kevin harding » sfu board of governors

Democracy and education: they go together, except when the government doesn’t like it?

kevin — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 18:10:21 +0000

(originally posted at PoliticsRespun.org – see here)

The recent controversy over the Vancouver School Board’s budget situation has been a bit of an interesting story to follow. Much like every other school board in the province, the VSB has been wrangling with a considerable problem: the costs of providing a high-quality public education continuously increase, while the funding that comes from the provincial government doesn’t keep pace.

This isn’t a problem that only the elementary, middle, and high schools face; indeed, every public educational institution in this province, from the Vancouver School Board to Simon Fraser University must somehow find a way to balance their budgets in the face of increasing costs and stagnant levels of funding. I’m certainly not an accountant, but the financial problem that all school boards — and our colleges and universities — face is a substantial one. When costs increase and funding doesn’t match, then cuts to education need to be made because the provincial government has legally required all school boards, colleges, and universities to submit balanced budgets. To repeat: all school boards, colleges, universities, and public educational institutions are required, by law, to submit balanced budgets. This is a feat that even the provincial government itself couldn’t accomplish, instead, they amended their balanced budget law giving themselves a pass.

But the legally required balanced budgets aren’t the crux of this issue. The true centre of the controversy was the fact that the Vancouver School Board stood up and spoke out about their financial issues. They publicly called upon the provincial government to fairly fund education. They postponed approving their budget because the legally required balanced budget would have meant substantial cuts to education and school closures. They acted as advocates for education.

It seems that this was something that the province didn’t want the VSB to do. The minister of education commissioned the comptroller general to investigate the school board’s management practices and report back with recommendations on how the budget could be balanced. The submitted report essentially branded the VSB trustees as incompetent; apparently, they spent too much time discussing the impacts of underfunding on the school district, they spent too much time discussing how they could best advocate for education, and they didn’t spent nearly enough time just dealing with it and cutting education. Of course, the issue of provincial funding was out-of-bounds for the comptroller general’s report.

It’s interesting to note what wasn’t out-of-bounds, though: the entire principle of elected school boards. The report from the comptroller general noted that elected school trustees, for some entirely incomprehensible reason, felt that their job was to advocate for education. And because education actually needs a lot of advocacy under the BC Liberals, the trustees had been engaging in advocacy. So, the comptroller general suggested that the government should re-consider the ‘co-governance’ model of education. Reconsider having elected school boards.

Why? Because, in my experience, appointed boards responsible for education don’t speak up as readily, and don’t embarrass the provincial government in the same way when their funding is being slowly drained to unsustainable levels.

Elected school boards seem to advocate for their schools. This seems to be dangerous — or at least distasteful — to the province. So, the province should reconsider this arrangement, at least according to the comptroller general.

To understand this a bit better, it’s useful to compare the elementary, middle, and secondary school situation the post-secondary education situation. And I will use a very familiar example: Simon Fraser University. I graduated from SFU with a BA (Hons.) in Political Science and Labour Studies in June 2010, and I was an elected student member of the university’s Board of Governors from 2008 to 2010.

There are a number of similarities between the Vancouver School Board and Simon Fraser University. The two have budgets comparable in size: the VSB’s is around $480 million, and SFU’s is around $420 million. Because both organisations rely on employees to conduct their main activities, teaching, the majority of both budgets are dedicated to staff salaries and benefits. Both organisations are public organisations, with funding from the provincial government being the primary source of funding.

Both organisations feel cost pressures in similar ways. Each year, the costs of teaching increase: computers must be replaced, textbooks purchased, libaries updated, and so forth. Inflation increases all costs across the board. And while provincial funding tends to increase each year, it doesn’t match the increase in costs. So cuts need to be made.

Both organisations have to make cuts in order to balance their budgets — the VSB is considering closing eleven schools, closing some programs, and increasing rents to nonprofit and community organisations, while SFU is engaging in round after round of layoffs, closing programs, and shifting more and more teaching from expensive faculty to cheap ‘temporary instructors.’ In both cases, the quality of education decreases. In both cases, class sizes increase. In both cases, education is at risk.

But there is a striking dissimilarity in how the two organisations respond to the problems of underfunding.

The Vancouver School Board trustees, elected by their constituents to both manage and ensure a high quality of education in their school district, have taken a public stand against underfunding. They have loudly stated the obvious: if funding does not match costs, something has to give. And unfortunately, what’s giving is the quality of education. This is not good.

