Increase Funding and Social Responsibility for Post-Secondary Education!
- Dr. Dougal MacDonald -
 
The Alberta government's 2021 budget, presented by the United
Conservative Party (UCP) in the Alberta Legislature on February 25, is
a further attack on the right to post-secondary education (PSE). In
October 2019, the UCP announced plans to reduce PSE funding over four
years. With this budget's cut of 7.9 per cent in operating grants
or $135 million, the overall UCP cut to PSE has now climbed to $690
million with more cuts yet to come. This is justified by the UCP's
twisted neo-liberal logic that money invested in PSE is "spending"
while handouts to the UCP's private corporate backers constitutes
"investing." Completely contradicting the UCP, a recent study by
University
of Alberta economists estimated the university's annual economic
contribution to the province at about $15 billion.
Post-secondary education in Alberta has long been underfunded. For
decades after 1945, governments provided over 80 per cent of the
funding. At one time, the federal government was committed to providing
half of the post-secondary operating expenses of the provinces. Over
time, the federal share has diminished considerably. In 1992-93 the
federal government's contribution (adjusted for inflation) was $3,291
per student while in 2015-16 it had dropped 40 per cent to $2,007 per
student. This declining federal share coupled with provincial cuts has
led to increases in the revenue contribution from tuition fees, which
climbed from 16 per cent in 1985 to 40 per cent in 2015. The other
funding increase was in "strings-attached" private investment from
corporations and wealthy donors, with increasing erosion of public
control.
The UCP is now urging that PSE institutions should "generate more of
their own revenue" which is basically code for "sell out further to the
corporations." Student tuition and other phoney add-on fees of various
kinds have steadily increased over the years, except during legislated
fee freezes as was the case under the previous provincial government.
The UCP government is now allowing fees to increase annually by a
maximum of seven per cent, a change that many PSE administrations are
already taking advantage of. Statistics Canada states that from
September 2019 to September 2020, Alberta's tuition fees increased the
most in Canada. The upshot will be decreased access to PSE and more
student debt, now estimated to average over $20,000 per student. All
this while there are many countries where students pay no tuition fees
at all. There is also the shameless use of international students as a
cash cow by governments and post-secondary institutions. These students
are charged exorbitant tuition fees which are said to sustain the
institutions. All of this funding crisis and anti-people and anti-social
neo-liberal solutions underscores that a serious matter for discussion
is how post-secondary education in Canada could be funded in a manner
that is sustainable and serves the needs of a modern society which
humanizes the social and natural environment while upholding the rights
of all. It can be done using all manner of pro-social self-sustaining
means which everyone can participate in working out.
 A
feature of neo-liberal attacks to post-secondary education is to
replace administrators who were in the past responsible to meet
pedagogical aims with experts in enforcing budget cuts. This explains
why recent UCP budget cuts have been met with a total lack of opposition
by the PSE institutions' upper administrations. While faculty,
students, and staff have resisted
and upheld the right to education, administrations have simply
capitulated and concocted ways to "adjust" or "restructure." Ignoring
the institutions' academic
missions, restructuring has included firing hundreds of staff,
eliminating important programs, removing courses, merging departments,
closing libraries, neglecting maintenance, and so on. The
administrations and the UCP ludicrously claim that all this is having
no negative effects on student learning!
The UCP's attacks on the post-secondary institutions are facilitated
by their agents on the inside. In August 2019, the UCP government fired a
number of members of these institutions' boards of governors and
replaced them with 44 of their own appointees, without following due
process. Many were from the heavily subsidized private energy sector.
For example, Nancy Laird, a 30-year energy executive, was appointed the
new Board Chair of online Athabasca University. While corporate
representatives (euphemistically known as "public members") have always
occupied board of governors' seats, the UCP blitz was the first time a
government implemented a simultaneous mass imposition of corporate
members across many institutions.
Throughout the current restructuring process post-secondary
administrations have held no meaningful consultation with faculty, staff
and students. The University of Alberta's academic association (AASUA)
stated on November 20, 2020: "We have not been provided access to any of
the detailed data, financial projections, benchmarks, and calculations
underlying the entire U of A for Tomorrow process. Furthermore,
we have been denied seats at the tables where the analysis is being
discussed and the options are being designed and considered." Other
Alberta post-secondary institutions are also excluding faculty, staff
and students from decision-making.
UCP budget cuts and other attacks on the right to higher education
reveal how Alberta's research universities are more and more becoming
the direct handservants of private industry. The UCP government openly
states that the most important PSE research is the most easily
commercialized. Much university research for private interests is done
by stealth and kept secret and much of it violates the academic
integrity of the institutions where it is taking place. Alberta
research universities fund projects where highly educated university
staff do the research, but the vital decision-making power is held by
the private monopolies and, in the end, the results benefit the
corporate sector who
acquire it on the cheap.
