In defense of accessible education

On September 6th, Montreal Gazette columnist Henry Aubin published, A taste of the Tea Party in Quebec. In it, he argues that the Quebec student movement, in their push to maintain the tuition fee freeze, is adopting the same stance towards government programs as the right-wing radical Tea Party movement in the United States.

Whether Aubin deliberately meant to push the limit and provoke people to respond, or whether he truly believes that a push to ensure financially accessible higher education is just as dangerous and illogical as a movement that espouses racism, brought us the birther movement and sees any social programs as socialist plot, it's not clear. But the arguments he makes are similar to those made by many conservatives in their arguments against maintaining the tuition freeze.

Robert Sonin, president of the Concordia Graduate Student Association sent, us the following open letter to Aubin, and it seems others are writing in too.

If you have a response to his piece, post it in the comments below or as blog post on our site.

UPDATE: David Bernans, former GSA president (2005-2006) had an abbreviated version of his response to Aubin published in The Gazette today (Sept. 8). We're posted his full response here.

 

Here's Robert's letter:

I expect opinion pieces from the Gazette to ply your readers with pre-digested conservative pap, and "A taste of the Tea Party in Quebec" by Henry Aubin, despite the spicy if asinine comparison of the student movement with racist right wing cranks that is both pointlessly insulting and without any redeeming qualities like wit or poetry, does not fail to disappoint.

Aubin writes - "Both see any increases in their financial contributions to government as heinous."

You can’t have it both ways. Either tuition is a tax, or tuition is a fee for a service. So decide which one. If it is a tax, everyone has to pay – after all, taxation should be a fair and equal burden. If it is a fee, then it is not a tax, any more than a fee for any other service that taxes are supposed to pay for. Perhaps the confusion arises because the government is expert at imposing fees for all kinds of things that taxes are supposed to pay for. They have even figured out, through electronic filing, how to backhandedly charge a fee for paying the taxes themselves, and kick it back directly to corporate partners (good business: cut out the middle man).

In fact, Mr. Aubin’s position is the one in line with the Tea Party’s anti-tax whining. He does not want to see his taxes spent on education – he would rather that those being educated pay for their education, making the whole thing into a private exchange. But he certainly needs the benefits provided by the educated population he doesn’t want to pay for. He personally depends on widespread literacy – he’d just rather not pay for it. The same is true for a first-world economy: it cannot function without a highly educated population. Everything we do as a society requires not only a few educated people here and there, but a population that is widely and highly educated. Even those who have not had any “higher” education are highly educated people by any geographical or historical standard – and this is something that we seem to recognize when we fund free education up until the CEGEP level.

Aubin implies that students are selfish because they do not want to pay their way. But Aubin is the one who doesn’t want to pay: he doesn’t want to pay for the post-secondary education that makes his country such a good place to live. He doesn’t seem to be able to make the connection between the level of education and the levels of just about any other social good one can think of, from more prosperity to lower crime. But what use is a lower crime rate to a selfish man? He can simply make more money, and buy a better alarm system, better still – take a cue from the Tea Party and just buy a gun.

An overwhelming majority of students work in addition to and to pay for their studies.  Students pay almost 15% of their income off the top in sales tax whenever they spend their money, after paying 25-30% in income tax.  Students who do not work receive their tuition money from parents who do - often parents who have to sacrifice to support a their student child, and pay for tuition, fees, books, supplies, and all the other expenses - after paying their own taxes.

On the other hand, as the city of Montreal brags, Quebec corporations are among the lowest taxed companies not in the country, not on the continent, but in the world - 87% lower than the US average, according to Montreal International.  And yet they also advertise Montreal as a "knowledge city" – so obviously corporations are benefiting handsomely from the high number of highly educated people in Montreal.

So who is it that isn't paying their fair share? Who should be increasing their financial contributions? Students who pay almost half of a stunted income in taxes, and then pay tuition and fees on top of that, and then have to pay for books and supplies and extra fees on top of that, or corporate welfare kings who use tax breaks to pay themselves seven-figure bonuses even when their companies can’t pull a profit? Which group should see the government’s ever-increasing appropriations as heinous?

Aubin writes - “Both are electorally minded.”

There's a word from that from an ancient Greek political practice - democracy.  You should check it out, it's a neat way to run things. When elected representatives screw us over, we un-elect them. (Maybe Aubin can ask his government sources about why mapmakers had to lay on extra supplies of orange ink after the last federal election – they could have saved some money by mixing leftover red with yellow – alas the newspapers have cornered the market on yellow ink.)

Aubin writes – “The agendas that the Tea Party and the student groups are pushing would weaken society.”

And there he goes right around the bend, into ideologically driven slander, or perhaps just sheer idiocy (also an old Greek term, idiotes – it refers to those not educated well enough to participate in political society). I have a hard time believing that anyone would seriously try to argue that making education more accessible would weaken society, much less that demanding accessible education could be compared to racist war mongering – but there it is in black and white. (Aubin has used another of the Tea Party’s tricks – those who disagree with you are disloyal, ruining the country, because, of course, only Henry Aubin knows what is best for Quebec, a democracy of one.)

The reason that Quebec's universities have run out of money is because the provincial government decided long ago that tax cuts are more important than funding essential public services – the services that strengthen society, and make for prosperity. Our infrastructure is falling apart, our health care system is kept together by tape and glue, and our universities had their budgets cut to the bone over a decade ago, never to recover - these things are the result of decisions made by governments, not the result of blind economic forces.  The GDP of Quebec is over $300 billion, and we direct less than 2% of that to higher education.  If you look at the amount of money that provinces put into education, you will see that even with a tuition hike Quebec will be at the bottom of the list, whether you include that extra tuition or not.  Increasing tuition is part of a set of policies that has been weakening Quebec society for decades.