The Board of Governors of SFU take an entirely different approach. No public pronouncements. No public stands. Instead, there are quiet pleas to an entirely indifferent Minister of Advanced Education. Cuts are made. Staff and faculty positions eliminated. Programs closed. Class sizes increased and quality of education decreased. And no public stand is taken. This is not good.

It’s not good for students in both cases. Quality of education decreases in both cases. And education is the key to a healthy society in so many ways.

But why is it that only the VSB takes a public stand? The answer, to me, is contained in the comptroller general’s report to the ministry of education: the Vancouver School Board is elected.

The Board of Governors of Simon Fraser University is mostly appointed by the provincial government. There are fifteen members of the board, and only five of them are elected. Two are elected students, two are elected faculty, and one is an elected employee. While the provincially appointed members don’t take orders from the province, their approach is entirely different to that of the trustees of the Vancouver School Board. In my years on the Board, we spent a large amount of time talking about the issue of underfunding. Each one of us acknowledged the severe challenges that it presented to the university. All of us seemed to agree that this needed to be changed if the university was to be able to continue to provide high-quality education.

But we didn’t take public stands as a board. The predominant thought amongst the majority of the board, those who were provincially appointed, was that advocating for funding wasn’t the role of the board. Instead, the role of the board was to oversee the implementation of budgets that necessitated cuts because of provincial underfunding. And maybe, if we were so concerned, we might from time to time write a letter to the Minister who would probably just tell us ‘too bad.’ The chair of the board and the president would meet with the minister privately, who would then likely just tell us ‘too bad.’

Despite all of us at least tacitly acknowledging the problems of underfunding, the provincially appointed members of the board were reluctant to take any public stand about the funding situation of the university. They felt it wasn’t our role. Instead, our role was, seemingly, to simply implement the cuts that the province mandated by underfunding the university. Without public protest.

The trustees of the Vancouver School Board, on the other hand, seem to feel strongly that their role is to advocate for public education as well as doing the best that they can with what they have. They have refused to simply implement the cuts that the province is downloading, at least without protest. They are all elected by their constituents, and they feel a responsibility to them, a responsibility to education. They don’t want to simply take a pronouncement that their underfunding is something that they simply have to deal with.

The difference here is that the Vancouver School Board is entirely elected by the people that their decisions affect. They have a very consultative approach to governance, with the participation of stakeholders, including staff, parents, and students, as a primary goal. They are democratically administering the school district, democratically managing and advocating for education. Advocacy is a key role of democratic accountability, which seems to be incredibly different than the bounded realities of fiscal accounting that the comptroller general’s report considered to be the most important role. The VSB is putting their advocacy for quality education above the passive implementation of provincial cuts.

Only a third of the Board of Governors of Simon Fraser University are elected. The rest are appointed by the province. They are overseeing the managing of the university. They implement the cuts that the province passes down without public protest. Public advocacy is something that they have identified as not being part of their role.

A foil exists in all of this: the province has the ability to fire the school board, and the province can replace its appointed members on the university’s board of governance at any time it wishes. I can’t recall a time when the provincial government has ever fired a school board: this would be soundly regarded as anti-democratic. However, replacing provincial government appointees on university boards is something that happens regularly. In 2001, after the province deregulated tuition fees, when the Board of Governors of SFU voted against raising tuition, the province replaced the Board.

The comptroller general’s report, as commissioned by the Ministry of Education, looked at the Vancouver School Board in the same way that the provincially appointed members of the SFU Board of Governors look at themselves. The comptroller general ignored the democratically administered nature of education. The comptroller general did not look at the issue of provincial government underfunding. Instead, the business mindset influenced the report.

The comptroller general recommended that the provincial government review the ‘co-governance’ model of school district administration, the elected status of school boards. The implication is that the university model is better.

But the university model is better in only one way: it implements the decisions of the provincial government, it cuts education, and it does this without public protest. It is not democratic, and it is not responsible to advocate for education.

The controversy around the Vancouver School Board and its resistance to underfunding is being used by the provincial government as a way to bring up the idea of taking away our elected school boards. Not because it’s necessarily a better way of doing things, but because appointed boards don’t publicly complain and protest harmful decisions from the province.