 Finally,
like zombies rising from the grave, performance based indicators (PBIs)
are once again being proposed by post-secondary administrators as a way
to determine how much funding an institution should receive. Suggested
indicators include graduate employment and income rates, international
and domestic enrolment, and administrative
expense ratios. This idea first became the vogue in the Reagan/Thatcher
era, one aspect of the neo-liberal movement to transform universities
into businesses, complete with the top down structures favoured by
corporations. PBIs are intended to drive down the costs of the
production of education, which is why they are always accompanied by
relentless budget cuts. Those who push PBIs basically believe
post-secondary institutions should slavishly serve the monopolies and
anything not measurable by numbers, e.g., critical thinking, is
worthless and therefore should be ignored.
Affirming the right to post-secondary education, requires not just
summing up the current situation but also putting forward concrete ideas
for change. One such program could focus on implementing the following
guiding principles. These are not meant to be exhaustive.
1. Recognition and legislation of education as a right which all people have by virtue of being human.
2. Continuously increasing investments in education.
3. Funding based on student needs and social responsibilities, not predetermined neo-liberal budgets.
4. An end to privatization of education and elimination of private
enterprise's stranglehold over decision-making on matters which concern
who education serves.
5. Elimination of all user fees.
6. Accountability measures which reflect the needs of a democratic society.
7. All staff to have the working conditions, and all students the
learning conditions, necessary for the provision of quality education.
8. Meaningful input of all staff, and where they are directly affected, students, into decision-making processes.
9. Mandatory labour education and Indigenous studies courses, created
by the labour movement and Indigenous nations, respectively.
10. Establishment of a free, quality comprehensive public education system accessible to all.
It is critical that unity of faculty, staff, and students within and
among the post-secondary institutions is developed in the course of
taking action with analysis to change the situation. The anti-education
forces want to divide faculty, staff and students by pitting them
against each other. Blaming each other plays into the hands of
neo-liberal governments in the service of private interests, no matter
what cartel party is in power, and their subservient administrations,
and lets them off the hook when they are the ones who have created the
current situation. Again, instead of standing up for the right to
education, the upper administrations have caved in with phoney
restructuring plans which are designed to attack full- and part-time
faculty and staff, causing serious harm to post-secondary institutions'
academic missions. Northern Ontario's Laurentian University has gone so
far as to go into insolvency protection, which is a known scheme to
shift the burden of the crisis onto the backs of the working people with
a restructuring plan designed by narrow private interests to serve
narrow private interests. Laurentian has hired Ernst and Young (EY)
whose reputation of restructuring to get rid of full-time positions and
pensions is well known to the Stelco and other workers across the
country. What is taking place means we must all hold to account both the
upper administrations of the post-secondary institutions and
governments, such as the UCP government of Alberta, the Ford government
in Ontario, as well as the federal government, for their nation-wrecking
activities.
As is the case everywhere in society the key question facing
everyone is, "Who decides?" The current system of governance
at the post-secondary institutions disempowers the faculty, students,
and staff when they are the ones in whom decision-making should be
vested, not some appointed corporate hacks with zero stake in the
academic mission of the institutions. We must end the phoney
"consultations" where faculty, students, and staff try to have their
say but are subjected to a predetermined agenda and predetermined
results, and treated as enemies of the institution's viability when
they stand up for the rights of all and solutions based on taking
social responsibility.
Faculty and staff are also determined to end the token representation
on administration committees that eventually do as they please and
ignore any input from those qualified to make claims on who education
should serve, how those aims should be met and under what conditions.
By opposing changes in governance, tuition hikes and so on, faculty,
students and staff are already taking social responsibility for
post-secondary education in various ways. The defence of our rights and
the rights of all should guide the resolution of academic problems in a
manner that genuinely enhances the quality of student learning and meets
the needs of society, not those of narrow private interests. By
empowering themselves to wage this fight, taking over making decisions
collectively on all matters that affect our lives becomes a new normal.
Organizing to exercise control over the post-secondary institutions and
their academic missions is the way forward to building academies and
societies that serve the continuous nation-building interests of
the working people at home and abroad.
Next Week: Laurentian University's Use of Insolvency Protection to Restructure at the Expense of Faculty, Staff and Students
This article was published in
March 12, 2021 - No. 16
Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/WF2021/Articles/WO08161.HTM
Website: www.cpcml.ca
Email: editor@cpcml.ca
|
