I agree with this columnist's analysis. Sadly, he could say the same about many American universities.
Students should be angry about what universities teach them
By Ian Hunter, Vancouver Sun May 18, 2012
The Quebec student tuition fee pro-tests have already cost Premier Jean Charest his minister of education; if polls are to be believed (a dubious assumption, perhaps, in light of the Wildrose debacle in Alberta) the pro-tests may yet cost the premier his job.
For a brief moment it appeared that Charest had pulled a Liberal compromise from his frayed magician's hat; the gist of the compromise was that the increase in tuition fees would go ahead but, if all went well, no one would pay. It put me in mind of Premier Dalton McGuinty's solution to Ontario's debt crisis: appoint a respected economist, Don Drummond, to examine the problem, and then, poof, make his recommendations disappear.
But Charest's compromise vanished almost overnight and the revolting students are back creating havoc in the streets of Montreal. Never mind the fact that tuition fees are already lower in Quebec than anywhere else in North America. Never mind that if the premier's compromise had been accepted and the fees were bumped up a bit, they would still remain the lowest in North America. Such considerations did not deter the protesters and occupiers who have smashed windows, upturned cars and hurled rocks at police.
Now the students say their protests are about more than tuition fees: they are about "social justice" - two words that increasingly make me want to reach for a gun. The agenda is to smash corporate power and dismantle capital-ism. The students are against the oil-sands, for diversity; they are for human rights, against profit; they are against global warming, for equality. In other words, the litany of the progressive left. The CBC, our national broadcaster, that institution that brings us together and nightly explains to us who we are, takes the protesters seriously; indeed to hear the CBC tell it, they are our hope for the future.
Former Parti Quebecois premier Lucien Bouchard does not agree. In a letter to a Montreal newspaper, Bouchard said the tuition hikes were required to compensate for Quebec's long-standing tuition freeze: "The scope of the disturbances currently being imposed on Quebec society bears no relationship to the impact of the government decision," he wrote. When a former PQ premier aligns himself with the provincial Liberal government and against the protesters and occupiers, I would conclude that, apart from the NDP and the CBC (often indistinguishable on policy matters), public support for the pro-testers is practically non-existent.
Yet I would be sympathetic if the pro-testers directed their rage not against tuition fees but against the universities and colleges that levy them; these institutions are largely wasting the protesters' time, their formative years, and even the relatively meagre tuition fees they collect. After half a lifetime spent teaching in Canadian universities, my own rueful conclusion is that however low tuition fees are set, they are exorbitant for what's on offer.
Canadian universities are so lacking in academic standards and institutional integrity that their degrees are practically worthless. The average liberal arts student pursuing a degree, say, in sociology or gender studies can perhaps be excused for not knowing better; the universities should not escape censure so easily. The protesting students, for the most part, are pathetic; the university system that spawned them is culpable.
I wonder if some of the protesting students dimly sense this themselves; anyone who misled them into believing that our current educational shambles will equip them to thrive in the modern world is their real enemy, not Jean Charest. In Canada, we spend lavishly on universities that have forgotten their raison d'être. They teach useless subjects, often badly. They are run by careerists not scholars. They practise grade inflation on a Weimar Republic scale. They are hothouses of political correctness and conformist thinking. They lack financial accountability.
If the students were protesting this, their cause would be worthy. If they resolved to change their university, they might be surprised to discover allies in unlikely places, including among faculty (present and past) heartsick at what Canadian universities have become.
Ian Hunter is professor emeritus in the faculty of law at the University of Western Ontario. His latest book is That Time of Year.