This controversy is about education and it is about democracy. The province harming the former by underfunding our school districts and universities and colleges, and it is trying to do away with the latter to enable it to continue on its way.

Either we believe in our education system and we elect people who will democratically administer the most important thing that a society can do to invest in itself, or we allow cuts to continue. The provincial government seems to have made its choice. Have you?

the results are in! / sfu senate election results

kevin — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 23:10:06 +0000

Perhaps not strangely, the main search term for people landing at my website today has been ‘sfu senate election results’.

To properly appease the masses, here they are. A fairly small amount of students participated – 1,376. Twice that participated in the SFSS elections. If there’s one thing that these elections show, it’s that the elections of student representatives to university governing bodies need to be publicized more. We had a ton of candidates this year, but turnout was relatively low.

(and yes, I won. thanks for all your support!)

Results (only elected candidates shown):

Board of Governors
Kevin Harding – 455
Arry Dhillon – 448

Senate
Ada Nadison – 590
Kevin Harding – 578
Ravi Patel – 532
Shara Lee – 506
Ali Godson – 459
Graham Hiscocks – 405
Joe Zelezny – 402
Alysia MacGrotty – 357
Fiona Li – 345
Anton Bezglasnyy – 344
Elliot Funt – 314
Cameron Noble – 266*

*Cameron Noble bumped other candidates because he is from the Faculty of the Environment, and Senate rules require one student representative from each faculty

Presidential Search Committee
Kevin Harding – 462
Ravi Patel – 425

Community Trust Community Advisory Committee
David Newman – 617

Community Trust Board of Directors
Ravi Patel – 473

sorry, i can’t afford it / the sfu budget and student aid

kevin — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 14:15:04 +0000

On Thursday, March 26, the SFU Board of Governors reviewed and approved the proposed university budget. [n.b.: you can view a PDF of the budget here and you can read a quick analysis of the impacts here.]

I am currently a member of the Board of Governors, elected by and from the students, and I voted against the budget for a number of reasons, some of which I will detail over the next couple of days. Importantly, you will note that I said that the budget was approved — while I voted against it, this was my action, and the views I express here are my own, shared as they might be by members of the SFU community.

In this update, I will focus on the issues of student aid, as they are affected by the budget. First, the budget document (in an appendix to the main document) raised most tuition fees by 2.0%, which is the most that the Board can raise tuition in any one year.

This quite simply means that education is again more expensive for students. Assuming a 30-credit year, a domestic undergrad student’s tuition will be $4,719.¹ That breaks down to about $589 a month, assuming an 8 month year, but tuition needs to be paid in full at the beginning of each semester. Likely kind of difficult.

It’s made even more difficult by the cuts to student aid that were passed in the budget for 2009/10. I apologize in advance for the amount of numbers coming up, but this story is best expressed in numbers. And the cuts are in big numbers. More after the jump.

First, this is the amount (rounded to the thousand) that SFU spent on student aid in 2008/2009:²

This is the budgeted amount of student aid – that is, this is how much we had actually planned to spend:

You’ll likely note that we spent more than we had planned to. Here’s how much extra we spent this year on things like scholarships, awards, and bursaries:

We spent nearly a million dollars more on student aid than we had planned on. As many members of the university administration have noted in Board Finance Committee meetings, it’s not a bad thing, necessarily. What the overspending means is that the university gave more students bursaries, awards, or scholarships than it had planned on. The notes to the financial statements explain that the increase is attributable to a higher than expected acceptance rate on bursaries, scholarships, and awards.

So what are we planning for next year? Well, here’s the budgeted amount of money that the university is planning on student aid in the next year:

You’ll note, likely quite quickly, that this is an increase from this year, both in terms of budget and project actual amount of spending. The budget document argues that student aid has increased 5% year-to-year, but what’s important to note is how small the increase is from what we actually spent this year:

So this means that we’re only increasing next year’s student aid budget by $33,000 over what we spent this year. If you’re a grad student, you’ll notice that this amount is only equivalent to about 5 graduate fellowships. If you’re an undergrad, we’re looking at about 16 average scholarships; less than ten full-year scholarships.

What’s even more frustrating is when you realize that next year’s budget for student aid has been increased by targeted funding for specific new graduate students we hope to recruit. This money can’t be spent on anyone else; indeed, SFU does not get it unless we recruit the students that the funding is targeted towards.

