The Charest government has argued that Québec’s universities are severely underfunded and that in austere times like these students ought to pay their “fair share.” One can surely disagree with Charest’s argument, but this does not seem to explain the extraordinary passion driving the strike.
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MODERN QUÉBEC was founded in the crucible of “la révolution tranquille” (the quiet revolution) of the 1960s, when Quebeckers emerged from “la grande noirceur” (the great darkness) and turned against the archconservative government of Maurice Duplessis, who ruled Québec from 1944 to 1959.
Québec society under Duplessis was marked by rigid social hierarchies: a local political elite entrenched by rampant nepotism, an Anglophone minority running the economy, and a Catholic Church watching over the citizens’ beliefs and mores through the education system and Québec’s cultural institutions. The quiet revolution not only separated church and state and laid the groundwork for Québec’s political, economic, and cultural self-determination; it also aimed to dismantle these social hierarchies and create an inclusive society based on social solidarity and equality of opportunity. In this respect, Québec chose to follow European welfare states (including, of course, France) rather than the brand of neoliberalism advocated by economists such as Milton Friedman during the same era in the United States.
A key element of Québec’s transformation was the reform of the education system, whose many shortcomings were documented in five volumes by a royal commission headed by Alphonse-Marie Parent. Reformers both
modernized the curriculum and abolished the many arbitrary barriers to admission based on gender and religion and, above all, wealth. In essence, going to university had been the privilege of affluent young men, more likely Anglophone than Francophone, who used their degree as an entrée-billet to Québec’s elite—becoming doctors, lawyers, businessmen, politicians, clerics, and so on. Statistics for the early 1960s show that 11 percent of Anglophones and 3 percent of Francophones aged twenty to twenty-four went to university, and that only 14 percent of the students were women.
Against this background, the Parent commission proposed a public system of higher education that would allow everyone with the relevant skills to study. To ensure accessibility, it recommended abolishing tuitions altogether in the long run. Going to university shouldn’t depend on the size of one’s wallet or on other arbitrary factors such as gender, religion, and language. In this spirit, the Québec Liberal Party, the same party now championing the tuition raise, promised in its 1960 election campaign to ensure “completely free education from elementary school to university for all students with the required talent and will.
Although universities never became free in Québec, tuition remained frozen at $540 between 1968 and 1988. And thanks in large part to a tradition of vigorous student protests, increases since then have been relatively modest. Meanwhile, the students never gave up on the quiet revolution’s goal of free higher education. That’s why eliminating tuitions over a period of five years was a core demand of the counter-proposal that Québec’s largest student association, the Coalition Large de l’Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Étudiante (CLASSE), submitted to the Charest government at the beginning of May.
The failure to recognize that free higher education is a distinctive social value rooted in Québec history and culture accounts for much of the puzzlement, indifference, and indignation about the strike outside the region. To take just one example: in a particularly insensitive op-ed piece in Canada’s main upscale English newspaper, the Globe and Mail, former business magazine editor Margaret Wente ridiculed the demands of Québec students and portrayed them as spoiled brats (“sociology, anthropology, philosophy, arts, and victim-studies students, whose degrees are worthless in a world that increasingly demands hard skills”). The piece garnered more than 2,000 reader comments, most of them cheering Wente.
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Quite apart from whether raising tuition fees is morally justified, one student had doubts about its economic necessity. He mentioned the
Québec government’s mismanagement of public funds in recent years, in particular the embezzlements connected to the notoriously corrupt construction industry. Students also distrust the lamentations of university administrators about underfunding. In 2006, for example, it was revealed that the
Université du Québec à Montréal had squandered hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on the bungled construction of a new science center. No wonder that one of the main demands of the striking students is that university spending be subject to a rigorous system of oversight in the future.
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While they don’t deny ownership rights, they argue that
higher education is not like a car or a television (“Against the Commercialization of Knowledge,” a large banner at one of the demonstrations summarized the concern). In their view,
the tuition raise is evidence for the transformation of higher education from a public good into a private commodity. And this, in turn, is just one manifestation of what they see as the government’s broader neoliberal agenda: trimming social programs, tax cuts for the wealthy, economic growth at the expense of the environment. That’s why in April they joined a demonstration against the Plan Nord of the Charest government, an ambitious project to invest $80 billion over twenty-five years into exploiting the natural resources in northern Québec. Where the Charest government sees the creation of 20,000 new jobs per year, the students see greedy politicians and corporations destroying the environment and the ancestral homeland of First Nations communities in order to enrich themselves. The sense of marching against the totalitarian power of international capital, corrupt politicians, and the mass media—disguised for gullible citizens as liberal democracy and the free market—helps to explain the talk of a printemps érable. It also connects the Québec student protests to the worldwide Occupy movement.
Leaving aside the question of whether a neoliberal cabal is indeed running Québec,
the lure to commodify higher education is certainly one that universities find increasingly hard to resist, especially since the 2008 economic crisis has led to a decrease of public funds, alumni donations, and returns on endowments. It’s not surprising that administrators at McGill, which can bank on its international reputation to attract well-endowed students, have been among the most vocal supporters of the tuition raise. Apart from the accessibility problem (which, as we saw, can be addressed through adequate financial aid programs), this gives rise to a new question:
what will happen to the content of higher education if universities turn into service providers? The fear is that curricula will no longer be determined by scholarly and educational considerations, but by what students are willing to buy, namely, skills that will pay off on the job market. How will this affect disciplines that teach things that aren’t profitable in this way, especially the humanities and parts of the social sciences? Like universities elsewhere in North America, McGill is no longer run by professors, but by academic managers who often think about higher education in market terms.
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=608
