $125 per student until the super-committee actually reports — which sure looks like a government capitulation on tuition.
A major complaint from the student leaders is that the universities spend too much on research and not enough on them. In fact, most university research is funded by outside money won in national and international competitions among researchers, so the universities can’t take that money and give it to students in the form of lower add-on fees. It’s not their money. And if profs don’t do the research, the money doesn’t come in.
In the usual Quebec corporatist way, the super-committee consists of six representatives from the universities, four from the students, four from the unions, and two from business. Quebec’s best universities are, at least nominally, private institutions, even if they do receive much, though a declining share, of their funding from the provincial government. Why union and business reps get to decide how supposedly private institutions allocate their budgets will be a mystery to anyone outside this sometimes bizarrely distinct society.
If you’re running such a university, and working as hard as you can to get alumni and others to donate to it, how do you look potential donors in the eye and say their money will be well spent — so long as the students and unions agree? And how do you go about making timely and effective decisions on your university’s behalf if your decisions, the big ones at least, now have to be vetted, not only by the elected representative of the people, i.e., the minister of education, but also by the super-committee?
The hardest-line students want Quebec university tuition to be zero and won’t stop fighting — sometimes literally fighting — until they get that. If anything, the events of the last three months will have persuaded many Quebecers that what’s needed is exactly the opposite: to get the government entirely out of university education.
Original Article
Source: ottawa citizen
Author: William Watson
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