How much is the targeted funding?

So in the budget for 2009/2010 — which was only increased from what we spent this year by $33,000, there’s a hidden $1.294 million reserved fund. Since that money is not available to anyone else, I cancel it out (control for it) when I run the numbers. So what’s the budget for student aid, next year, when we control for the targeted funding?

Which is a considerable decrease from both the actual spending done this year, and the budget spending this year. How much? Well, here’s the decrease from budget, which is less than we actually spent:

And here’s the decrease from the aid we actually gave to students:

This means that once we factor out the targeted money — which can only apply to the targeted, new, graduate students — we see that there will be $1.261 million dollars less in student aid in 2009/10 than what we made available to students in 2008/2009.

Add onto this the fact that tuition is going up by 2% in most cases, and the fact that SFU requires that students be approved for BC Student Loans before they’re eligible for bursaries, and I fear that education will be altogether too unaffordable for some students next year.

What are your thoughts? I’d like to compile comments on student aid for use at Senate and the Board of Governors.

Tuition per credit-hour will be $154.90. ↩
This is a projection, meaning it’s a best estimate based on spending to date. Actuals are only availbale after fiscal year-end, which is April. ↩

death by a thousand cuts? / briefly analysing the sfu budget

kevin — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 02:17:24 +0000

I promised (a while ago) to analyze the SFU budget that will be proposed tomorrow morning at the Board of Governors‘ Finance Committee meeting. You can grab a PDF copy of the budget (here) and page through it, if you’d like, and I’ll try to make references to page numbers as I make my analyses.

If you’re interested in seeing how the budget gets approved, stop by the Halpern Centre (between the AQ and the Library), room 126, on Thursdsay morning at 8am. (yes, there is an 8am in the morning).

So, without much further ado, here’s the budget analysis:

Undergraduate tuition is increasing by 2% this year.¹ This brings the standard per-credit hour cost of tuition to $157.30/credit for domestic undergrads, and up to $490.70 for international students. Costs for upper-division computing science, engineering, and business courses are higher. To break this down, it means that a 30-credit year now costs $4,719 excluding student fees, textbooks, transportation, parking, rent, etc. For international students, the 30-credit year of tuition only now costs $14,721.
Grad tuition is also mostly increasing.² Most of the non-premium tuition costs are increasing, while most of the premium programs are seeing a 0% change. Oddly, the MBA in Global Asset and Wealth Management is decreasing by 7.7%³ — this may be the first decrease in any kind of tuition in years.
Student services and rec and athletics fees are increasing.⁴ Same as the tuition costs — up by 2.0%. Which is kind of frustrating because layoffs and the like mean that student services will actually decrease despite the increase of fees. Alarmingly, scholarship, awards, and bursary funds will also precipitously decrease — by hundreds of thousands of dollars, despite an old promise that as tuition increases, so too would financial aid. Instead, SFU has made it more difficult to access financial aid and has cut the aid budget as tuition gets more expensive.⁵
A new fee — a “regalia fee” of $25.00 is being instated.⁶ When you actually graduate from SFU, you have the chance to walk across the stage and graduate from the university. You get to wear a blue robe, blue hat, and a coloured ‘hood’. We will now charge you $25 for this, and no, you can’t opt out of the program.
The university argues that impacts are “inevitable.”⁷ While the budget document states that impacts of budget cuts and underfunding are inevitable, they have tried to “preserve areas of academic and research strength.”⁸
Investment income has declined steeply.⁹ The budgeted decrease in investment income is $1.1 million, which also means endowment spending will decrease by $2.2 million. This directly and immediately impacts student scholarships, awards, and bursaries. Strongly. And not in good ways.
Significant changes in the university are coming.¹⁰ The university notes that the budget planning for next year will proceed with an intensive review of the academic and strategic plan, which will identify “areas for resource reduction or elimination.” This is huge — we’ve killed off Canadian Studies…what’s next? What impacts will this have on education?

There’s a lot more throughout the budget, but more important are the discussions that we’ve had, in the Senate and Board of Governors, that directly address the cuts being made and the strategic impacts that are being felt.

Again, this is a very brief analysis of the budget that is being proposed tomorrow. I would greatly appreciate any comments, questions, or suggestions. Feel free to suggest things to yell, if you so feel.

