Unity on university financing seems unlikely
Little changed since student protests
Positions seemed as entrenched as ever as the third workshop on higher education opened in Sherbrooke on Thursday night, paving the way for a day of debate on Friday about the issue that was at the heart of the tuition rebellion last year and continues to divide the university community: money.
Depending whose brief you believe, universities are either underfunded to the tune of $850 million a year, or they are wasting the ample funding they have through bad management.
About a year after students marched repeatedly through the streets of Montreal to demand a tuition freeze, almost nothing about the debate has changed.
(Of course, the reality surrounding the debate has changed a lot: There is a tuition freeze in effect for this year, students still kept the additional $39 million for loans and bursaries intended to support a planned, but cancelled, tuition hike, and the system is scrambling to cut an additional $124 million from budgets for this year.)
Despite the Parti Québécois’ investment in a Summit on Higher Education in February, and all the preparatory discussion preceding it, it seems unlikely any kind of consensus can be achieved on the crucial issue of university financing.
Liberal higher education critic Gerry Sklavounos said the PQ government has a lot of explaining to do — like how it can cut $124 million for this year but then promise it will invest $1.7 billion over the next seven years.
Sklavounos also called on the government to dispel all the doubts about financing that have surfaced, including where the money to finance the cancelled tuition fee increase will come from and whether the $124-million cut is a permanent move or a one-time correction — something about which university administrators are still in the dark.
“We are having difficulty understanding where the government is going with the funding of universities,” Sklavounos said.
And yet the government has to find a way to protect the $5-billion-a-year investment it makes in its institutions of higher learning (including CEGEPs).
Not surprisingly, the Conseil du patronat du Québec came out with a brief on Thursday firmly in the camp of the university rectors, who say the underfunding situation is critical and the tuition freeze is at the root of it.
But the Conference of Rectors and Principals of Quebec Universities (CREPUQ) stopped short of calling for a tuition increase, saying how the government finances the universities’ needs is a political decision. CREPUQ officials have said they don’t understand the fuss about transferring funds as it is a completely legitimate practice that is often required according to the government’s own regula- tions, and it is always done in a transparent way.
In the opposing camp, the Fédération québécoise des professeures et professeurs d’université made public a brief outlining what it called a growing trend of universities using operating grants to fund campus expansion and other building costs.
While FQPPU president Max Roy noted some of the building needs are justified, he said the problem is that it is a practice that goes on much more now — and that means operating budgets don’t have enough money for services to students or for hiring professors.
The federation is also recommending the government establish a Conseil des universités to oversee campus expansions and finances.
For the Conseil du patro- nat, it is all about preserving quality in Quebec’s universities.
“There are many indicators that prove that underfunding exists,” Norma Kozhaya, director of research and chief economist for the council, said. “You just have to look at the state of the buildings and the ratio of students to professors.”
Robert Sonin, president of the Graduate Students’ Association at Concordia University, said the government seems to be destroying the knowledge economy it says it wants.
“I increasingly get the sense that there is a disaster looming unless there is a major shift in how universities are run,” he said.