Moves to
Destroy Alberta's System of Higher Education
Fighting for the Future of Alberta's Universities, Colleges and Technical Institutions
- Dougal MacDonald -
Rally against Kenney
government cuts to education funding at the University of Calgary,
November 21, 2019.
Against the setting of vicious
budget cuts to
higher education by the United Conservative Party (UCP), many
Alberta universities are engaging in comprehensive downsizing.
Details differ across institutions but proposals and policies
include raising tuition fees, merging faculties, cutting
programs, deleting courses, firing staff, expanding class size,
increasing online courses, closing libraries, demolishing
residences and so on. These anti-social changes
will negatively impact the education
of future generations of Albertans, threaten the livelihood of
the many people employed in and around the post-secondary
education (PSE) sector, and undermine the academic research upon
which the economic, social, and cultural future of the province
depends. The University of Alberta's new president
shamelessly congratulated a U of A researcher for sharing a Nobel
prize in virology, just after announcing plans for
massive layoffs at the university.  Specifically, the
Kenney government announced it will slash
PSE funding for the current financial year by five per cent, with
further cuts of five per cent projected for each of the following
three years. Those cuts, taking inflation into account, mean that
21 of Alberta's post-secondary institutions will lose one-quarter
to one-third of their public funding over the four years, an
unprecedented amount.
Strange to say, not a single
post-secondary institution in
Alberta has launched a fight against these damaging cuts.
Instead, all administrative responses are essentially "Yes,
Master Kenney, we'll just have to do more with less," as if the
cuts were pre-ordained instead of the result of conscious
anti-social, anti-education UCP policy decisions. Meanwhile the
UCP government, which says it "must" cut PSE, is
throwing billions of so-called job-creating
dollars in handouts and tax cuts at energy companies such as Shell
and Suncor that in turn are shutting down their projects and
firing thousands of their workers. While the PSE
cuts and lack of institutional resistance are
very harmful in and of themselves there is also the very
important issue of how the compliant institutions are
specifically deciding the details of their "restructuring." Many
staff, students, and support workers have publicly complained
about the outrageous manner in which upper administrations are
shutting them and their collective organizations out of any
meaningful democratic involvement in these decisions. Decisions
are simply taken arbitrarily by handpicked, closed-door
committees, then inflicted on the masses. Meaningful public
engagement is non-existent. Instead sham consultations are held
where pre-determined agendas are railroaded through. Only those
at the top have actual input into decisions; everyone else is simply to
rubber stamp them. It is very clear to many that
what is going on in higher
education is totally bogus. Albertans have had decades of experience
with
Con-initiated fake consultations. The
pattern is familiar. Decisions are made in advance; committees of
those who are likely to agree with the decisions are handpicked; a
few "town halls" with predetermined agendas and strict speaking
rules at a handful of microphones are held as window-dressing;
input contradicting the predetermined decisions is ignored; and
the "consultation" winds up with those in power announcing with
great fanfare that 1) they consulted, and, 2) everyone in Alberta
agreed with their predetermined conclusions. Surprise,
surprise. Of course, the phony processes in the PSE
sector are
facilitated by the fact that on August 19, 2019, the UCP
government replaced eleven sitting board of governors' chairs and
32 other board members of post-secondary institutions with their
own hand-picked appointees. Many sitting board members had not
finished their terms. Many newly appointed chairs are energy
executives (e.g., Nancy Laird, a director of Trinidad Drilling
and a former Encana and PanCanadian Energy executive is
Athabasca University's new board chair). Contrary to the Minister
of Advanced Education's limp denials, the UCP appointments were
very partisan and a direct attack on the foundational
principle of university autonomy. The lack of real
consultation over the current funding cuts is
the continuation of a long history of the deterioration of so-called
collegial governance in the PSE sector. At Canadian universities,
the main arenas for policy consultation are meetings of the
General Faculty Council (GFC) and the Board of Governors (BoG).
The GFC, sometimes called the Senate, supposedly has the last
word on academic matters and the BoG has the last word on
financial and administrative matters. Actual policy setting is
left to the BoG, a small body usually composed of a majority of
outside businesspeople (euphemistically called 'public members')
and the president, plus an additional minority of academics,
staff reps, and student representatives added for show. This
bicameral GFC-BoG approach to collegial governance is a
much-criticized model. More and more it is the BoG, dominated by
political appointees from the corporate sector, which makes all
the important decisions. Various manoeuvres are used, for example,
claiming that a clearly academic decision is really financial.
Another trick is to control GFC-BoG meetings with bureaucratic
rules that, for example, keep certain items off the agenda,
railroad through a "consent agenda," and rule people out of
order if what they say threatens the BoG agenda. This is
facilitated by the fact that the university president chairs the
meetings and makes the final ruling on all such matters. Finally,
there is also the lurking presence of certain wealthy private
donors who can use their financial leverage and connections to
exert backroom influence on university decisions. Other
models of university governance exist. At the University
of Cambridge in Britain, for example, the official governing
body, known as Regent House, consists of academic and
academic-related staff of the University's colleges and
departments, numbering over 3,000. A similar model is in place at
Oxford University, where the Congregation, as it is called,
numbers about 5,500 members of academic and administrative staff.
This is said to be the sovereign body of the university. On March
6, 2018, university lecturers, striking to defend pension rights,
were denied the chance to vote in the Congregation meeting and
voted outside. Consultation is generally defined
as "an exchange of views."
However, just exchanging views is not enough. If, in the final
analysis, the subsequent decisions are based on the views of only
one party then the consultation is phony. Genuine consultation
must begin with the participation of everyone in setting the
agenda. Setting the agenda is key. The discussion of an agenda
preset by those in power is not consultation because a preset agenda
ensures
that what is discussed will only be of concern to the party
setting the agenda. Other contending perspectives are excluded
from the get-go.  The first genuine
consultations at the Alberta post-secondary
institutions should have focused on what should be their
responses to the UCP cuts. As noted, there was zero public
discussion of this. Upper administrators from the post-secondary
institutions fell over each other trying to be the first to
pledge their loyalty to the UCP austerity program. One wonders
why; perhaps it is the fact that post-secondary institutions'
BoGs are controlled by the corporate sector. Or perhaps it was
believed that those who caved in first would receive more favours
from the UCP. No matter, without consultation all the
post-secondary institutions made the arbitrary decision to accept
the cuts without a whimper and then focused on figuring out who
and what to eliminate from their institutions to accommodate
them.
The current situation at post-secondary
institutions is
problematic but there is still time to build resistance. We must
end phony consultations, secret meetings, arbitrary decisions,
hand-picked committees, meaningless online input, and the shutting
out of unions and associations. We must expose misleading
messaging about so-called engagement, inclusion, and listening,
and the diversionary warnings about "the need to act quickly."
With meaningful public engagement, all affected can have a say to
ensure that decisions reflect the broad interests of all
university people impacted, as well as the interests of the
larger society. It is not too late to fight for our
post-secondary
institutions. Working together, faculty, staff and students and
their organizations can still initiate and build a powerful
movement for a sustained democratic exchange of ideas and
follow-up actions. Collective action with analysis is what will
counter the UCP's vicious cuts and create a positive future for
the post-secondary institutions moving forward.
This article was published in
Volume 50 Number 38 - October 10, 2020
Article Link:
Moves to
Destroy Alberta's System of Higher Education: Fighting for the Future of Alberta's Universities, Colleges and Technical Institutions - Dougal MacDonald
Website: www.cpcml.ca
Email: editor@cpcml.ca
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