University funding cuts will compromise quality
The Parti Québécois government has managed the remarkable feat of getting student leaders and university administrators onto the same wavelength.
The two sides, so adamantly opposed over tuition-fee increases, have joined their voices in denunciation of the government’s plan to cut funding for the province’s universities by $124 million in the short term.
This comes on top of the $40-million revenue shortfall the universities will suffer as a result of the government caving into student demands to cancel the fee hikes imposed by the previous Liberal administration. It also comes at a time when university administrators are making a persuasive case that even now they are underfunded by more than $600 million a year compared with universities in the rest of the country.
The funding cut, set out in the government spending estimates made public this week, requires the universities to trim their budgets by five per cent in the coming four months. According to Université Laval rector Denis Brière, this will mean trimming his institution’s spending by $21 million during that period, something he called unrealistic.
It is indeed hard to understand how universities can manage this, since the lion’s share of their budgets goes toward salaries that are locked in by contracts and collective agreements. It will probably force universities to either run up debts to cover the funding loss, or drastically cut student services.
The minister for higher education, Pierre Duchesne, suggests that university administrators start by trimming their own salaries. To some, these salaries — such as McGill principal Heather Munroe-Blum’s $500,754 in combined salary and benefits — may seem outlandish. But on the whole, Quebec university salaries are in line with those paid by other Canadian universities. Even though she heads the country’s top-ranked university, Munroe-Blum was only the thirdhighest-paid principal in a recent Maclean’s magazine survey. In any case, what salary cuts could reasonably be made would not nearly cover the shortfall that the universities are facing.
Now that the government has staked out its position on university funding as well as on tuition, which it has signalled it intends at best to peg to the rate of inflation the year after next, it is hard to imagine what can be constructively accomplished at the highly touted summit on higher education scheduled for February, at which these matters were supposed to be negotiated by the parties involved. As one student leader put it, it now appears that the government views the summit essentially as a rubber stamp for the key decisions it has already made.
Certainly, the university administrators seem to have little to gain from the summit exercise, apart from the prospect of being hectored by a common front of students, unions representing teachers and support staff, and the government, whose position seems to be that the universities’ funding woes are mostly due to their profligacy. (Duchesne tipped his hand by releasing a flawed report that misrepresented university funding to suggest that Quebec schools got the highest funding per student in Canada.)
This week, some four dozen prominent Quebecers from the business and cultural sectors lent their names to a declaration that lauded the importance of universities to Quebec society and pleaded for greater support to raise them to higher levels of excellence.
It noted that universities provide critical fuel for the development of Quebec’s economy and the vitality of its culture. It suggests that universities are essential to meeting the challenges of an aging population, a crushing level of public debt, and the need to sustainably exploit the province’s natural resources. It also asserts the validity of claims that Quebec universities are proportionally underfunded among Canadian institutions of higher learning.
It argues that the province’s universities must be world-class since, due to its limited numbers, Quebec society is among those whose vitality is most intimately reliant on the quality of its universities. It concludes by saying, “We must make no compromise on the quality of university education in Quebec.”
It appears to be a message that eludes the current Quebec government, because the decisions it has made with respect to the province’s universities will inevitably compromise the quality of education they can offer.