Page 49 of the PDF, labelled as page 44 in the document. ↩
Page 50 of the PDF, 45 of the document ↩
Page 50/45 ↩
Page 52/47 ↩
No paper citation that I’m aware of — I have confidential documents that describe the amount, but the ‘discussion’ that we had on the decrease is not confidential. ↩
Page 53/48 ↩
Page 9/4 ↩
Page 9/4 ↩
Page 9/4 ↩
Page 13/8 ↩

envision education / re-elect me!

kevin — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 01:09:47 +0000

It’s election season at Simon Fraser University, and I’m running for re-election as a student member of the Board of Governors and of the Senate of the university. I’d appreciate your support — if you’re an SFU student (no matter grad or undergrad) you can vote in the election, which will be online on March 25-27.

For those interested in where I’m coming from, I’d suggest my campaign website, here, but also do visit the ol’ blog (kevinharding.ca) for random posts, etc.

For background, here’s my official candidate statement:

My name is Kevin Harding, I’m a fourth year student in Political Science, and I’m running for re-election as a student member of Senate and the Board of Governors. I have been elected to the Senate twice, and am currently completing a first term on the Board. This year, I’m running for re-election, and for election to the Presidential Search Committee. I’m heavily involved in the SFU community, serving on a number of committees, working for the SFSS, and actively organizing with the SFU Community Coalition.
Over the past year, I’ve worked hard to make sure that students are heard at the Board of Governors and the Senate. I sit on the Finance committee of the board, and work hard making sure that the university is accountable to students. At Senate, I make sure that students are heard all the time—especially when decisions are being made that affect them. I’ve worked hard to make sure that the provincial government appointees on the Board understand the university, know what’s going on, and keep our education in mind when they make their decisions.
I think it’s incredibly important that students are involved at all levels when decisions are being made that affect them at SFU—and this is why I’m running for re-election. We need to envision education as it should be—and work together to achieve it.
In the upcoming year, there are a number of significant issues that will need to be addressed at SFU, and students’ views, opinions, and needs are central. Here are some of the key issues:

Budget cuts and budget crisis should not harm our education. We all know that university funding isn’t keeping up with the actual costs of running the school and providing a high-quality education. This is why tuition increases, classes are cut, lecture halls are crowded, and staff are laid off. The university community needs to come together and work towards a different vision of education—one that benefits everyone, and is high-quality, and public. Importantly, the Board of Governors must take a public stand, demanding sustainable funding to ensure high-quality, public education.

All students need their voices heard. Grad students are incredibly affected by the budget cuts, and the university must take them into account. We can’t expect higher grad enrolments with declining financial support, fewer faculty able to supervise, and cuts in TA/TM positions. We need to work towards having an increased grad role on Senate and the Board so that their views are heard. Students can’t be students if they can’t afford it. And since grads often play a key role in teaching, undergrads need to remember that grad working conditions are undergrad learning conditions.

Course availability and registration issues must be addressed. Many undergrads know all too well the pain of not being able to get required courses because they’re full or not offered. The university needs to offer required courses more often, and more of them. A four-year degree should actually take four years—not five or six because you couldn’t get your required courses!

I’ve worked hard for two years representing you, your ideas, your opinions, and your issues at the Senate and Board of Governors. I’m running for re-election because I think that we need to envision education as it should be and work towards achieving it. With effective student representation, anything is possible.
If you have questions, comments, or anything to say, you can contact me at kharding@sfu.ca. I have a website at http://www.sfu.ca/~kharding/ where more information is available. I’m also on Facebook. Thanks for your support!

proposed university budget now available

kevin — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 23:02:13 +0000

I’ve just received my copy of the university’s public budget document for SFU for 2009/2010. This document sets out the $390 million budget and, in fairly broad strokes, what we plan on doing with it.

It’s important to note that the $390 million budget is an increase from last year of only $8 million — an increase of only 2.09% overall. Nothing near matching our increased costs of operation, etc.

The link to the budget is here: http://www.sfu.ca/~kharding/budget.pdf. When I have more time (ie: not tonight, maybe tomorrow) I’ll try and do a bit of analysis, highlighting what I feel to be the main points of interest, concern, etc.

In the meantime, if you enjoy reading things like this, I encourage it — and please, post questions, comments, concerns here, so that I can keep them in mind and actually ask them myself.