Now, if you actually want to weaken society, then reducing the number of people with an education is a fine way to start.  Another fine way is to attach strings to education funding so that academic freedom is eroded – and democracy without academic freedom is not democracy.  Another way to weaken society is to make sure that people are hedged in by debts.

Aubin claims that the debt load for Quebec students is low.  Firstly , that $13,000 figure from the CFS is out of date (information does expire - that's why we need people to study these things, so that people like you don't need to throw out false information).  The actual figure has grown to over $15,000 – without a major tuition hike – and it includes only the student loans.  The reality is that student loans are so paltry that students cannot live on them and pay tuition, so most are forced to take on more debt, especially by using credit cards.  The result is a system where the students who come from "privileged" families are the ones without debt, because their education is paid for by parents.  The students you seem to think of as "privileged" and "reactionary", the ones complaining about costs, are the ones who pull the average up because they can't afford to go to school at all other than by going into debt.

Now, let's look at the opposite way of doing things - the way that Aubin claims would weaken society.

1. The debt load of Quebec students will be increased to an average over $25,000, much like the rest of the country.  This will deter many people from pursuing higher education (the government's own figures say about 30,000 people)

2. Since the system is so underfunded, the extra tuition will be a drop in the bucket.  By increasing tuition to a burdensome level, the government will have made no real gains, and Quebec's university system will remain the worst funded in Canada, and among the worst funded in the developed world.  In sum, you forgo tens of thousands of university graduates added to your workforce and citizenry for the sake of funding corporate bonuses.

3. Since the system will remain underfunded, all the problems caused by underfunding will remain: classes too large, a shortage of full-time faculty positions, a shortage of funding for research, a shortage of funding for student financial aid, and more money from private sources (corporations) who have as much respect for education as Aubin apparently does, and strings attached that could moor an oil tanker.

4. The only real competitive advantage that Quebec universities have over other universities in Canada is cost - other than that, there is little reason to attend a school like Concordia, because there are equivalent programs elsewhere (and they are usually better funded by their governments).  Raise tuition, and say goodbye to a large proportion of out of province students who no longer have the advantage of lower tuition, and to a large proportion of international students who currently pay about seven or eight times as much as Quebec students in tuition, and must pay their living costs out of pocket. These students benefit to Montreal to the tune of tens of millions of dollars per year.

5. The pressure to privatize and commercialize will remain and be intensified by government policies (like the one that has commanded universities to engage in more directly commercial activities - sell more books, sell more health club memberships, rent more property to retailers, do more R&D contracting with industry), and there will also be more pressure to privatize programs.  These activities have occasioned disasters - UQAM's real estate binge and McGill's destruction of their MBA program, for example.

Society will be weakened? Look at any indicator of social health: crime statistics, mental health statistics, UN quality of life1, etc.  You will find that where there is more education, made more widely available, especially where it is made available for free or a nominal fee, life is better, people are freer and more prosperous and healthier.  Free education is not a luxury that a good society can afford you - it is a fundamental, necessary condition for a good society to exist at all.  That is why if you suggested that elementary or high school education be made optional and subject to fees you would be pilloried as a crank - there is some residual recognition of the fact that in order to live well, we need to be educated well, and we need our friends and neighbours to also be educated well.  So why is there this divide between the education we consider basic to forming a good citizen and going farther to study more?  It is part cash grab, and it is part an attack by anti-intellectuals and the right wing (like the Tea Party) on the kinds of education that makes for free thought and criticism (the kind of free thought and criticism that makes society stronger).  On the one side are people who like education because it liberates us, and on the other are people who hate education because they fear liberated people.

There are other inaccuracies:

…if Quebec funded them at the same level as the Canadian average, they'd get $600 million more per year.

No, if Quebec funded our universities at the same level it would mean close to $1 billion more per year.

…if the two institutions [McGill and U of M] had received funding at the Canadian average, they'd have been able to hire up to 1,500 additional professors between them - and thereby attract more public and private research money.

But these institutions have no interest in hiring professors when they can hire part-time instructors as 1/3 the cost. This claim is, essentially, the repetition of a lie.

But Aubin really shows himself to be a complete jackass when he says, apparently without irony:

The student groups evidently think it's okay (even though they and their children will get stuck with the bill). Quebec is already the most heavily indebted province and continues to roll up more debt every year. To keep funding universities at even the same skimpy level that it did before this year, it would go still deeper in the red.

We are the children stuck with the bill. That’s why Aubin’s generation went to school for cheap, and that’s why Aubin’s generation wants to stick us with the bill. Quebec is already the most heavily indebted province because of the greed and stupidity of “common sense” conservatives like Aubin, who have an answer for everything and a solution for nothing. If the government of Quebec had not decided, as a matter of policy, supported by selfish conservative voters, chronically misinformed by corporate-owned media, to destroy all of what has always made Canada the Canada we can be proud of – all the fruits that grow from the simple quality of being nice, to be replaced by something out of a high school student’s crappy version of an Ayn Rand dystopia – well, then Aubin would be out of a job, the Gazette would publish actual news on a daily basis, university education would be free of charge, and we could dare to be proud of ourselves.

- R. Sonin

President

Graduate Students' Association

Concordia University